Page 16 - CSA Speaker Bulletin December 2017 | CSA Celebrity Speakers

TECHNOLOGY
Future of news:
What’s next?
DANIEL SIEBERG,
FORMERLY WITH GOOGLE
IS NOW A CO-FOUNDER
AND HEAD OF JOURNALISM
OPERATIONS FOR CIVIL, A
REVOLUTIONARY APPROACH
TO DECENTRALIZED NEWS
CONTENT SUPPORTED BY
THE BLOCKCHAIN AND
CRYPTOCURRENCY.
Sieberg was previously co-
founder of the Google News Lab
and a senior marketing executive
and official spokesperson at
Google. Prior to joining Google,
Sieberg worked as a technology
correspondent, analyst and
reporter for the likes of CNN, CBS
News, ABC News, MSNBC and BBC
News. His first book, The Digital
Diet (Crown), is about healthy
ways to consume technology. He
lives in New York with his wife and 2000s. To the point now whereby
two daughters.
In a “headline,” I’d say the
future of news is: murky but suffice it to say it’s a business
promising.
(And that’s an important order of
words; notably I recall meeting
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the father of the world-wide web
at a conference in Zurich, Tim
Berners-Lee, who said an early
description of his now-everywhere
connectivity was reviewed by a
superior who noted: “vague, but
interesting.” And Berners Lee likes
to underscore that it would’ve
been much worse for his future
efforts had it been the other way
around - “interesting, but vague”
sounds much more pessimistic.)
And the murky part is arguably
easier to describe than the
promising part. But I’ll do my
best.
As is the common retelling,
newspapers the world over began
to suffer steep advertising losses
as the rise of the web and search
grew in size in the late 1990s/early publications - especially at the
Google and Facebook take the
lion’s share of ad dollars while
publishers wrestle for the rest,
model that will not return to a
heyday anytime soon.
So as ads become less relevant,
the emphasis has shifted to
paywalls and subscriptions and
metered access. For reasons that
continue to baffle me there is
a resistance to paying for news
content (except in some places in
the Nordics at marginally higher
rates) - any news content, even
high-quality news content - which
means that convincing consumers
to subscribe to one or more
publications could be challenging.
The perception is that the gist of
the information exists everywhere
across social media and search
so why bother reading (or paying
for) anything too in-depth if your
motivation is simply to know when
breaking news happens or keep up
at a dinner party.
Subscriptions face other
challenges as well, not the least
of which is ensuring as many
local level - have the technical
infrastructure to handle them and
that the tech companies involved
with sourcing the subscriptions
pairs well with the needs of the
news industry writ large (rev-
share, bundling, etc.). Oh, and
whether consumers actually care
or not. Some will take the leap
into paying for news while others
might see it more as patronage