Shifting their strategy from trying to attract ‘reader’ eyeballs in world dominated by celebrity news, to engaging ‘learners’ around the life of news stories might be just what the world of mainstream media needs to thrive in the age of web-based media. Could the holy grail of news in the age of web media be informal learning?
Google’s new Living Stories platform is a collection of many simple web services that aims to deliver a richer, more personalized media experience on the web. The beta-version service pulls feeds from the NYTimes and Washington Post to deliver a full spectrum of web media elements including story timelines, graphics, key people, videos, et al. The story feeds are then personalized based on the behavior of the reader. The vision? Readers never see the same headline twice – and follow stories based on the most relevant story lines and media formats. The service is classic Google ‘beta’ strategy. It was probably realized too early for general audiences to like it, but enticing enough to stretch our thinking of what is possible in an era of personalized learning media.
What is the innovation waiting beyond this ‘beta’ version? Social web feeds and learning stream management. The audience target of professional journalism might be the ‘learner’, and stop trying to compete for eyeballs of the lowest common denominator of celebrity news that can dominate traffic. It is still early days for the future of web-based media, but I’m cautiously optimistic that personalized learning media apps could help raise the bar and lead to brighter days for professional journalism. Google’s Living Stories might be the right skeleton of a new form of media based on learning systems.
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