Will MSM please hurry up and die?

If you don't read it within minutes after it comes out, you should check out David Sifry's (Technorati CEO) state of the Blogsphere (or Live Web as he's now calling it). Every time the report comes out I race down to the part where he compares MSM (main stream media) vs the blogsphere - and I'm usually disappointed.

The recent early coverage by MSM of the VA massacre left me speechless. They were thin on facts, so they turned a very sombre event into a soap opera to draw viewers. As I flicked from CNN to MSNBC to Fox (ugh!) I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Sad winding orchestral music was the backdrop to endless speculation with the old (we-don't-got-no-facts) trick of reporters interviewing other reporters.

The first real reporting that came in was from a student called Jamal Albarghouti who shot video, presumably from a cellphone and sent it to CNN's iReports. I've sent in an iReport myself and the nice T-shirt they send you hardly makes it worth it.

Entrepreneurial types reading this may be pondering execution plays. "What if we built a news network on user submitted content and paid them their fair due?" I think that sort of thinking is flawed. You don't want to build an expensive-to-run-and-promote destination for news. You'll just become another news network playing soap opera music to draw eyeballs.

What should have happened is that Jamal Albarghouti should have uploaded his video to his own blog where he owns the content and the brand (his domain name) and earns revenue from his own traffic. Then tools like Digg and Technorati should have alerted the world to the fact that his was the best available news source.

But iReports got hold of it and Jamal will continue his studies and possibly his life in anonymous bliss.

How to solve this? Here are some ideas:

• Digg should evolve into the mainstream faster than they're doing. But how do you get away from a vocal early adopter geek demographic? I don't know.
• Build a mainstream Digg
• Google News could get their act together and mix blogs with mainstream news in a more real-time way so that when something like VA or 9/11 happens, we get the most read site popping up in seconds at the top of the News list.
• A "Third Force" could emerge that combines real-time traffic data and full-text search to produce a real-time feed of what's important news right now. Perhaps users do the initial submitting, but then traffic, or traffic growth analysis takes over and says "hey, site X's traffic is growing at 20,000% per minute, we'd better bump him up because somethings going on there.".

That's my 2c on the matter.

Comments

[Tony Wright]

First of all, I want a tshirt for being the first to ever comment on this blog.

Second, re: the concept of a mainstream Digg... Netscape/Calcanis tried it with very limited success.

http://snapshot.compete.com/digg.com+netscape.com?metric=uv

[asteele]

This is the runner-up entry for second comment on this blog.

[MarkM]

If I had VC money I'd burn some of it on a T-Shirt for you T. Oh hell maybe we should just get T-Shirts anyway. You should see the awesome logo samples I'm about to post. :))

[Tims]

Well I was the first to hack it!! Mark can confirm this ;-)

[cosplay]

To do something without planning, to change course midstream, to figure things out as you go. The new project was discovered over beers in the kitchen (we're out of tequila at the moment which is a crisis all in itself) which qualifies for without planning. We put Geojoey on the sideline for a month changing our course. And daily I hear expletives wafting from the "dev" office so definitely figuring stuff out as we go.