Demand Media announced an agreement to provide content for USA Today’s Travel section. Why would a major paper want to license content from Demand’s content farm?

The rapidly changing economics of publishing continue to be the core issue. The core activities of content businesses, content acquisition and content distribution, are simply too expensive to continue in their current state.

Retaining a large staff of writers to recapitulate the same story as competitors is nonsensical in an age of ready access through search and perfect copies. The economic incentive is very strong to simply license any non-core content. If licensing increases content volume and reduces costs, what will publishers do to add real value to their offering to readers?

I would argue that many publications have suffered from a diminution of their capacities to add content value. This trend predates the explosion of the internet.

The “news” industry has always been about aggregation and POV. Somewhere along the line that seems to have been forgotten. A news story aggregates facts, witness statements and research in an attempt to tease out an accurate description of an event. If that event can be described by the headline and lead alone, then the remainder of the piece was pretty much a waste of everyone’s time.

Discovery, Filtering, Commentary, Fact Checking and Distribution

I think these are are the five pillars of 21st century journalism. No single player in the market really has all five nailed at this point-in-time.

Discovery requires significant technology resources. Ideally a publication would use a system to “listen” for new opportunities. This is not the same as following a few Google Alerts or Twitter streams. It means a real investment in aggregating the flow of the real-time web.

Filtering (and de-duplicating) reveal that there’s not actually that much news in the world. Within the massive flow of data, how many unique “posts” happen in a given day? Most are reposts or other forms of sharing. More importantly is using filtering to understand the “sense” of what’s happening. What’s new? What’s trending? What’s being discussed? What’s relevant?

Commentary is a key area where bloggers have the mainstream media beat. The value for the reader has to extend beyond the headline and lead. J school practices may place journalists at a huge disadvantage online. The reader places value in more than just facts. News needs to acknowledge POV. Fox News seems to have figured this out for cable news.

Fact checking plays directly into the existing strengths of traditional publishers, but no one seems to really be grabbing this opportunity. Publications should use their resources to tell the reader what is true. A story endorsed as “correct” by the NYT or Washington Post has real weight and value. They don’t have to write it. Just tell us what’s factual. NPR seems to do a pretty good job of this. As an instrument for democracy this is the most significant contribution journalists can make.

Distribution roughly lines up with monetization. Paper was a very efective monetizable medium for decades. The product is easily distributable, but hard to share and very hard to copy. The trend away from this pre-dates the explosion of the internet. Technology makes creating perfect copies, sharing copies trivial. From an economics perspective this means that supply has gone to infinity. Despite a significant rise in demand, (Newspaper websites have MUCH larger audiences than print ever did.), the equation is now permanently broken.