Where’s our Journalist discovery engine?
So Don Tapscott says:
If markets are the best mechanism for determining how goods and resources are allocated, why isn’t everybody an independent contractor at every step along the way in production? The answer is collaboration costs. Because the web drops collaboration costs, consumers can now produce.
…and I think he’s quite right. And not only can consumers now produce, but large organisations can now begin to disaggregate, indeed must disaggregate in order to realise the efficiencies that derive from it (this is frightening them quite considerably).
We will, I reckon, see this applied across pretty much all sectors and industries over the next 5 years or so (see the excellent documentary Us Now for a taste of what this means). But I want to have it applied to the news business right now. I don’t want to go somewhere in particular for my news, I want to cherry pick individual journalists whom I trust, and listen to just what they have to say. And not just press journalists, but bloggers and pundits and comics and commentators alike.
However, in order to do that I have to know who those people are. Also, in order not to become isolated in a tiny backwater of self-reinforcing opinion, I need to know what their political outlook is (self-declared, auto-interpreted *and* community assessed) and see some contradictory opinions both by writer and per article. And I need to find out if there are other writers I might be interested in based on the preferences I’ve expressed, and what other people think of them, and what they’ve done in the past, what awards they’ve won, what publications they’ve been published in, what ‘kind’ of writer they are… I’m sure you get what I’m driving at :-)
I need a recommendation engine for all those soon-to-be-freelance journalists that I a) genuinely want to read, b) absolutely do not mind tracking back from a summary feed to provide a page hit to, and c) am quite likely to drop the occasional micropayment to in support.
