The Independent View: The Future of the News Is You

In researching the future of news, I came across the MIT Media Lab and a project on the future of news.

Media Lab's Associate Director, Andrew Lippman, explained "It's about the democratization of everything." He believes in the power of the internet to democratize news delivery and showed off a tool that could help.

Andrew Lippman has a more than 35-year history at MIT. His work at the Media Lab has ranged from wearable computers to global digital television. Currently, he heads the Lab's Viral Communications research group, which examines scalable, real-time networks whose capacity increases with the number of members. This new approach to telephony, sensor interconnection, and broadcasting transfers "mainframe communications" technology to distributed, personally defined, cooperative communicators.

The tool was set on about a 72-inch flat screen. It listed the top stories of the day, and within each top story was a pile of stories in various formats from around the world pulled from various internet feeds. Select a news event by touching the screen, bring up a series of stories, and then explore certain aspects of a story in-depth to whatever level you wanted. You could look at these stories across categories or on a timeline. As you explored, you could get a much better sense of the news of the day and how it fit together in a broader tapestry of the news.

Lippman believes today's most popular news broadcaster is John Stewart, because he has an uncanny way of mixing news, humor, and historical news clips, stitching them together in a way that's both funny and informative, in his clever use of media to help tell his stories.

Lippman foresaw a news creation tool, one that could take the ability to manipulate and categorize news in various formats (video, text, and audio) and pull it together into personal broadcasts.

These broadcasts may focus on the news broadly or explore a topic in-depth. Imagine, for example, if everyone could create his own Ken Burns-like documentary and share it on social media. It has the potential to be the YouTube of news in that if it were distributed correctly, it could allow people to drag and drop pieces to build, share, and distribute a news story package easily. This would require a new way to handle copyright issues.

In this vision, we still need the core news organization. This is not strictly about about a community journalism kind of scenario, but one that pulls existing news sources together in order to build personal broadcasts. The key is to create great, easy-to-use tools, and to pull the technology behind the MIT Media tools into an app or web service people could use to easily create these these personal broadcasts.

I have been watching the last season of the HBO series THE NEWSROOM. One of the store lines is the takeover of the news network by a person who wants to bring them through the 19th, 20th, and into the 21st century of news.&nbs. His version is exactly what the MIT Media is trying to create.

If we were to democratize the creation of news in this fashion, then the future of the news would be one in which news organizations share various pieces on the internet and in which other people are mashing them up in various ways to create their own broadcasts with their own take on how it fits together. Lippman believes that if we're given the right tools, we can all participate in the news and become a better educated society for it.

I agree but worry about the misuse of facts. The only way to make this work is the ability for the audience to interact with the producer.

I hope I can make The Independent View the type of media that fills this vision.

So let me know what's on your mind.