Okay Geek Farm
The future of Newspapers - Bonnier concept shows us, and we don't love it
Brandon Davenport
This is a fantastic concept video, created by Bonnier a media company founded in 1804 who’s goal is to take what we know about the paper today, and strip away the old ideas and inspire new ways of consuming news. The promo video really says it all — a one stop shop for news, and all controlled in a clean, easy and familiar way, but this leaves one issue…
The Future of News
The meat of the problem is the app and idea themselves — obviously this is mainly focused on big-name papers and highly recognized brands — sort of like the high-end shops in a mall. On the other hand, we (blogs) are the grubby old discount clothing stores that offer really original stuff and niche interests, at half the price, but we obviously don’t carry the notability of the high-end stores, aka, the professional news publications.
What we mean is this — A new model of a controlled news experiences, carefully curated from trusted sources (if this becomes popular), could stifle our voice as bloggers, mostly because Bonnier does have a point, “nobody likes the noise of the web - they want pure news”.
In the end, we believe that services and apps like Flipboard, Digg and Reddit will continue to prevail as news aggregators, on two conditions: They need to keep their directory of news sources open and controllable by users, and they also need to appeal to the general tech user. If these news aggrigators (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon etc) don’t push to become mainstream, Bonnier’s idea could be the new model for news — and blogs could be pushed down to the bottom of people’s lists of news sources.
Do you think this new app is good, or bad for blogs? - Leave a comment!
