The following is the 4th part of an exclusive Impact Lab series called the Twelve Trends of Christmas by Thomas Frey.  Title: The Star of Today’s News


Every day new people make their debut on the front page of newspapers, radio shows, and television.  People become instantly famous or infamous as they watch their name and face rise to neon light levels and quickly fade back into obscurity.  But as we wake up each morning and search for our daily dose of news we should be asking the question, “who will be the star of today’s news?”

News organizations are constantly searching for interesting stories to fill their pages or air time.  While the wire services average over 4,000 stories a day, there is a growing dissatisfaction over news coverage, and people have begun a mass migration to alternative news sources.

Chris Anderson’s “long tail” theory predicts that when consumers are given an infinite number of choices they will tend to migrate towards the niches. And hidden in these deep niche regions of the long tail of news we find a growing number of high-interest hit stories and an emerging new breed of “stars” making their way into the headlines.

Here’s why this is so significant.  The image we hold in our heads about the world today and the future direction of humanity is framed largely by the news media.  Their ongoing quest to improve profitability has caused them to gravitate towards the extreme fringes of subject matter, dramatizing topics of little significance, fueling the fires of controversy in order to improve their bottom line.  Here are some examples of our distorted view of the world:

• The stories about children fall into six general topical areas: education, economics, family, health, culture, and crime and violence. However, the proportion of child-related stories about crime and violence dominate the headlines, varying significantly by source. Crime and violence stories made up 74 percent of the local news TV stories on children; 48 percent of the network news on children, 40 percent of the metropolitan newspapers’ coverage, 37 percent of the network TV magazine show coverage and 27 percent of the talk show. 
   
• Women make up 52 percent of the world’s population but they make up only 21 percent of news subjects.  Only 10 percent of the stories have women as a central focus. Women are more than twice as likely to be portrayed as victims than men.
   
• International coverage in the Local News is primarily violence or disaster based. According to a GRIID study in 1999 – 2000, almost nine out of ten international news stories on the local news were about war, violence, or disaster.

Over the past two years there has been much written about “citizen journalism”, a not-so-simple concept that is being applied in many experimental forms by traditional organizations, but is emerging as a common “Empire of One” business model by bloggers around the world.

In the past, news media companies were able to extend as far as their staff would allow them to reach.  Typical staff for these companies numbered in the dozens, sometimes hundreds, and in a few of the largest, in the thousands.

Every day a few key editors would pool their thinking and decide the priority of the stories, and “who and what” would fall into the top story category.  And in doing so, they decided who would be the “star” of the day’s news.

Since the tentacle reach of news organizations was limited to the range of their immediate staff of reporters, many key stories were never discovered.  Very often, during the so-called slow news days, the media would use government and politics as a standard default subject simply because nothing else of interest came across their desk.

The dominant influencers in the new media world have little ties to sponsors or advertisers because the ad dollars are a couple steps removed from their doorsteps.  In many cases companies become their own influencers as they become tech savvy and consumer savvy.

Today’s pro-active bloggers, podcasters, and vidcasters (YouTube) are on the verge of re-writing the procedure manuals for how news stories are discovered and captured.  And in doing so, are constantly casting for the newest “star” of today’s news.