Startups disrupting news agencies. Viva La Revolucion! [kwiqq]

Posted on | January 12, 2009 | No Comments

A recent trip to Kuwait made me realised how people might have followed news in the 70s. A stack of the 4-5 most popular newspapers over coffee and a pastry, nodding head in despair. Almost wondering if they could receive the news instantly. Fast forward to 1990s, watching live news on television, although still not as instant as one would have hoped for.

In 2001 television live news displayed one of the most spectacular (and indeed sad) presentations of the attacks on 9/11. Fast forwarding again to 2008 with the tragic incident in Mumbai tagged #mumbai on Twitter. Twitter became a news source and that is fantastic news but there are sources which have made it possible and used Twitter as their medium of delivery.

Welcome to the Revolution

Traditionally news is reported by correspondents who are based locally to the source. This is then picked up by radio and television reporters who compose their stories live or in newspapers columns or blogs. The reports are now undergoing a constant change of medium, i.e. YouTube Videos, Twitter, Blogs. Further the fundamental generation and propogation of news is changing too:

Newscaster Alternative: Traditionally newscasters function at large stations and networks that usually specialize in a particular type of news, such as sports or weather. Sometimes it is in the form of a light hearted news, technology, celebrity culture, a good example is pop17.com.

Pop17 is a two-to-three minute daily exploration to track, analyze and understand the new cultural phenomenon of online micro-celebrity.

Wire service alternatives: Wire services are typically news agencies that provide news to publications, broadcasters and media houses by the minute. Recently BreakingNewOn, which almost gives users instant access to the events through out the world on Twitter, has been doing a fantastic job as a news source. They have been quicker than 911 (in the US) on more than one occasion.

Another example is a London based startup, Demotix, which allows users to upload photos and videos to newspapers, magazines, TV channels and websites, making users in $100,000s. Think of it as  Flickr for News pics.

Broadcasters Alternatives: Similarly there are other sources of news on Twitter which are more of breaking/interesting news as displayed on other sites. Example: @channelone, @BreakingNewsOff, @reddit and @INQ

Another fantastic example of broadcaster alternative is CitizenNews which broadcasts interesting user generated news videos on YouTube.

News discoverers: There are also breed of bloggers and twitterers who work as news discoverers. They take images, videos or articles and find facts related to the news. This is an example of crowd sourcing, using collective intelligence of people to do a task.

Example: Recently Sunday Mail and The Telegraph reported a circus dwarf eaten by Hippo, which was then proved incorrect on Snopes.com. Second example is discovering a hindu wrist band on Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Future ‘People Power’

So overall we are slowly but surely replacing the dominant players (see News Corporations holding globally) in the news publishing business with group of volunteers/induviduals and startups. Sites like BreakingNewsOn are Wikipedia for the news industry and have the potential to replace news sites, just like Wikipedia is replacing encyclopedias. This is obviously fantastic giving us unbiased news from multiple sources.

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