Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Content has a life cycle of it’s own and the value of content is pretty much built up by it’s freshness (how breaking is the content), how unique is it, and how emotional the content is. Breaking news content will always be in high demand. The life time and stickiness of the content improves with supporting relevant material such as context, facts and opinions, together with providing the audience with the capability of interacting with the content with ratings, comments and topical forums.

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It is an absolutely necessity to have this free. It is the freedom of speech on steroids but still fact checked. It has to be free and open. To all people. By any means. Everywhere. Essentially, all these components build the human story and the provided context, facts and opinions built up by other user contributions and aggregation grounds the discussion. Ironically all these characteristics of the content actually provides you with the necessary components of the quality assurance system. It is the ultimate long-tail system.

I usually describe the new content media arena with the analogy of imagining a party. Which party would you like to go to: the party with all the detailed instructions what to wear, what to do, what to not say, what to say. Or would you prefer the laid back come as you are party. I would choose the rock n’ roll party any day. Why? It is fun. It is free. But… Most importantly I can relate to it. I can relate to it. That is the key.

http://inthefieldonline.net/blog/2009/12/23/the-ever-changing-media-land...

Excellent analysis and powerful thoughts.

People whose main job it is to report will still be a need– I hope community-supported journalism will be able to fill some of that need-- certainly better than reporting that answers to advertising, corporate, or government support.

It is the editorial control where I still see the greatest potential in democratizing. This has to be distributed, and transparent, and I think if asked "what's important" directly in concrete cases people will give a very different answer than the decisionmakers of media do in "giving people what they want". (That's the key idea behind People Who Give a Damn / Visions Unite, forthcoming network for all who care about making some little piece of the world better, without gates or conditions, but the more places that adopt the citizen-editor model the better!)