The Future of News

I have researched this topic quite extensively in the last month. I believe it has a great connection with our current topic of the negative effects of technology. To quickly give my conclusions I firmly believe that even though newspapers are struggling with the shift to online, Journalism as a practice will be unaffected. A great example  of this theory is the website mediastorm.org. I attended a presentation by the founder Brian Storm and he explained how his system works. Their operation is both a news producer and outlet. Photojournalists and Videographers go out and do their stories and then go to mediastorm.org to produce it into a polished piece of news. Media Storm has the power to search through the hundreds of projects they are presented with and decide which are worthwhile to produce. After creating a multimedia informational project as well as either a video or audio slide show they are able to go to outlets like msnbc.com and sell the story for money. The site then creates revenue from ads and links back to media storm who will split any profits 50/50 with the actual journalist who did the story. They now have a system that allows several websites to bid on the projects to generate as much revenue as possible. They have an average site time of 11 mins. That is unbelievably huge. Other news sites are around 30 seconds. The fact is they are a small news corp that is able to keep their costs low and their stories in high regard. They're not making a ton of money, just enough to stay afloat. However, Brain says thats what we need in today's new form of journalism. People not in it for profits, but for the spreading of important stories and information. Their next project will be released later in May.