Process vs Beta Journalism - the Real Time Point

I've been following the debate today about Product vs Process vs Beta Journalism with some interest. In essence, the New York Times wrote an article about Journos being better than Blogs because (as it says of TechCrunch):

That drive to compete with the so-called mainstream media is what’s behind his strategy. He doesn’t have the luxury of a large staff to confirm everything, so he competes where he has the advantage. “Getting it right is expensive,” he says. “Getting it first is cheap.”

And cometh a NYT post on News, cometh the inevitable Jeff Jarvis antipost (and book pimp ):

This is journalism as beta. I make a big point of that in What Would Google Do? - that every time Google releases a beta, it is saying that the product is incomplete and imperfect. That is inevitably a call to collaborate. It is - even from Google - a statement of humanity and humility: We’re not perfect.

In other words news as Beta, a continually updating storyline. But this is not the traditional workflow - Jarvis again:

Ah, but there’s the problem: journalism’s myth of perfection. And it’s not just journalism that holds this myth. It is the byproduct of the means and requirements of mass production: If you have just one chance to put out a product and it has to serve everyone the same, you come to believe it’s perfect because it has to be, whether that product is a car (we are the experts, we took six years to tool up, it damned well better be perfect) or government (where, I’m learning, employees have a phobic fear of mistakes - because citizens and journalists will jump on them) or newspapers (we package the world each day in a box with a bow on it - you’re welcome).

Contrast that with online media:

Online, we often publish first and edit later. We do that on blogs. One could say that 24-hour TV news does that, though I rarely see the editing. Even a division of The New York Times Company - About.com (where I used to consult) - does its work in that order. (That is why About had dozens of writers for every editor [I don't know the mix today], while The Times has three editors for every writer. That level of editing before publication is what makes The Times The Times - both from a journalistic perspective and, today, from an economic perspective; it may be what makes a newsroom like that unsustainable.)

Online, the story, the reporting, the knowledge are never done and never perfect. That doesn’t mean that we revel in imperfection, as is the implication of The Times’ story - that we have no standards. It just means that we do journalism differently, because we can.

Now maybe its just me, but I think what is really going on here is not "Journo vs Blogger" per se. After all, Journos have a few news-churning ploys of their own. Its more a shift of medium, from paper to broadband. And the key bit of this, that in my view the even as the above commentators point to it no-one fully grasps yet, is the shift from "batch" to "real time" processing of news.

As readers of this blog will know, we do quite a lot of work with real time systems frpm content collection through to provisioning. And the truth is, as even Google is finding out, Real Time is different - and is here and rapidly growing.

(What Will Google Do about Realtime, we wonder

There has been more than a bit of buzz about real time media and search in the last few months. Three weeks ago the refrain at the TeleManagement Forum in Nice was "Real Time OSS", and I was reminded of this shift again today by fellow Tuttler Janet Parkinson of Quirk's post on Real Time Branding:

Take the case of Motrin last November when they produced an online ad playfully describing babies as fashion accessories. Over just one weekend a huge ruckus arose on Twitter, Friendfeed and other social networks resulting in Motrin removing the ads the following week. It was, however, too late.

Just last month, Nielsen mapped out the brand associations linked to Motrin both before and after the event and established that since then the brand Motrin has had a much higher association with terms such as "backlash", "offensive", "condescending" and "offensive Motrin ad."

And where the Ad media is going, you had better be sure so will the rest of it, as he who pays the piper.....In other words, the emerging realtime web probably makes the more traditional forms of journalism at worst obsolescent, at best it will barge its way into the market share, as all new technologies with better economics are wont to do.

Of course its all new, of course its raw media, and not as finessed as what exists today. Of course babies will be thrown out with the bathwater, thats what periods of change like this do. But of one thing we can be sure - the realtime genie, once out the bottle, will not go back in.

Incidentally, in the New Yorker this week is a rather good article on how Davids taking on Goliaths do not adopt their same methods to win but instead work in new ways, and especially they:

- Do not look at the "unwritten" rules of the game - they look at the rules as is and optimise that. In News-speak, blogs are looking at where the economics and the customers are, and are optimising to. that game.

- Are prepared to do "socially unspeakable" things according to the mores of the genre, and thus come from surprising angles.

- Use speed and flexibility to make up for lack of resources.

So its all very predictable, even by the NYT

And that will be as true of video news in the future as print news today.....