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Nichepapers, new models, monkeys, and bananas

A friend told me a story once about a man who comes across a bunch of monkeys. Before the man can even say anything, one of the monkeys hands him a banana. He hangs out with the monkeys for a while and then has to press on down the road. After some time, he runs into another bunch of monkeys and gets upset when they don't offer him bananas. The moral of the story is that, of course, you have to stop expecting bananas from monkeys. Some monkeys don't have bananas to give you.

It's a simple story with an even more simple and obvious point, but I like it. It's become a bit of a mantra for when I become disappointed: stop expecting bananas. (This is an especially effective mantra for listening to music by artists you've loved for a long time who then release an album that feels like a stylistic departure. The problem isn't that they're making a different kind of music, perhaps it's that you were expecting bananas, so to speak.)

I have a point here, of course.

The same friend forwarded me this piece from HarvardBusiness.org about nichepapers and the future of the media. It pretty much echoes everything I've been thinking, reading, and talking about with people lately. Mainly that, going forward, journalists need to change the way we think and stop looking at the web as the death of print, but rather as something completely new which we have an opportunity to define. Of course, here at ND we're talking specifically about going from print to the web, but it's less cause-and-effect and more that-was-then-this-is-now. These monkeys don't have bananas. They have some other kind of fruit we've never seen before. We can't expect it to taste like a banana.

It got me thinking what we "new media" people are doing is kind of like...well, imagine your boss saying we're going to give you a new job - what do you want it to be?

I've opined up and down all over this topic on this site, so figured I'd point to what someone else is saying. I like what the author - Umair Haque - has to say about the fact that newspapers literally give you yesterday's news. It was a matter of time before we humans developed a more immediate way to share information and share what's happening right now. Namely, as he and plenty of others believe, the new way to do news is to start conversations and let those conversations develop as the actual news develops. I dig it. What do you think?

Tags: community, haque, magazine, media, new, nichepapers, nodepression, umair

Comment by Easy Ed on August 4, 2009 at 3:45pm: I was up at four this morning, had little else to do, and watched the early morning cable news folks. It may have been Morning Joe or may not, but there was a lively discussion about said topic. One t-head noted that there are now 300 million reporters and the problem is not that we won't have enough media to hold them all as the internet is an endless highway. The problem [he noted] is that there are not enough editors left to manage it all. Made sense to me...but I was kind of groggy.

Comment by Katelyn Hackett on August 5, 2009 at 9:52am: Ya'll might be interested in this interview with Wired's editor. A salient quote: "Sorry, I don't use the word media. I don't use the word news. I don't think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like 'horseless carriage'. [...] There are no other words. We're in one of those strange eras where the words of the last century don't have meaning. What does news mean to you, when the vast majority of news is created by amateurs? Is news coming from a newspaper, or a news group or a friend? I just cannot come up with a definition for those words. Here at Wired, we stopped using them."

Read the whole thing at http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,638172,00.html , it's great food for thought!

It's both scary and incredibly liberating not to have the traditional reference points and centers of gravity. I expect to make a lot of mistakes and receive a few rotten bananas as I and my fellow music and news writers move forward, but I believe in the end this is a creative, energizing time of change for the industry.

Comment by Kim Ruehl on August 5, 2009 at 11:13am: Totally! I really believe it's a language problem. I think the sooner folks stop trying to cram words like "news" and "journalism" into this little internet box (or shall I say tube?), the better. Or, if we insist on using those words to describe things that are happening on the web, we need to stop thinking of them in the same terms we used to think of them. I really do believe that, if you want something to change, you first have to change the way you talk about it. And to change the way you talk about it, you have to be open to new words and new definitions.

When life hands you rotten bananas, make banana bread.