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7.31.2009

Non-consumers of news reporting

Truly disruptive innovations result from the initial discovery of non-consumers of the incumbent offering. The innovators then come up with ways to help those non-consumers solve their problems, get their jobs done and realize added value in their own contexts. These non-consumers may regard the incumbent's offering to be too much of a good thing, missing the mark, neglecting the important parts, creating more problems for the end user. The opt out of "mass consumption" to avoid getting over-served, under-served or otherwise dis-served. They appear as several different niches of untapped demand to observant innovators

Here are four segments of non-consumers of news reporting that I'm expecting to partake in disrupting incumbent journalism models:
  • Too post-literate to grok journalistic writing - Reading comprehension, long attention spans, and the ability to focus -- are in decline among media savvy youth. News reporting seems to be long winded, excessively detailed, boring and time consuming to these cultural forerunners. They assume that if the information was meant to be consumed it would be presented as text messages, videos, animations, manga cartoons or podcasts. The content would be downloadable onto mobile devices after subscribing to its RSS/Atom feed that announced updates. The presentation would allow for adding comments, linking to it, bookmarking it and quoting or embedding it in one's own uploads. Falling short of these expectations simply indicates that the journalism is irrelevant, obsolete, clueless and useless.
  • Too passionate to accept objective reporting - Some of the non-consumers care too much about an unfolding story to accept the professional version. They feel for the people involved and relate to many subjective interpretations of what happened. The facts of the situation fail to capture the significance, larger context, and system dynamics involved. The objective reporting appears biased, making the problem worse, dwelling on the superficial evidence and neglectful of its unintended consequences.
  • Too busy getting results - Other non-consumers don't have time to distract themselves with non-essentials. News reporting is not helping them change lives, further progress, solve problems or make things happen. They are low profile newsmakers who don't make the news reports. They are social activists who get their news from the people they are serving and the situations they are immersed in day to day. News reporting appears to be all talk and no action by pundits with too much to say from too far away.
  • Too alienated to show interest - This fourth segment of non-consumers regards news gathering and publishing as industrial production for mass consumption. It appears to push content onto passive consumers in excessive bundles via profiteering intermediaries who are only serving their own interests. News reporting shows too few signs of learning from the disintermediation of record albums, encyclopedias or courseware. Industrialized journalism appears to fall in step with Wall Street pay scales, Detroit auto makers and private military contractors who all spin off huge, negative externalities onto vulnerable publics.
Non consumers like these do not show up on incumbent radar. These new "value constructs" get dismissed by incumbents as impossible to please, incompatible with what's for sale and too costly to serve adequately. The opportunities for disruptive innovation appear marked with warning signs: Danger Keep Out. The current paying customers are too captivating to betray them with changing the value constructs. Non-consumers remain dis-served until upstarts come along and "move the goal posts".

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