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Kevin Anderson on Information Overload Syndrome and #Journalism's Future #DD11

Kevin Anderson just used this video in his talk here at Digital Directions. "In the 20th century, Ruper Murdoch built an empire based on scarcity," said Anderson. Anderson's talk is about the combination of abundance with journalism. Salient points mixed with my own extension.

  • We're losing the battle for attention. People weren't necessarily more civically engaged in the past. There was just less competition for their time. "We're not just fighting against other news sites. We're fighting against every other site on the Internet," and the same is true for apps
  • More content is leading to lower revenues. Excess of inventory drove CPMs way down
  • We're overwhelming audiences into inaction
  • Minutes per month on news sites ~4 minutes per user. On Facebook it's 375 minutes!
  • Young (18-24) turn to celebrity and car crash news because they can no longer follow long, complicated stories with updates. 
  • We're moving from mass to relevance. Size is less important than context, relevance, curation
  • Growth of social media publishing. Check out this AllFacebook.com post including profiles of paper.li, Flipboard and Newsbook
  • Networked journalism. Not just about distributing across platforms (flickr, twitter, facebook) but also cultivating sources
  • Real-time and real-space curation. A bit of information where people are physically. Gave example of WSJ post to Foursquare via a shout at Times Square about evacuation

I'm a huge Kevin Anderson fan now. Follow him on Twitter. Holy Jesus-who-wasn't-killed-by-the-Jews-afterall-thanks-Pope