 The Idea: Information
intermediaries are facing revolutionary changes and threats, but the
energy behind these changes is not new technologies, but a broad
dissatisfaction by readers and viewers with the end-product, and with
the lack of value added by intermediaries. This article suggests some
answers.
We live in an age of
'disintermediation' -- the cutting out of the middleman. We do bank
transactions without tellers, we browse libraries without librarians,
we learn without teachers. Those who used to know their role in our
society often find themselves reinventing those roles before they
simply disappear. One such group struggling with their role are
'infomediaries' -- the people who stand (or used to stand) between you
and the information you consume. The chain is shown in the illustration
at right.
To some extent blogging is an attempt to disintermediate this chain.
Some in the mainstream media would like to see us as just another link
in the chain, at the very end between the channels and readers, adding
little or no value other than links to related stories, high-tech
cataloguers. But online journalism can incorporate all six of these
intermediary roles, and, in fact, bloggers can be newsmakers in their
own right -- like when they break major stories that the legacy media
miss, or undertake investigative reporting that the legacy media no
longer have.much appetite for.
At the same time, search tools and social networking software are
providing additional channels and ways to aggregate information,
working to some extent hand in glove with bloggers to create entirely
new ways to connect
Following are some comments from reader Wendy Siegelman, who works for
a major infomediary, from a recent e-mail exchange on this subject:
I think that intermediaries are
perhaps underappreciated because there isn't a recognized name for the
role they have. Maybe these information intermediaries are missing an
important element - branding. Without the proper branding,
intermediaries that take, find, gather and make information usable,
accessible, meaningful - are not properly valued.
I think there is a relatively high value placed on the concept of 'good communication'. There's the content being communicated,
the communicator, and the receiver of information. But, there's also the element of how the info is communicated. I think that the value is usually placed on the what and who, but not the how.
[Politicians and others with vested interests use information to]
measure and try to influence opinion and policy. Unfortunately, they
have made the science of gathering, sorting and adding value and
meaning to information appear to be a negative, opportunistic process.
Intermediaries that do the same thing for productive and positive ends
aren't properly recognized or valued.
The critical
issue for the future of all intermediaries is, as Wendy implies: What
value are you, or could you be, adding? Fail to add enough and you'll
be gobbled up by others along the chain or circumvented entirely. Add a
lot of value and you can actually 'reintermediate' information flow
that had ostensibly been disintermediated -- like some of the best
librarians have done, reinventing themselves as researchers, analysts
and report-writers filtering, compiling, analyzing, organizing, adding
insight and producing crisp and concise documents ready for
end-customers.
It is that very lack of value-added that has caused disintermediation
in the first place. Reporters are too often underfunded and lazy -- so
they wait for news to break and ambulance-chase, and add nothing to the
propagandist commercial 'press releases' issued by governments and
corporations. Most analysts are paid by stock brokers, governments,
biotech companies, corporate-sponsored think-tanks, and other
vested-interest groups, to help 'sell' their products and suppress
information and opinions to the contrary, as James Surowiecki has
eloquently demonstrated in his weekly New Yorker column, and as many recent scandals involving analysts who were fired for not towing the line show.
Likewise, editors are paid to reflect the editorial stance of the
publisher, and legacy publishers are beholden to shareholders who only
want them to publish what sells simply and in large quantity.
Aggregators then try to pull this 'dumbed down' and censored content
together, but are having the rug pulled out from under them by
increasingly sophisticated free aggregation tools that channel
companies like Google and Bloglines provide. And the mainstream media
channels are finding their audience increasingly splintered, demanding
and dissatisfied with the poverty of truly informative or useful
content they push out. So readers and viewers have been open to
disintermediation, not because of cost (which continues to drop
precipitously) but because of the poor quality of intermediated content
and the lack of value added by intermediaries.
What could information intermediaries do to be more valuable? Here are
a few ideas from a presentation I made a few years ago to a conference
of intermediaries:
- Make the content more useful, more actionable, or at least
more interesting. The limits of attention span and bandwidth often
cause intermediaries to strip out content that provides valuable
context to the reader or viewer -- tells them not only who, what, when,
where, why and how, but also what does it mean?
- Study how to write great
stories, so that those further along the information channel will be
disinclined to pare them down and reduce the value you have
incorporated in the story.
- Focus on information that's important, rather than urgent.
Too much of the content reaching the reader and viewer today is 'sold'
as urgent, when all it is is new. Not enough is important.
- Follow up. We squander reader/viewer interest and trust
when we get them worked up about today's story and then never tell them
what happened later.
- Be conversational. Let the reader/viewer see the person
behind the point of view. And don't pretend to be objective -- your
audience knows better.
- Help people deal with information overload. If people hope
to be able to give more attention to important stories and issues, they
need the rest of the crap filtered out. Search engines, blogrolls,
eProfiles and other filtering mechanisms are woefully imprecise. The
tools need to be much better, and intermediaries need to find a new
role filtering the firehose of daily 'news' in a way that will probably
never be possible even with the best tool. There are huge opportunities
here.
- Get out more. Intermediaries need to learn the value of
doing their own primary research (interviewing and direct observation),
and not merely working with the content flowing though the chain to
them. If that's not in your job description -- add it.
- Read broadly. It gives you perspective. And it has a lot of other benefits as well.
- Learn a disciplined approach to research and analysis. I
like the Pyramid Principle, but there are lots of others. This will
make your thinking sharper, allow you to appreciate how your readers
will 'see' what you're providing them with, and provide a 'trail' that
will make your arguments more compelling and allow you (or others) to
understand and check your logic.
- Take some chances. The disintermediation that is
overwhelming the information industries came about because the
technology industries were bold, and didn't constrain their products to
doing just what other technologies had done before them. Talk to
readers and viewers about what is possible, think them ahead to imagine
how they could use an intermediary product or service that doesn't even
exist today. Level of 'customer satisfaction' with the legacy media is
extremely low, and that dissatisfaction has many causes, and suggests
many needs that are not being met. Find a need and fill it.
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