The Antwerp Horror

Get out of there now!

Did you ever watch a horror movie.

The Texas Chainsaw Killer kind of movie, where the young, good looking group of friends has their car break down in the middle of nowhere and they wander into the old house.

And just when things start to get really weird, the girl says, ‘I think I’ll take a look upstairs’ and you are sitting there going ‘get out of the house now!’.  Because you know what is going to happen.

She’s going to get an ice pick in the eye.

Or something similar.

I had a similar feeling speaking to a group of Dutch and Belgian newspaper editors last week in Antwerp.

‘For God’s sake, get out of the house… now!’

But like the cute girl in the bad movie, they don’t listen.

All of these very nice editors are going to end up with an icepick in their eye.

Or worse.

They are in the journalism business. They think they are in the newspaper business, but they aren’t. They’re in the news business. And the news business has changed.  But they don’t want to hear about it.

When their business was invented, there were very few people who had a printing press. So access to a press was a real rarity. and so was the ability to gather and print information and distribute it.  That rarity has gone away. It has gone so far away it is now a commonality.

Last year, there were 90 trillion emails sent.  There are 247 billion email messages sent every day.  There are 234 million websites.

That is a lot of information. A lot. And it’s instant. And it’s free.

The idea that there is something ’special’ about sending out some guy with a notebook to take a look at what is happening somewhere and then write about it is about as rare as air.  That is, it isn’t. And if you think you can charge people for that kind of information, try charging them for air.  You’ll have as much luck.

There’s a tsunami of information hitting us every minute, every second, and more on the way.  Last year alone, there were 47 million new websites added to the blogosphere.  In one year.

What is needed is not yet another source of information. There are, God only knows, enough of those. What is needed is someone who can sort through all this crap and determine what is worth spending your time on.  The web is infinitely expandable, time is not.

Google was the first organization to pay attention to focusing the web.  They did OK. Now newspapers and TV stations can, instead of simply adding yet another voice to this cacophony, better use their considerable editorial skills to focus this mess, to cull through the crap and extract the gold. To find the few really good voices and shape and edit them and then tell us where they are.

Now that is something I would pay for.

There’s a river of information flowing as us every second, but the newspaper people only want to spit in the river to add their ’special bit’.

No one cares.

And no one is going to pay for their ’special’ and extra-important information.

But the papers don’t care. At least not yet.

They still think that what they do is important.

Funny.

They see the web as a ‘threat’, not as an opportunity to become publishers and curators of content.

Too bad.

Ironically, during the debate that followed my little talk, I watched as the Dow dropped 1,000 points. I followed it in real time on Twitter.

None of the editors tweets.

As a result, none of the great journalists in the room knew what was happening to the economy.

They would have to wait until the next day when they would send out their reporters to report and then until that afternoon when that reporting would be set in ink and paper and hand-delivered to a newsstand near them.

A bit late.

Like the editors.

A bit late.

And that’s why speaking to a group of newspaper editors is like watching a horror movie.

You know that they are going to get an icepick in the eye.

But no matter what you do, you can’t save them.

Too bad.

Pass the popcorn.