The new news-order must be scary for major corporations like CNN. Micro-reporting has become such a huge part of most of our lives that fewer and fewer people seem to be interested in getting brief news clips from a news anchor when they can get in-depth coverage from people actually in the trenches on websites and blogs.
In our opinion, CNN seems to have shown their worries a little today by purchasing the popular iPad magazine app Zite. Zite is pretty much everything that CNN can’t be at this point. The application aggregates news based on your personal preferences and then offers up news based on the things you like to read.
CNNTech is reporting that the app will remain free and unchanged for now. CNN plans to merge the technology with their current iOS applications, which is what scares me frankly.
Obviously this type of news has its strengths. Customized news is a huge change from the traditional approach to providing news, previously based on editorial oversight from editors, news teams, and magazines. Today’s approach is on customization, and automated information curation, but that brings with it some troubles down the road.
Cross pollination between news topics and categories may become a relic of the past. For instance, if you’re heavily into technology you may not get important information on politics or sports. Hopefully that’s not something we’ll have to worry about in the near future, but long term it could become a bit of a problem as companies focus more and more on giving users what they want to read, instead of providing them with articles that they should read.
