Toyota is responding in all sorts of different ways to its car-brake fiasco. Whole books will be written about the company's damage-control efforts, effective and ineffective, starting with the Capitol Hill testimony last week of top Toyota execs.
But one aspect has caught The Cable Gamer's attention, because it speaks to the future of news, and news management. And that aspect is the endless and total aggregation of news content--in huge gusher-like quantities. That's a vertical--you can plunge as deep as you wish into it. The deeper the better, because for some folks, there's no such thing as too much. Those folks are known as Loyal Viewers, or Loyal Clickers, and they are not to be made fun of!
The screen grab above, for example, comes from ToyotaConversations.com, shows a stream of Tweets, as well as a "greatest hits." There's both good news and bad news for Toyota here, so there's the presumption of evenhandedness in the presentation of the data. (If someone has his thumb on the scale--not a shock, if true, considering that Toyota is paying for the whole thing--editorially, at least it's not obvious. Which is to say, if I were really interested in dispassionate news about Toyota, I might well be coming to this site fairly often, just to keep up.)
Some might say that what we are seeing here isn't much different from an RSS feed, and that's true enough. The challenge is to make the data-flow as cool and aesthetically pleasing as possible. And that's another endless challenge. Lots of companies will succeed--or fail--in the pursuit of cool and pretty.
But in the meantime, the monitoring--and subtle management--of such news-flows is becoming a big business.
In the words of TechCrunch's Leena Rao:
It’s definitely interesting to see such a high-profile company taking to Twitter to try to reform its image by engaging directly in a dialogue with consumers. As we’ve seen with the recent Southwest/Kevin Smith incident, Twitter is influencing public relations in unprecedented ways. Now more than ever, brands are flocking to Twitter to not only monitor and track what’s being said about their company on Twitter but to influence and participate in the conversation.
No doubt Toyota spent a lot of money on its site, but freely available sites such as Tweetfeel allow anyone to be a public-opinion expert, or at least monitor.
The point is that people want the news exactly what they want it. That's the idea of a vertical, which serves a niche, and only a niche. And the only way to service a vertical is with a googol or two of data. And that means the adroit deployment and display of information to serve consumers' needs. That's what, for example, Bloomberg News does--yes, there's a news-wire service, and even a rump TV channel, but the paradigm-shifting, moneymaking part of Bloomberg--the part that gives everyone access to high-powered consequential information--is the financial-info database. That's what people pay for, and they pay so much for it that Bloomberg can afford to give the rest away for free.
Indeed, the creation and cultivation of such databases has already created its own lore and legend--its own sense of etiquette and protocol.
Many years ago, The Cable Gamer read a piece, Database As A Symbolic Form, by Lev Manovich, a professor at UC San Diego, which argued that the database is, in fact, a new kind of art form, with its own specific rules of narrative (un)structure. As Manovich wrote:
After the novel, and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate - database. Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don't have beginning or end; in fact, they don't have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.
So news organizations, along with everyone else, will have to accommodate themselves. The idea that one editor, or portal, can lead people in a certain direction is thus kompletely kaput. People will edit themselves, making their own choices--when they want to.
So we might ask: What's the value-added proposition for the existing media companies? Easy: Talent. Anchors. Hosts. Known-quantity guides who will guide us through the database, when we want them to do so, if we invite them to do so.
