Nicholas Carr is now considered a veteran among information technology gurus, but when he speaks you always have to pay attention. His book on what the Internet is doing to our brains (no good, it seems) was a Pulitzer finalist and his analyzes are always interesting. When asked to predict what will happen next year in the world of news, Carr began by taking stock of what has happened in the past twelve months - a revolution that few have noticed.
According to Carr, the line between business software and media business no longer exists. “Today – he writes in Nieman Lab – thanks to cloud computing and advances in technology, applications look more and more like journalistic products: they are ad-supported, they are available by subscription, they are continuously updated and their contents are often as important as the functions they provide”. In a mirror way, traditional media that have developed the diffusion of content in digital form are increasingly resembling software companies. "They distribute not only original content - notes Carr - but a whole series of online tools and functions that allow readers to see, manipulate and increase the content in an infinite number of ways".
The fusion of software and media, while everyone was still waiting for the perfect integration between print and web, instead it produced the disintegration of the Internet. The old generalist web, open to all for viewing the same material, has been supplanted - adds Carr - by specialized packages of digital content aimed at particular devices: iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Galaxy, Kindle, Nook, Xbox. The old HTML-based website is about to be replaced, or at least integrated, by proprietary applications. Newspapers, magazines, books, games, music albums, TV programs: everything will be redesigned as an application. According to Carr, this revolution has already largely taken place and newspapers now have the opportunity to take advantage of it. If content becomes applications, it will be easier to ask readers to pay. In the old world of the open web, paying for online content was considered outrageous.
In the new world of applications this is normal. Any "App Store" is made up of a series of toll barriers, under which people are now accustomed to pass. The new watchword will become "versioning" (coined by Hal Varian, Google executive), a practice which consists in create different versions of the same content to convey them on different devices at different prices in order to meet the needs of as many consumers as possible. Nieman Lab blogger Martin Langeveld argued just a few weeks ago that "newspapers that put up payment barriers for online content are digging their own grave." Nicholas Carr's observations instead open up a new perspective and suggest that 2012 could be the turning point. But there's a lot of work to do in newsrooms, and little time to do it.
