A percentage of people pay very close attention to the stream of news that is occurring on a daily basis. It is a percentage that has been shrinking and is harder to track. It is the stream that I’m interested in not the percentage of people observing it at the moment. Keeping track of the stream of news occurring is actually getting harder and harder. No one place exists that could be described as curating the information stream. It happens online. All over the place online a fragmented tapestry of news sources share content as quickly as they can to catch the wind behind a new entry to the stream. Like a ship with sails following the wind the newest entry into the stream propels focus and attention and drives speed above accuracy or continuity.
It is really the question of the continuity of our information stream that has me wondering about the world this early in the morning. I could sit down and make a calendar of events that occur every year that will ganner news coverage. With that calendar you can sort of map out a few things that will happen within the stream of news, but that calendar is becoming increasingly more irrelevant. Streams of news are no longer event based time sequence driven and predictable. They are very much spiced up by the very incentive to catch the wind and within that mass of attention the hope of profitability.
I would be more interested in reading a solid daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly digest than a stream of reported fillings from news outlets. The key difference in preference is that I’m less interested in the single newsroom filing of a report and I’m more interested in the continuity of a digest describing the broader totality of events occurring. That preference is not a foundation supported by the same montiorizaintion that advertising provides currently in a world of clicks. You would have to build up a base of paying subscribers like a traditional journal or newspaper, but that foundation might not be economically viable anymore. That and the nature of the claim in the first paragraph are what are driving my curiosity this morning.
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