I have a friend with whom I've enjoyed discussing this very topic.
One interesting remark he made: the way people consume "news" will likely change in a fundamental way. Traditionally, the unit of news has been the article. This approach worked well for print and has been widely adopted online as well. Perhaps the future of journalism will be the abandonment of the article, focusing instead on a more concise approach that delivers rapid-fire, credible, news.
He's the Django co-creator, gypsy guitar-playing developer of Everyblock.com
His big idea is that reporters have been gathering all this data for years.....and organizing it in the worst, least helpful format ever, the "text blob." What he's doing with Everyblock is the same thing Google's been doing since day 1, converting text blobs into useful, actionable, structured data that you can reassemble into graphs, maps, interactive features, or articles if need be.
He's certainly onto something. My question is whether that's going to completely blot out narrative journalism. My guess is that people who like narrative journalism are going to keep liking it while the many many people who never cared and who just read the headlines anyway will flock to Google News, sites like this and anything else that gives them something "worse" than narrative journalism but "good enough" to attract their eyeballs.
Note: I did not comment on my own comment. For some reason user jaydub deleted his comment as I was responding to it.
One interesting remark he made: the way people consume "news" will likely change in a fundamental way. Traditionally, the unit of news has been the article. This approach worked well for print and has been widely adopted online as well. Perhaps the future of journalism will be the abandonment of the article, focusing instead on a more concise approach that delivers rapid-fire, credible, news.