The blog post in which an annoying market survey made me wonder about the future of news, or that some people think that there might be a future for news.
Image by markhillary
The Atlantic.com had a reader survey that I let myself participate in today (yesterday, actually). Buried in the annoying usage and demographic questions were a bunch of questions related to what I thought was important in a news website/company.
This intrigued me. I mean, newspapers are dying, right? Moreover, even though TheAtlantic.com has its roots in a monthly publication, it does have daily content, associated blogs, etc. Thing is, and I say this having been a regular Atlantic Monthly reader at one point, I think of that publication as being more of a place for analysis, in-depth features, and not for rapid fire bursts of news that are coming from the newswires or, increasingly, places like Twitter.
But apparently someone involved with TheAtlantic.com wants to see which way the wind is blowing with regards to consumer consumption of the news.
Misguided or not, it seems like an encouraging sign to me. At least someone’s interested in knowing.
And, wouldn’t it be interesting if organizations known for longer publication cycles (i.e. monthly magazines) became more dominant players in the news foodchain? After all, they never had to contend with the expense of producing actual newspapers on a daily basis. They march to a different rhythm. What would make them think that they could succeed where the dailies are (supposedly) faltering?
I may be wrong about TheAtlantic.com’s intentions with their questionnaire – these could just be standard questions. Again, though, it’s the whole idea of a feature/analytical publication, asking questions about a news medium which tends to work on a daily basis, that caught my attention.
