Future of News !

Listeners of the World,

Today I woke up and immediately opened up my laptop to find out our voting results on the many issues and candidates up for election in my state.  Then I proceeded to grab my iPad2 and BlackBerry to head into work.  On the way in I continued to check the morning news on my BlackBerry to find out the what was going on in my city besides the local elections.  Once at work I opened up my iPad2 to check out my daily alerts to see what was going on in the Tech community and to see if there was anything really neat happening.  Then I turned to my computer and sent a friend a link about the voting results.  To say the least things in the news and information industry have changes a whole lot over the past decade.  The real question now is how are they going to change over the next decade!

Many people have projected and predicted how the news industry will evolve - Newspapers will die out, news will go hyper-local, news will become more social, online video will rule the day.....but, what will come true, and what will just been seen as a fade when we look back.  I would like to think some of the predictions are not too hard to figure out if they will come true or not.  Newspapers have seen a steady decline over the past decade and have been scrambling for years to come up with new ways to compete, but I think everyone (even me) can see the end of Newspapers is near.  More and more people are preaching social this and social that and it seems like everyone belongs to a social network, so why not have news become more social?  Also, online video is huge and not to mention everywhere, so why wouldn't news become more online video centric?

All and all it seems the future of news is moving more online, social, and video centric everyday.  With more online news sites popping up, and with YouTube and Facebook being two of the biggest sites on the web, I think that we will soon see an online video social news movement!  Only time will tell if this is all true or if the these notions are just silly.  I for one believe that news will have to become more social and video centric and that is why at least with our online news site we are moving in this direction.  The fun part of actually seeing the next step with news is yet to come, and I for one cannot wait!

Your OurTown Hero,

Chris