Prediction: Jeff Jarvis Will Be Right about the Media Predictions He's Made

Here are some of his predictions I think are very smart (and wish I had said first). In his BuzzMachine blog article, “A scenario for news,” Jarvis predicted several interesting things we thought worthwhile to cite:

• News will emerge from networks…No one believes that a 35-person staff can cover Philadelphia as the 300-person newsroom did; they will have to collaborate with the community, with, we hope, a network of a thousand or thousands. Some people will freely contribute to the news network’s efforts, recording school-board meetings for podcasts, say.
• Editing will change. Editors will become more curators, aggregators, organizers, educators. Their jobs will be less about controlling a flow than encouraging and improving creation.
• Do what you do best and link to the rest will be a foundation of the future architecture of news. This is a necessity of efficiency – no one can afford to waste resources on commodity news – but also a necessity of the link economy, for it is through others’ links that original journalism will get attention and audience and the opportunity for monetization through advertising. Linking to journalism at its source - rather than matching it or rewriting it, as we have done - will become an ethic, a moral imperative of the new journalism.
• Specialization will take over much of journalism. We’ll no longer all be doing the same things - commodifying news – but will stand out and contribute uniquely by covering a niche deeply. Local newspapers, I believe, must specialize in being local and serving local communities.
• News will find new forms past the article, which will include any media, wiki snapshots of knowledge, live reports, crowd reports, aggregation, curation, data bases, and other forms not yet created.

Check out Jarvis' BuzzMachine.