Where were you when you heard that Kennedy had been assassinated?  Where where you when the Berlin wall came down, when the Twin Towers were attacked, when you saw the waves from the Tsunami hit the beaches?  Where will you be next time?

According to the BBC, the next major news event could well come to you over your mobile phone, since this is their latest advert promoting viewing its news website from mobile devices.  There is some evidence to support this thinking.  According to Nielsen, BBC News is the most popular site for mobile browsing with 1.7 million average unique users, exceeding even Google.

Although mobile browsing is still in its infancy, consumption of news via the internet is now very mainstream.  Our most recent UKPulse survey showed that 68% of internet users regularly get their news from online news websites, which increases to 76% for under 35s.

It is somewhat ironic that many people still refer to this as ‘new media’ when many sites have offered news over the internet for over a decade – the BBC News website itself was launched in 1997 with the Daily Telegraph offering its main stories as far back as 1994 making it Europe’s first daily web-based newspaper.

The real ‘new media’ or should that be ‘new new media’ is of course the revolution brought about by web 2.0.  According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere Report 2008, the company has indexed 133 million blogs since 2002.  Blogging has grown up with many blogs equalling if not exceeding traditional news site traffic.  Many are also becoming serious generators of advertising revenue – mean revenue for those sites with more than 100,000 unique visitors a month is more than $75,000 dollars, with ad rates on a par with publishers.

In a Technorati poll of bloggers, half felt that blogs would be the primary source of news and entertainment in the next five years.  However there does seem to be a blurring of the lines between mainstream channels and blogs.  95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs and it is similar in the UK.  Many are highly regarded and used as a priority news vehicle, for example the BBC’s Robert Peston has used his blog to ‘leak’ key stories over the banking crisis.

Online content makes it easier to share information but it also makes it easier to plagiarise.  I have posted before about the fact that the need for more content combined with fewer journalists raises the temptation to copy other people’s work.  Researchers at the University of Cardiff have demonstrated that 80% of home news content in broadsheet newspapers originated from newswire or PR content, while Tim recently commented on Birmingham Mail reporter Adam Smith’s YouTube confession that he used content from the BBC website for his coverage of the Obama campaign – “cut and paste, baby!”.  To counter this type of behaviour, Associated Press have been sending out lawyers letters to blogs and news sites that copy headlines or content from its newswire service.

Jeff Jarvis argues that all this can be avoided if news becomes more transparent.  The whole web works by links (what Jeff calls the "linked economy"), so why shouldn’t news work in the same way.  By doing “what you do best and link to the rest”, news owners can add value while removing the need for wasting resources on commodity news.

This transparent linking of content is being used by news search tools, news aggregators and personalised news services (Google news, DailyMe, Feedly, Digg).  In effect these services are acting as an editorial filter by providing the stories that are most popular.  But isn’t there a difference between what is popular and what is important?  To illustrate this consider the news last week.  On the BBC’s news site on Thursday the lead story was the Mumbai terrorist attack while the most e-mailed story was ”Cliff and The Shadows to reunite”, closely followed by “How to grow a good moustache”!

Andrew Keen is particularly critical of Web 2.0 in his recently updated book “The Cult of the Amateur”.  He argues that there is so much content now that it is difficult to work out the good from the bad, that what is popular is not necessarily what is important.  He states the need for central editorial control and as an example compares the often criticised Wikipedia with Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The problem is that Wikipedia works better than one would intuitively believe.   A study by scientific journal Nature found that Wikipedia had as many errors as Encyclopaedia Britannica, so the Wiki model does appear to work.  It is an example of what author James Surowieki calls the “Wisdom of the Crowds”.

Yet while Wikipedia goes from strength to strength, it’s sister site WikiNews has struggled.  Jonathan Dee writing in the New York Times said that “Wikinews has sunk into a kind of torpor; lately it generates just 8 to 10 articles a day” while Robert McHenry, former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopeaedia Britannica has criticised the project:

“Making a newspaper is hard...Someone who wants to do it but doesn't really know how hasn't solved the problem by gathering a lot of other people who don't know, either.”

There is a lot of value in the sound editorial judgement that comes naturally to the traditional news vendors.  The problem is not in the generation of content, since there is clearly enough of it around.  It is in the filtering of important and above all credible news.  And this is why there is a big opportunity for the big media owners.  Recognised brands such as the BBC, and The Guardian act as a beacon for a confused audience that need to find out what is going on in the world. 

So we may or may not be using our mobile phones when the next big news event happens, but I bet we will all go straight to the vendors that we trust.