I’m at the Aspen Institute for the second meeting of the Knight Commission on the Informations Needs of Communities in a Democracy. The commission explores media policy to meet the information needs of communities in our 21 century democracy. The commission is one of four components of the media innovation strategy at Knight Foundation. The co-chairs are Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP for search engine and user experience, and Ted Olson, the former Solicitor General (and a first amendment lawyer).

This morning, Tom Rosenstiel did an excellent presentation on the “State of the Media”. He’s the director of the Project on Excellence in Journalism. Some of his key messages:

• The problem is not that audience are gravitating away to unmediated media
• The problem is the uncoupling of advertising and content (online, advertisers don’t need to associate themselves with content anymore)
• Serendipity plays a big role in news consumption today.
• The Cronkite line “And that’s the way it is” would be a Saturday Night Live joke today.
• The newsroom is seen as the place for innovation, not the business side of a newspaper operation.
• TV is not going to provide the information that a community needs
• Citizen journalism won’t do it either, it’ll lack the training
• For communities to thrive, some variation of the newspaper needs to figure out a way to survive.
• In a news on-demand culture, we still need to know about the things we didn’t know we want to know about.

Marissa Meyer made an interesting point, and it’s obviously informed by her experience as the Google Search Engine VP:

• As data sets grow, we are going from a browser to a search model.
• Search is random. You don’t have the usual audience selection.
• It’s harder to target an ad.
• New media has broken down the atomic unit of consumption (brand -> individual article; individual song)
• Question: Is the atom of the published article the right atom? Should that atom change?
• The Wikipedia entry on the investigation of the anthrax scare is one of the best resources on the topic.
• Instead of publishing static articles, maybe use living articles, pages that constantly change as the atomic unit of news.

Here’s a video I took of Marissa explaining her thinking about the changing nature of the “atomic unit” of news consumption.

Google VP Marissa Mayer on the atomic unit of media consumption from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.