Must-Read: Ezra Klein: “It will be normal…

Must-Read: Ezra Klein: “It will be normal… to be publishing to some combination of their own websites…

…a separate mobile app, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, Snapchat, RSS, Facebook Video, Twitter Video, YouTube, Flipboard, and at least one or two… yet to be named. The biggest publishers will be publishing to all of these simultaneously…. Reporters will write their articles, and their content management system will smoothly hand them to Facebook, Snapchat, or Apple News… how RSS feeds work [already]. But there will be more of them, and they will matter much more…. The off-platform audience will be huge. The publishers of tomorrow will become like the wire services of today, pushing their content across a large number of platforms they don’t control and didn’t design.

The upside… the potential audience… is vast, and it is diverse. The possible downside is innovation…. Stories the Associated Press sends to its customers can’t be as innovative…. Our core mission is to explain the news to people perplexed by it, so… I’m enthusiastic about the coming off-platform world. A longtime problem for the news business is that the people who use our product most often need it least…. My biggest frustration with the new media… is how much we’re like the old media…. We’re not fully realizing the potential of this new technology.

But there is so much potential! Length no longer matters…. It’s no longer necessary to write a new article every time there’s a small change to a story. Digital stories can be interactive…. We’re getting products like Vox’s card stacks–topic guides that can be embedded anywhere on the web, and updated continually…. Look at the Upshot’s social mobility feature…. But even now, the rules around off-platform distribution constrain innovation in quiet ways…