Wired Cola

2009: Auto-Tune the News #1

2010: Brothers Gregory get a regular segment on TV

2011: MSNBC is the first channel to go to an all-autotune format.

2014: A web-only news broadcaster starts up. Key gimmick: the newsreaders sing in their natural voices.

A few weeks back I had a slight discussion on the fb with keith about the Guardian's experiment with crowdsourcing analysis of a data dump. I made the hubris-plagued claim that in the future, more news would be made that way than by traditional reportage.

I stand by that. Given the general weakness of most modern news-gathering agencies (the ratio of press-release-generated news to "gathered" news is sad but funny), there's a lot more substantive news buried in some combination of FOI requests, large publicly-accessible data sources, and the general field of data and statistical analysis , than there ever will be in traditional reportage or absorbing whistleblown secrets. When people ask what will replace news-gathering organizations, tell them it's Statistics Canada.

As an aside, I largely disagree with this commentary on Shirky, and this commentary on that commentary. My guess is that private foundations and societies will be able to fund journalists (it's basically a $100k/a grant to buy yourself an NYT-grade reporter) if that is deemed necessary. I think reportage of this type is more likely to be considered a quaint and unnecessary artifact in the future, though I hold this opinion weakly, not strongly.