This column was filed on 2 November and first appeared in November 2007 in Business & Finance magazine.

Richard Delevan

Journalism as we knew it died at about 11.15 pm Dublin time on November 1^st, historians may record.

It was the moment on the conference call, staged by Google, in which it unveiled how far it had gone in putting together an alliance of social networking websites that would challenge the rise of the social network, Facebook. When Chris DeWolfe, the CEO of MySpace, got on the call and said how happy he was to join Google’s alliance, teaming up with rivals including bebo, LinkedIn and Google’s own Orkut.

Google’s PR coup surrounded the launch of something called OpenSocial, a software thingee for developers of “widgets” – little mini-applications that let people compare and share their favourite books and films, host their own opinion poll, or dozens of other things not yet dreamt of. OpenSocial will let those developers create a “widget” that will run not just on MySpace but practically all other social networks.

For people under the age of25, time spent on their online social network is quickly displacing time spent with other media like newspapers and TV. As wireless broadband gets better, devices like the iPhone get cheaper and the software wrapping social networks together gets smarter, it looks as if social networks may become the main portal through which people consume media.

That brings us to the second factor. Also in late October, an ex-RTÉ journalist called Donnahca DeLong emerged as the international poster boy for “old media”. Now the editor of Amnesty International’s website but presuming to speak for his whole profession, DeLong’s byline appeared above a story in the National Union of Journalists’ in-house publication headlined, “Web 2.0 is Rubbish”. It was a preview of an official report to be released this month by an NUJ committee on multimedia journalism of which DeLong is a member.

“Isn’t increased participation and feedback from our ‘users’ – readers and viewers – a good thing?” DeLong wrote. “Of course it is, but the problem with Web 2.0 is not how it introduces these elements to the media, but how it’s seen as replacing traditional media.”

DeLong was instantly transformed into a transatlantic whipping boy. Guardian columnist and new media evangelist Roy Greenslade announced he was quitting the NUJ – citing DeLong’s attitudes as symptomatic of how irredeemably suicidal the union had become in the face of new technology. Shane Richmond of the Daily Telegraph laid into him. Even on the other side of the Atlantic, new media pundits Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen found DeLong a figure worthy of scorn.

Another quote from DeLong was held up as particularly revealing of attitudes about the emerging technologies: “In one of the main examples given to explain Web 2.0, Wikipedia replaces Britannica Online. Is that the kind of democracy we want – where anyone can determine the information that the public can access?”

With the much-ridiculed former RTÉ journalist now the English-speaking world’s symbol of why the old order in journalism will be swept away and personally responsible for discrediting arguments in favour of professional journalism, DeLong has almost single-handedly robbed the credibility of fellow critics of what the internet might do to journalism.

Combining the two factors is a little-known project going on today at Chicago’s Northwestern University, home of the famous Medill School of Journalism. But the project at the school likely to have the most impact on the media is happening not in the journalism department but in the computer science department.

News at Seven (newsatseven.com) is an experimental programme whereby an avatar – a computer-generated character – presents the news. The news itself is selected and culled from newswires, blogs and – wait for it – social networking sites, and packaged together in a news show done to simulate a news broadcast.

But because News at Seven isn’t a broadcast, but something produced on the computer individually each time it’s viewed, the news programme can be tailored to each individual’s tastes, or those of your own social network. So that your own personal newscast could begin with stories about topics you’d responded well to before. It might include comments from like-minded people about politics or your favourite sports team. The entertainment news might well include the fact that your best friend, on her bebo page, has discovered a new band she likes, and offer to play a clip of their latest video, then offer to sell you the download of their album.

News at Seven is just one experiment, and it’s in its most primitive stage. Soon, something like it will be a “widget” you can add to your personal webpage on your social network of choice. And it will change everything we understand about news.

But the time is upon us when the idea of mass media journalism as we understand it will be made irrelevant by something quite like it. Google’s OpenSocial provides the means for delivering it to the social networks that have increasingly captured the eyeballs. And thanks to Ireland’s own Donnacha DeLong, there’s no credible critic to stand in its way.

ends

…what did you think this would be about? Oh. And on the other thing. Thanks to the many who sent such kind messages. And we did our own reporting and checked our facts.

Good night and good luck.

rdelevan@gmail.com