A Coming Flud? With Death of Print a Reality, It's Time to Get Granular and Social

Andrew Sullivan is right about the death of print. Newsweek print may be a dead beast in the muck - and for the good. What it means for digital, though, is extremely important. Digital media is about delivering people to people, rather than delivering people to a platform where they have to then imagine their next moves with an abstract notion called the Public. 

We are all in the public now, and so directly accessible, that we don't have to believe in generalities. We have to believe in the right things to say, the right things to think, and the right actions to perform. News media, or journalism, is transforming into fixing people's problems, rather than reporting on them. 

As Sullivan points out:

‎There's a reason why Drudge Report and the Huffington Post are named after human beings. It's because when we read online, we migrate to read people, not institutions. Social media has only accelerated this development, as everyone with a Facebook page now has a mini-blog, and articles or posts or memes are sent by email or through social networks or Twitter."

Everyone thinks about the technology or the device -- a dead tree or a tablet -- but all we are talking about here, for the future, is giving people the direct insights of the most important events in their life from the right people, as near to immediate as possible.

And if you look at one of the Microsoft BizSpark companies that is working in media, Flud, you can see one of the first steps in this direction. There is no alliance to a news or media institution. It's highly curated content, meant to be consumed around context and relationships.