Up to this point in time, news sources have followed a printing model that places high value on mass producing a single article and blasting it out to absolutely anyone they can possibly reach, effectively inundating their entire audience all the time about everything, regardless of if the customer is interested or not. This model made sense decades ago when papers were constrained to being literally mass produced on a printing press and shipping it to everyone, but now, this is largely not the case. People were willing to pay upfront and wade through material they largely don't care about to pursue a single interesting article or relevant update when it was the only source of news.

Today that is no longer the case. People have an almost unending supply of news on any topic imaginable just a few clicks away for no more than the cost of basic cable.

My point is that the paradigm of merely sending every scrap of information on every topic to everyone all the time was never a good one... merely a necessary one from a technology where it couldn't be helped. It is now spam. The new paradigm that must be embraced is that of total personalization. News sources must find a way to give their customers what they want, and only what they want free from clutter. This is as opposed to telling customers what they want and being surprised when they stop paying in favor of finding it themselves from less reputable sources of which there are now infinite.

For instance, I could not care less about Tiger Wood's career, but there was a time where I could not look to a conventional news source and not see it first and foremost on every single page. However, if I were to wake up in the morning and effortlessly be given a paper with only articles that inform my day to day life and interest me then I would gladly pay for it. This will be the way of the coming decade.

To this end I suggest that a third party news aggregator system be created that not only finds and assembles news from my personally trusted sources, (like Feedly, or other RSS aggregators) but content checks them and learns my interests as well. Instead of merely limiting you to leafing through broad topics like "Business," "Politics," or simply perusing an infinite scroll of updates from particular sources, this hypothetical service would offer the user customizable folders and the ability to make rules that govern how incoming news articles are sorted, marked, deleted, or flagged based on each article's content. (like a mailbox environment)

Additionally, the service should offer some sort of rudimentary AI that watches how you interact with your news. Based on a keyword understanding of the article's content it would watch which articles you choose to look at, don't look at, delete, save for later, etc. and eventually begin to offer new unselected articles based on what it thinks you would like in a new discovery folder, or offer new rules on how to better govern the influx of news to better suit your tastes.

The net of this service is that it would work to create a relevancy/interest based order out of the chaos of news spewing at subscribers where the user would only see what they want to see, and everything else would be either cast aside or held in reserve for extra reading.

Now, if this approach were to be combined with an internal "bubble up" system of news monitoring where the articles and authors that the majority of users found legitimately interesting gain in notoriety (similar to the youtube algorithm), this news aggregation system would be able to identify the user-voted "best" news sources and compensate them with a cut of the subscription and advertisement money that the site makes off of broadcasting their material. Essentially paying back per click of interested reading.

This system effectively changes the news game by tailoring the news to provide readers with what they want to read, providing news companies with informative statistics on what user's preferences and reading habits so that they may reach their consumer base with more accuracy, and creating a survival of the fittest style of environment where news sources who can effectively write for their readers instead of at their readers can profit. This system would benefit not only big name news companies. but also independent web bloggers and other sources of more obscure information.

If history has shown us anything, it is that people will always be willing to pay money or spend time clicking around for a service that gives them what they want simply and directly, and will circumvent efforts to paywall or bury items of interest within a larger scheme. For example, the most effective way to combat piracy on the internet is to provide a simpler and easier alternative such as streaming or full digital downloads. This is the principle that the Steam store, Spotify, Netflix and the Apple store are turning to and finding initial success.

Stop making users work to find the information they want to see, and they'll gladly pay to have it given to them. That money can be then split with the original content provider, and keep the news alive.

The key is personalization.

This concept ended up being uncomfortably prescient. As proud as I am that my predictions here have proven accurate, I was blind to the darker implications of the system I was proposing; namely the construction of reality distorting information bubbles and the platforming of demagogues.

Obvious in hindsight, but when you build a news feed that curates itself to exclusively show a person what they're interested in, it skews their view of the world. News curation that hides irrelevant, uninteresting, or ideologically contrary articles from a reader's eyes blinds them to the existence of important events and conversations; or worse forces every article read about said events to come filtered through the perspective of a source that already supports the reader's interests. When Black Lives Matter rallies cry out across America or entire nations are pulled into existential war, people reliant on curated news platforms are left either totally unaware or only aware of heavily targeted editorials that skew the details to grab attention.

For example, you likely know the phrase "Defund the Police" as either a popular rallying call to radically rebuild our law enforcement institutions from the ground up in the name of justice, or an anarchist outcry of a vocal minority who demonize and rail against the thin blue line of civic order... that is, if you've even heard the phrase at all. The actual material of the movement's goals - rehabilitating public trust, de-escalating tensions between officers and the neighborhoods they serve, redistributing law enforcement responsibilities so that armed officers aren't the only response to every social emergency, and instituting better policies to hold bad actors accountable for their actions - have been lost in favor of polarizing hyperbole and catchy headlines that easily slip into personalized feeds. --Is this a necessary segment?

Actually... it is much worse than that. One of the ways a platform like the one I proposed generates revenue is in gathering and selling user behavior data. I predicted this would help news sources both large and independent track the interests and habits of the general public and write articles that better attracted and engaged readers. I foresaw that an algorithm that highlighted or hid headlines based on reader engagement would create a Darwinian environment where any news source big or small would succeed by their ability to write for their readers. I imagined this would be a good thing.

Instead this has opened the door for immense psychological manipulation and abuse.

It turns out that the average reader has very limited ability or interest in checking an article's sources, and that the perception of credibility is easily manufactured via pandering. The data collection and marketing tools made available by news curation platforms like Facebook are so incredibly granular that it is now possible to to identify the exact political leanings, existential fears, social relationships, disposable income, and mental health of hundreds of millions of people and serve each of them custom tailored sourceless articles that no one else will see or fact check.

This has opened the door for fear mongers and would be tyrants to

Peddling paranoia.

-Today it is possible to track the interests and opinoins of large swaths of the global population, and write "clickbait" articles to enrage and engage large groups of people without sources or credibility.

-Put it all together and you get an environment where a reader only sees what they want to see, and what they want to see is manipulated by targeted messaging without credibility.

-Groups like Cambridge Analytica, Fox News, etc. making up stories and facts whole cloth to anger and motivate readers

-Today, I could pay Facebook or Google for information on the political and market leanings of entire demographics, write an article with made up facts designed to provoke a specific audience to join a cause/buy a product, spin up a brand new website to host it, then pay Facebook or Google to broadcast it exclusively to that audience. No one else would see it, but it would become a fact of the world to that audience reinforced by seeing it everywhere they go online.

-Gives rise to talking heads and demogauges who use fear and calls to action targeted at very specific people to build an entirely new reality in the minds of a subset of people, platforming themselves with misinformation.

-reduced large news corporations into divisive instigators

-offered a platfrom for small but vocal groups to look as legitimate as larger more established news entities

-gave political groups better insight and control over what people wanted to hear and what they could hear

- gave corporations advertising and direct lobbying channels to push or obscure topical issues

-made fearmongering incredibly easy and effective. Joe rogen, Trump, Fox news, etc. etc. "I'll find my own information"

- or the interests of a sponsor who paid to breakthrough curation and place it in their feed.