MySpace Diggs the news

Barry Parr | April 20, 2007, 02:53 PM

Yesterday's announcement that MySpace is becoming a news aggregator is a leading indicator of a brand-new era for the news business -- and the content business in general.

The last big change was the emergence of the Web itself and the rush by media companies to move to the web. Over the last ten years, we've seen the media slowly adapt to this new environment as they shift their content online. The next shift could be just as profound as the last one.

A little over a year ago, in The Future of News, I advised publishers to deconstruct their sites in order to get the best audiences for their individual news items. Since then, Digg has moved from startup to one of the 100 most popular sites on the web. In 2007, publishers are trying hard to get readers to "Digg" their stories.

Now, MySpace is entering into that market with a whole new audience -- one that is younger than the typical news audience and already strongly interconnected.

But this is a lot bigger than MySpace trying to swipe a bit of Digg's mojo. This is the beginning of an era in which a whole new set of intermediaries are about to emerge in the media business. This could threaten the current Web business model of a lot of publishers, just as Web itself threatended their old business models.

I'm going to be talking and writing more about this in the coming months. It's a scary new trend, and it's not one that can be controlled. We need to find a way for media companies to thrive in this new environment.