BigShinyThing

One of the main findings is that, like everything else in internet-enabled nations, news is now social. Pew’s research found that Americans are increasingly active participants in online news creation and dissemination, as well as keen consumers of mobile news content. For example:

• 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
• more than 8 in 10 online news consumers get or share links in emails.
• a third of cellphone users access news on their phones.

Pew’s analysis of this situation is that:

People’s experience of news, especially on the internet, is becoming a shared social experience as people swap links in emails, post news stories on their social networking site feeds, highlight news stories in their Tweets, and haggle over the meaning of events in discussion threads.

Locked down, pay-walled content is more or less shut out of this conversation — after all, how many ’subscription required’ links have you forwarded to your mates or colleagues lately or posted to Facebook? Worse still, the research further reveals that only 17% of Americans read news in a national newspaper on a typical day. So, as physical newspaper reading wanes, many newspaper companies are actively shutting themselves out of the online ecosystem by pursuing a pay-per-view or subscription model. Smart.

Yes, slow news and the heat getting to journalists’ brains means that it’s time to put together lists of the most influential/cool/powerful people in media. Folks in advertising and TV will be frantically scanning the Mediaguardian 100 — in particular for leads, mates, or (most importantly) themselves. Meanwhile, BigShinyThing was delighted to have got a namecheck on our friend Lisa Devaney’s renegade list on BrandRepublic which was MUCH more interesting than the Mediaguardian’s (natch). Also worthy of note is The Hospital Club’s Top 100 which is sooo alternative and cool you have to be a member to read it. (Full disclosure: we write for The Hospital Club’s site.)

Now this is not just a pat piece about our mates (honest). There is — as The Hospital contends — a new world order upon us, and one in which the old heirarchies no longer apply. It’s very sweet and retro of newspapers to ply us with the Mediaguardian Power List and Observer journalists’ idea of what stands for ‘cool’ but we don’t have to listen to them any more. Besides, old media has always been obsessed with glorifying those who have already made it — those cronies who are already ‘in the club’. We’re much more interested in the renegades, the iconoclasts, the innovators… Generation Next. Some of them have been paid lip service — drag artist extraordinaire Jonny Woo gets a namecheck in the Observer cool list — but we suspect that’s just print journalists trying to look ‘with it’.

No, the new power networks are defined by all of us and not by them. And influence is no longer a numbers game dictated by salary, age, employees, readership, viewership … all of that is blown. The true influencers now exist in a long tail of cohorts: the clubkids, knitting circles, flash mobsters, gamers, bloggers, weirdos, geeks, freaks, kids … whatever. For instance, within the perfomance art cohort, Lisa Lee’s Underconstruction night has quietly helped launch the career of many a star of the current Performance Art explosion. And in street art, stencil originator Blek le Rat is finally getting his dues. And those are just in BST’s little corner of the world.

With Generation Next, their influence is obvious: it’s in the clubs, in social media, on the bus, on the street… where it matters.

This door-dropped card from Hackney Council offers their considered opinion on the subject — Yellow Pages is the only branded item on their list of useless waste (think engine oil and foil) to be put in their green recycling bins. We think they’ve got it about right.

Rupert Murdoch’s Sun tabloid has taken blogging mainstream by running blogs from the Israeli and Lebanese frontlines.

The Sun says,

Sun correspondents will keep you up to date with the latest news and views on the Middle East crisis with blogs from the heart of Israel and Lebanon.

Our Chief Foreign Correspondent Nick Parker will post daily blogs for you from war-torn Beirut.

While our award-winning Chief Feature Writer Oliver Harvey is based in Israel as Islamic militants’ rockets rain down on the Jewish state.