Terry Heaton writes provocatively about the “unbundled newsroom“:

…our essential mission is to first serve the information needs of our community throughout the day, and then to create programs that will summarize the news of the day. This means a fundamental change in our approach to the news, for the best way to meet the needs of people during the day is to create news in an unbundled form. No longer can we simply repurpose content that’s created for a bundled program and distribute it elsewhere. On the contrary, our unbundled content is what should be repurposed to create our end-of-the-day summaries.

…field crews need tools for directly publishing to the Web, including text, stills, video, blogs, e-mail, cellphones, handhelds, and especially RSS. We need to see ourselves as pushing content at every turn in the creation and development of our journalism.

This is journalism made fully transparent. (There’s much more in Terry’s piece than those two snippets, btw.)

Terry sees the broadcast news programs as a rebundling of the bundles. I wonder whether the networks are going to be trusted as rebundlers worth listening to; already the editorial function has migrated to the Web to a remarkable degree for many of us. Why should we value the broadcasters’ editorial judgment enough to enable them to stay afloat economically? And if the news programs fail, why will the news divisions continue to generate unbundled content?

I’m not saying I have an alternative.

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