PSFK recently asked our global network of experts, The Purple List for their thoughts on the future of journalism. We received answers that imagine a variety of possible scenarios, though a common theme emerged which points to a system that combines crowd-sourcing with some kind of editorial curation and professional reporting. If you want to share your ideas about where news reporting is heading, leave your thoughts in the comments.

“One future of journalism is to disintermediate the institutions that now represent them (magazines and newspapers) and create a micropayment system that allows them to get paid directly by the reader. They will have to supply their own editorial direction. They will have to fund their own initiatives, but this model could work well. It depends of course on a micropayment system. And this has been very slow in coming. And this is odd because the person who creates this system gets to be Bezos or Gates. (Good point. Who would want to be Gates.)”

.Reference resource: Click Here.

In brief, a design driven approach to creating something new favors a qualitative approach over a data-driven approach. Rather than amassing mounds of data from customer and marketing research, you go out and observe people to understand their lives and needs and how products could fit into them. Folks who embrace design thinking commonly refer to this as building empathy with the customers.

One example of how that could look for newspapers can be seen in this recent post by Michelle McLellan about Carla Savalli, a former assistant managing editor who left the Spokesman-Review in Spokane in October. McLellan writes that Savalli’s “time away from the newsroom has upended the way she views the daily newspaper.” Savalli now sees the newspaper through the eyes of her community, rather than through the newsroom. She’s developed greater empathy for her community. Savalli doesn’t need piles of polls and surveys to understand the community outside the newsroom, because now she’s one of them. Everyone working in a newsroom today needs to have that experience. It requires listening to the community in a very different way.