Is the media becoming a wire service?

[Commentary] Within three years, it will be normal for news organizations of even modest scale to be publishing to some combination of their own websites, a separate mobile app, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, Snapchat, RSS, Facebook Video, Twitter Video, YouTube, Flipboard, and at least one or two major players yet to be named. The biggest publishers will be publishing to all of these simultaneously. This sounds stranger than it will feel: Publishing to these other platforms will be automated. Reporters will write their articles, and their content management system will smoothly hand them to Facebook, Snapchat, or Apple News. There's nothing new here, really -- this is already how RSS feeds work. But there will be more of them, and they will matter much more. The RSS audience is small. The off-platform audience will be huge.

The publishers of tomorrow will become like the wire services of today, pushing their content across a large number of platforms they don't control and didn't design. The upside of being a wire service is the potential audience: It is vast, and it is diverse. The possible downside is innovation. Wire services have to provide a product all of their subscribers can use -- no matter how they publish or design their paper. So wire copy needs to be simple. Stories the Associated Press sends to its customers can't be as innovative in their form as stories the New York Times or the Washington Post lovingly design for their front pages.