News: For the Masses, By the Masses?

This is a repost of the latest article I wrote for my work blog on how digital tools are changing journalism. ___________________________________________________________ As social media gets more integrated into people’s lives, they’re demanding more control over the content they interact with. This behavior is happening organically in the digital space. In response, newspapers are changing the way they create content to include consumer participation – and consumers are changing how they interact with the news.

According to an eyetracking study by the Poyner Institute, the shift within newspapers towards focusing on more digital consumer participation makes a lot of sense:

• Online participants read an average 77% of an article versus the 62% within broadsheet and 57% within tabloids. 
• People consuming news digitally also read more regardless of the length of the article. 

This could directly relate to the fact that people have the option digitally to aggregate news in a way they rarely can offline.

And, people are taking advantage of this by personalizing the news for themselves:

• Digg Newswire and Redditt both allow consumers to act as an editor by voting news stories up and down depending on the topic and its relevancy to the individual.
• Trove creates personalized content based on individual user’s interests. It instantly builds a user’s personal home page by matching its channels to the user’s Facebook likes and interests. It then searches and analyzes articles and blog posts to find entities – people, places, things, or concepts – in text. Based on what it finds, Trove classifies the article into one or more of hundreds of topics.
• XYDO is a news-based social network. It focuses on the social endorsement, prioritization and engagement of news. XYDO provides users with a prioritized view of articles/features, editorials, blogs and other news being shared within their social graphs, together with the ability to observe and track broad global news trends and specialized domain-specific trends. Personalized news emails, the XYDO brief, are sent to the users regularly.

Newspapers are also adapting to find real time, socially curated content. For example, New York Daily News is now requiring that every editorial computer has tweetdeck installed on it. This was mandated by Scott Cohen, the New York Daily News’ digital executive editor. Even more interestingly, the Guardian just began an experiment in which consumers helped curate the news. Beginning Oct 11th, the newspaper began publishing a live account of its news diary online, allowing consumers to see the scheduled news of the day as well as any upcoming breaking news. Consumers were encouraged to tell editors what they thought about individual stories and suggested stories using Twitter by tweeting with the hashtag #opennews. They could also follow the editor’s opinions about stories in a Twitter feed and add their own opinions to the conversation by tweeting to the hashtag #opennews. Editors dropped stories in the queue that received a lukewarm response. The purpose of the experiment was to increase readership, online conversation and positive sentiment around the Guardian’s news.

And, tools are coming out that change the definition of what it means to be a journalist. For example, Public Laboratory is creating a number of tools that are available to allow anyone to cover the news. These tools can take aerial photos or video of an event or story. These tools are facilitating the means for anyone to tell their story from a different standpoint.

However, this evolution in the news begs a question. Does news that is created or influenced by the informed public elevate certain stories like celebrity gossip over others such as the protests in Syria? Or, does it allow for truly unbiased reporting or information gathering? There are examples that point to both options as possible and indicate that the answer will probably lie somewhere in between. It feels like time will tell.