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.

Online game results in an offline solution

I am always interested in seeing how digital trends and emerging technologies manifest themselves in the real world. I love the idea of taking the online world offline and the offline world online. This is already happening in city-wide scavenger hunts using tools like Foursquare and Twitter to pass on clues and through billboards like GranataPet dog food billboard in Germany.




Now, we have another interesting idea coming out of the UK - "Real Life Farmville." According to an article today in PSFK, "a large working farm will be taken over for the first time by web users across the world on Wednesday, who will vote on every key decision taken on its cattle, pigs, sheep and crops. The MyFarm experiment hands over power at the National Trust’s 2,500-acre Wimpole Estate farm in Cambridgeshire, UK. Up to 10,000 farming novices will choose which bull to buy, which crop to plant and whether to spilt fields to resurrect lost hedgerows."

MyFarm experiment capitalizes on the existing popularity of Farmville, which currently has 47 million players a month and is the second most popular game on Facebook, to help people understand where their food comes from.

As stated in the article: "'The National Trust is the UK’s biggest farmer,' said Fiona Reynolds, its director-general. 'This is all about reconnecting people to where their food comes from. Our TNS poll showed that only 8% of mothers feel confident talking to their children about where their food comes from. That’s really poignant.'"

It will definitely be interesting to see how the MyFarm experiment shapes up. Personally, I would love to see it succeed.

Fallon's Skimmer - Cool app to keep up with your social networks

Today, Fallon launched Skimmer, an Adobe AIR application "designed to streamline, beautify, and enhance the experience of participating in your most frequently used social networking activities." Skimmer streams Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger onto one desktop dashboard. This feed content can be filtered by service, by group, or by keyword. In addition, you have the ability upload pictures and videos to Flickr and Youtube.



I immediately downloaded it to see what I thought. I have to say it did make things a lot easier. I could easily follow what was going on with all my friends on Facebook and Twitter, as well as any blog updates. For me, the only downside was that it got a bit overwhelming since I hadn't grouped my friends yet.

Apparently, (via Creativity Online) the app has launched in conjunction with Fallon's new corporate Web site — employees’ social media activity will be published via Skimmer within Fallon.com. In some ways, I see this as the next step in the evolution of agency sites from the traditional to a site like Modernista's where a floating menu bar that superimposes its logo and a small clickable menu over the top of whatever referring page you clicked from to Fallon's where all employees' social media activity is openly published on the site. While I think this is an interesting idea, I wonder how much monitoring it will take as employees come and go and if it will force employees to be much more private since their whole lives are now fully connected to their employer.