Thursday, September 13, 2007

We have met the editor and he is us

Okay, have you wondered what would happen if the editor of your newspaper wasn't a middle-aged, probably white guy or guys? In this cool story, news in sites like Reddit, Digg, del.icio.us, but not NowPublic, was compared to traditional newspaper frontpage news. As the story says,

Technology allows users to create their own news "agenda" from multiple online sources, rendering a traditional front page increasingly "irrelevant," he said.

Source: sfgate.com



Obviously, since traditional news outlets still produce the yeoman's share of reporting, there is interdependence, but the study found robust differences, too.

The study, a snapshot of a week's worth of news consumption, shows the growing interdependence between traditional news outlets and online user-news sites.


It also illustrates how the news looks a lot different when audience members pick what story they want to read or recommend, as opposed to a professional journalist.

Source: sfgate.com



At the end of the story is a nice section with short descriptive summaries about each of the reader-driven news sources. However, as a regular user of news systems that include voting or reputation ranking like NowPublic and Digg, Reddit and del.icio.us (not to mention furl.net, and others) one thing the article failed to point out is that in each of the user-driven services, you find a story, click to add it to the reputation system, but you must choose a category for each story. I have not found a system where user's can create categories.


What I have noticed is that there are stories I post about or nominate, or vote for that don't fit into any of a particular system's categories. I am forced to put stories I tag about Media for NowPublic into the "technology" category. With Digg, there was a similar "bias" built into the categories. In fact, I started posting more to NowPublic than Digg because the categories struck me as "for geeks." The kind of stories I was tagging were interesting, but it looked like not the audience or at least the developer of digg.


Del.icio.us lets users create categories, but for that very reason, I never thought of it as a news finding site. It is more like a tool chest or library shelves. I don't care often if del.icio.us stories are "hot off the press" because I go there to find out how-tos and such. Digg or Reddit or NowPublic are where I expect recency to dominate the organization of stories.



Tags: | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Posted by barbara i at 11:31 AM

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)