Apr 17th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
There have been a number of threads floating around the blogosphere recently that have to do with traditional media vs. “new media,” and the differences between the two — something that this article in the New York Observer got me thinking about again. There was the TechCrunch post about ads in Twitter, which was somewhat lacking in facts; there was the idea that journalism online has become much more of a process or continuum rather than an end in itself; and then there was the whole concept of “if the news is that important, it will find me,” which I wrote about.
I wanted to try and pull a few of those together because, well… that’s how I roll. Plus, it’s something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit, and writing about it helps me think. So bear with me (or not). If you look at some of the comments on my post about the Twitter ads story, as well as on other posts about it, you can see people talking about how it “wasn’t a story,” and suggesting — as Nate Westheimer did — that traditional media, with editors and so on, would never run something like that. I’d like Nate to read the New York Observer piece and see if he still feels the same way.
Would a newspaper or TV station or magazine have run with a Twitter story like TechCrunch did? Maybe not. But the fact is that plenty of poorly-sourced or single-sourced or anonymous-sourced stories show up in newspapers all the time — and not just the Enquirer or People magazine, but in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. And it’s not only stories about nuclear weapons in Iraq either — it’s stories that are about celebrities, or wealthy Wall Street types, or politicians. Sometimes, a story is just too good to pass up, even if it’s shaky.
That’s why it’s actually a good thing that news is becoming more of a process (which it always has been). Instead of trying to pump rumours and innuendo into full-fledged stories that deserve a premier spot in the paper, journalists can toss things into the ether when they think there is more to a story, and then update the story as it develops, something Mike Arrington said at mesh 2007 that he sometimes does. This is frequently messy, which is why I like to adapt the old saying about “if you love the law or sausages, don’t watch either one being made” to apply to the media. It’s not pretty, but it is occasionally true.
And that brings me back to the idea of “news.” What do we mean when we use that word, or when we say something like “if the news is that important, it will find me?” Some people responded to my post on that concept by saying they weren’t confident that “real” news would find them, by which I think they meant news of the U.S. election, or war in Sudan. But that’s only one small part of the definition of “news” — something that every person is probably going to define differently, and may even define differently depending on what day it is.
Is the Web to blame for creating “news” out of nowhere, as the New York Observer article suggests? I don’t think so. Newspapers have been doing that for about a hundred years. The Web is probably accelerating and amplifying that phenomenon — but at the same time, a proliferation of sources is also helping to nip such stories in the bud a lot sooner.
Feb 22nd, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests has a post up about Google News and its commenting feature, in which the service reaches out to individuals who are involved in news stories and allows them to post comments — or in some cases, apparently, takes their blog posts and publishes them as comments. The case Tony refers to is one in which Mick O’Leary of Information Today wrote about Citizendium, the Wikipedia competitor that Larry Sanger (a co-founder of Wikipedia) started last year.
O’Leary wrote a piece about Citizendium and how it is failing to keep up with Wikipedia, and is in fact “almost useless” for a number of reasons, mostly because there isn’t enough material in the entries he checked. Sanger’s comment on the Google News entry is essentially a shortened and edited version of the blog post Sanger wrote in response to the original story, in which he took the writer to task for not calling him.
Like Tony, I think that Google’s comment feature is a fascinating one, and I wish that it was used more often (there are some recent examples here). As Tony suggests, it’s a feature that can come in very handy for “new media orphans” — although I would argue that Sanger isn’t really an example of an orphan, since he was more than capable of responding on his blog. At the same time, however, while the Information Today piece would show up in Google News, Sanger’s blog response wouldn’t.
Feb 7th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
For lots of people I know (including me, I have to admit) Google News has effectively become their online newspaper. I don’t know where it stacks up in terms of news portals, and whether Yahoo News or MSN have bigger market share, but for many the day starts with a browse through Google’s version of the newspaper — and now that paper will include local news as well as world news. Can the 800-pound gorilla make local work? And does that help or hurt newspaper sites?
The first thing I wondered was whether Google was just looking at the placeline and/or the source for its stories, since the section in my version of the new Google News showed that the five stories were all from the Toronto Star. Was that paper being ranked higher just because it has the word Toronto in its name? Not according to the Google blog.
We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.
As always with Google, the algorithm is king. And the local section on my page did a pretty remarkable job of pulling together news from most of the local outlets, including radio-station websites such as 680News, as well as newspapers like the Star and the Globe — although it did pick up stories from as far away as Kingston and Montreal, so it’s not foolproof. But it’s still as good or better than many of the other news aggregators I’ve tried, including Yahoo (which used to be my start page).
Update: Topix founder Rich Skrenta has a response to Google’s launch that is worth reading, and there’s a post on the Topix blog that also looks at the impact of Google moving into the company’s local search space. The point of the post seems to be that “local news is not a search problem.”
I may be somewhat biased toward the “Web is friend, not foe” argument as far as newspapers are concerned, but I think this helps newspaper websites rather than hurts them. I know that there will be the inevitable arguments, like the ones the World Newspaper Association and others keep trotting out, that Google is “stealing” eyeballs and readers who just want a quick summary of the news, but I think that continues to miss the point.
In a nutshell, if a quick summary or the first paragraph of your story captures all that you have to offer, then you don’t deserve to have those readers in the first place. Write well, add value and readers will continue to come to you — and now even more may wind up coming, as a result of features like Google’s localized news.
Jan 30th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Patrick Ruffini at Tech President has a great post about Twitter starting to become a news-delivery system, a post I came across because it was linked to by Josh Catone over at Read/Write Web, who says Twitter is becoming a “platform for serious discourse.” Not all of what we see on Twitter is serious discourse, mind you — there are still people who insist on telling me everything they’re doing (yes, I’m talking about you, Scoble) and there are performance issues, but Patrick and Josh both have a point.
Like Patrick, and probably lots of other people, I started noticing Twitter becoming a news-delivery system when a news event came along — like the fires in California, or the death of Heath Ledger — and probably noticed it the most when the U.S. primaries came along. The volume of Twitter posts during the debates and the voting was incredible, and it was like a front-row seat to the action. Some people were watching CNN, some watching other shows, some were at actual events; it was quite a sea of information and opinion all blended together.
Josh has a great rundown of why Twitter works for news, including the fact that it’s fast, it’s open, and it’s two-way — and Patrick makes many of the same points. Like Mitch Joel, I have found out about news events through Twitter, including several takeovers, financial results and other stories. And journalists are taking note, including Steve Outing and Jack Lail, as well as Bruno Giussani. Newspapers are feeding their news alerts straight to Twitter, and reporters are starting to do likewise. It’s fascinating to watch a new medium evolve the way Twitter has.
Dec 13th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Just came across something interesting from a few days ago that I somehow missed, but which could have serious implications for newspapers and their evolving relationship with Google: Search Engine Journal notes that Google News is tinkering with its algorithm and the way it ranks news stories. It wants to do a number of things, but one of the main ones is to promote the publication that first breaks a news story, rather than one of the follow-up pieces from newswires or larger papers.
That’s good for smaller local papers, since they will get more exposure and hence more traffic. It doesn’t say so in the Google News blog post, but I have to wonder if this is related to some of the criticism that Google got after they did the deal with Associated Press to host AP stories on Google servers and some people complained that local publications weren’t getting credit from Google News for the stories they were breaking.
