In an effort to sift through the growing amount of data available to them, many professional journalists have turned to crowd-sourcing as a means of analyzing big data sets. WikiLeaks has been doing this since its inception, relying on the internet at large to find meaning in the hundreds of thousands of documents they leak. But some sites, like The Guardian, have taken a more calculated approach, creating an interface for their readers to analyze documents page by page and find pages that they should look at more closely.
Taking crowd-sourcing somewhat to the extreme, some newspapers have experimented with moving towards fully crowd-sourcing their news gathering operations, and as newspapers' revenues continue to plummet, this model seems more and more appealing as a cost-cutting measure. Gannett, publisher of around 90 daily newspapers in the U.S., including USA Today, started moving towards a fully crowd-sourced model as long ago as 2006, and other newspapers have followed suit since then.
But what's most interesting in this space is sites that are using crowd-sourcing to do completely new things, not just to cut costs. Ushahidi, in my opinion, is one of the most compelling examples of this. Ushahidi allows people around the world to contribute original information and data and synthesizes this in meaningful ways. For example, during a crisis in Kenya, Ushahidi was used by citizens around the country to report where acts of violence had occurred and where people were gathering to protest. Ushahidi's platform was able to map these locations out and synthesize data on the overall trends being reported. Something like this would be impossible to pull off via traditional methods, and because citizens are passionate about a topic like this, they are very willing to contribute their time and knowledge for the greater good.
People have just begun to explore the possibilities that crowd-sourcing holds for news generation online. So far no single model for crowd-sourcing has stuck in news generation, but I think we can be fairly certain that crowd-sourcing, in some form, will be around for a long time to come.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Sunday, October 23, 2011
News Aggregators
Link aggregators have been a staple of the internet for nearly its entire modern existence. The first was Slashdot in 1997, and since then Digg and Reddit have come to prominence. Niche link aggregation sites like HackerNews have also been fairly successful in serving smaller groups of internet users. So what implications does the use of user-driven content curation have for the consumption of online news?
Link aggregator sites try to create a community by allowing users to submit links, vote links up or down, and have conversations about the links submitted. This tends to work fairly well; links usually generate some good conversation and breaking news tends to make it to the front page of the aggregator sites fairly quickly.
But users can also game the system, exerting influence over what links get voted up or down through their networks of friends. Users of Digg during its heyday (2006-2009 or so) all know who "MrBabyMan" is, and some users revolted against his dominance of the network. MrBabyMan seemed to dominate the network through his group of friends on Digg, and at times the entire front page of Digg was filled with stories submitted by him. Other sites have also had similar problems with spammers and overly dominant users as a result of their reputation management systems and social tools, and this problem still persists today.
Another interesting implication of link aggregation sites is the risk for Groupthink. Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon by which people in groups or communities can become closed-minded to new ideas or new ways of thinking. Link aggregation sites tend to take on a sort of collective opinion on different issues (Reddit Trees is a great example of this), which can crowd out conflicting opinions or viewpoints from conversation. This could mean that link aggregators have the ability to sway public opinion on controversial issues, because only the group opinion is represented on their sites.
Link Aggregators are a great source of user-curated news on the web, promoting interesting stories and providing an alternative to professional media online. But there are some things to watch out for when using these sites to learn about important issues or topics, because users (and the site at large) can dictate the types of links that are promoted on the site.
Link aggregator sites try to create a community by allowing users to submit links, vote links up or down, and have conversations about the links submitted. This tends to work fairly well; links usually generate some good conversation and breaking news tends to make it to the front page of the aggregator sites fairly quickly.
But users can also game the system, exerting influence over what links get voted up or down through their networks of friends. Users of Digg during its heyday (2006-2009 or so) all know who "MrBabyMan" is, and some users revolted against his dominance of the network. MrBabyMan seemed to dominate the network through his group of friends on Digg, and at times the entire front page of Digg was filled with stories submitted by him. Other sites have also had similar problems with spammers and overly dominant users as a result of their reputation management systems and social tools, and this problem still persists today.
Another interesting implication of link aggregation sites is the risk for Groupthink. Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon by which people in groups or communities can become closed-minded to new ideas or new ways of thinking. Link aggregation sites tend to take on a sort of collective opinion on different issues (Reddit Trees is a great example of this), which can crowd out conflicting opinions or viewpoints from conversation. This could mean that link aggregators have the ability to sway public opinion on controversial issues, because only the group opinion is represented on their sites.
Link Aggregators are a great source of user-curated news on the web, promoting interesting stories and providing an alternative to professional media online. But there are some things to watch out for when using these sites to learn about important issues or topics, because users (and the site at large) can dictate the types of links that are promoted on the site.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Affiliate Content in Online News
A growing trend on news sites today is the use of affiliate content. Massive sites like The Huffington Post and Business Insider are scraping content from other websites and reposting it on their own sites (in many cases rewriting the headlines of articles to be more inflammatory). They also allow users to submit articles they write themselves, using the website community to vet content and identify poor information or writing. Though there are many issues surrounding the debate on affiliate content usage, I'm going to focus on the effect of this change on you and me, the consumers of online content.
The Huffington Post was (relatively) recently sold to AOL for the staggering sum of 315 million dollars. Business Insider has raised 13.6 million dollars in financing, meaning most likely its valuation is somewhere in the ballpark of 20-40 million dollars. These sites are generating great profit on the backs of unpaid bloggers, and aggregating even more content from the internet at large. Major accusations have been claimed against these sites for linkbait titles and content scraping without permission, but they continue to grow their viewership and generate staggering profits through advertising and intelligent SEO.
So what does this mean for us, the consumers of content online? In my opinion, the model that these sites are using successfully today means that going forward, the quality of content on the internet will decline in favor of increased quantity. The linkbaiting tactics that HuffPo and BI are using will make it much harder to trust the validity of content we see online anywhere, and their use of content scraping of quality personal blogs and news sites, taking revenue and viewership away from these sites, is a great disincentive for these sources to make their content freely available to the internet at large.
The direction we are going right now is not good, but we, as online news consumers, have the power to change this. If viewership declines on The Huffington Post, Business Insider, or any other affiliate content site, they will be forced to reexamine their business model. Hopefully, they will see that in most cases, consumers prefer quality to quantity.
The Huffington Post was (relatively) recently sold to AOL for the staggering sum of 315 million dollars. Business Insider has raised 13.6 million dollars in financing, meaning most likely its valuation is somewhere in the ballpark of 20-40 million dollars. These sites are generating great profit on the backs of unpaid bloggers, and aggregating even more content from the internet at large. Major accusations have been claimed against these sites for linkbait titles and content scraping without permission, but they continue to grow their viewership and generate staggering profits through advertising and intelligent SEO.
So what does this mean for us, the consumers of content online? In my opinion, the model that these sites are using successfully today means that going forward, the quality of content on the internet will decline in favor of increased quantity. The linkbaiting tactics that HuffPo and BI are using will make it much harder to trust the validity of content we see online anywhere, and their use of content scraping of quality personal blogs and news sites, taking revenue and viewership away from these sites, is a great disincentive for these sources to make their content freely available to the internet at large.
The direction we are going right now is not good, but we, as online news consumers, have the power to change this. If viewership declines on The Huffington Post, Business Insider, or any other affiliate content site, they will be forced to reexamine their business model. Hopefully, they will see that in most cases, consumers prefer quality to quantity.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
User Generated Content
Hello everyone! This is my first blog post here. As you can probably tell from the blog title, I'll be writing about how the world of online news is rapidly changing right now, and what that means for us as consumers of online media.
To get us started, I'm going to take a cursory look at how user-created content is being used more commonly as a source of news content. It's been known for a while now that breaking news usually spreads via Twitter before TV news and news websites can report on it, so when documenting how news breaks it can be useful for journalists to reference tweets. And in many cases, videos on YouTube or pictures on sites like flickr document news more comprehensively than journalists are able to.
One rapidly growing startup, Storify, does exactly this. It allows both professional journalists and regular users to organize tweets, photos, and videos from the internet together and narrate them with original writing. I learned about this company a few weeks ago, when I saw it linked from a post on Reddit, and explored it further. It's a really interesting idea, and allows for stories about what real people think to be written much more easily. For example, here's a Storify about Steve Jobs, where someone asked their followers on Twitter to reply with how Steve Jobs impacted their lives. It'll be interesting to see where Storify goes, and I have a feeling that more companies will be entering this space in the near future.
In the last year or two, YouTube has also been used fairly often on TV news reports. In many cases, it can be very difficult for reporters to completely document an event on video, so relying on user generated content can be very useful. For example, when the earthquake happened in Japan about 6 months ago, this video (along with many others) was used widely in televised news reports about the quake. In cases like this, where an event cannot be predicted, amateur videos are usually the only source of video for reporters to use. Now that it's so easy for people to record and share their own videos (most smartphones have HD quality video recording capabilities, and can upload straight to YouTube), my guess is that amateur videos will be used much more often on news shows.
The combination of the decline in subscribers print and TV media are facing with the growing prevalence of user-generated content means that, most likely, print and TV media will soon rely greatly on users to generate much of their content as a cost-cutting measure. I doubt this will be the last time I talk about this topic this quarter, but I'll probably talk about some of the more specific microtrends that make up this greater trend towards amateur content.
What do you think? Please respond in the comments section if you have an opinion on this post, I'd love to hear what you have to say!
To get us started, I'm going to take a cursory look at how user-created content is being used more commonly as a source of news content. It's been known for a while now that breaking news usually spreads via Twitter before TV news and news websites can report on it, so when documenting how news breaks it can be useful for journalists to reference tweets. And in many cases, videos on YouTube or pictures on sites like flickr document news more comprehensively than journalists are able to.
One rapidly growing startup, Storify, does exactly this. It allows both professional journalists and regular users to organize tweets, photos, and videos from the internet together and narrate them with original writing. I learned about this company a few weeks ago, when I saw it linked from a post on Reddit, and explored it further. It's a really interesting idea, and allows for stories about what real people think to be written much more easily. For example, here's a Storify about Steve Jobs, where someone asked their followers on Twitter to reply with how Steve Jobs impacted their lives. It'll be interesting to see where Storify goes, and I have a feeling that more companies will be entering this space in the near future.
In the last year or two, YouTube has also been used fairly often on TV news reports. In many cases, it can be very difficult for reporters to completely document an event on video, so relying on user generated content can be very useful. For example, when the earthquake happened in Japan about 6 months ago, this video (along with many others) was used widely in televised news reports about the quake. In cases like this, where an event cannot be predicted, amateur videos are usually the only source of video for reporters to use. Now that it's so easy for people to record and share their own videos (most smartphones have HD quality video recording capabilities, and can upload straight to YouTube), my guess is that amateur videos will be used much more often on news shows.
The combination of the decline in subscribers print and TV media are facing with the growing prevalence of user-generated content means that, most likely, print and TV media will soon rely greatly on users to generate much of their content as a cost-cutting measure. I doubt this will be the last time I talk about this topic this quarter, but I'll probably talk about some of the more specific microtrends that make up this greater trend towards amateur content.
What do you think? Please respond in the comments section if you have an opinion on this post, I'd love to hear what you have to say!
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