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!
Storify is a really interesting idea. It strikes me as a Wikipedia-like collaborative database for the news, but different because it updates constantly with the ripples of each current event.
ReplyDeleteThe Steve Jobs story doesn't read like a news story, however. It's a series of tweets of tributes to Steve Jobs, which is fine, but it's not a report. The option to include original writing exists, but I am not seeing it in action here.
Even a story on blogs on trial in the UAE doesn't provide a complete report. What Storify seems to do is compile a number of stories into one location, but I wish more people were writing to connect the links.(http://storify.com/ajstream/uae-blogger-trial)
I do see good stories, though, like this one on Twitter (http://storify.com/tylerwillis/twitter-debate-on-product-design). The difference is an actual conversation is going on; the story is cohesive.
I do like this idea. It'd be interesting to see Storify integrate filters by categories/regions/communities. Could we have a Stanford Storify group?
Interesting – I hadn’t seen Storify before. Seems that there are different level of citizen participation. This one is at the editing level, selecting items and bringing them together. There is also the ground level of providing raw reporting, as in the recent examples of mobile phone videos of Saddam’s capture and death. As yiu point out, YouTube has been a primary vehicle for the latter. Tweets are somewhere in between. They obviously reflect editing (160 characters!) but are not exactly primary like videos. What do you see as the interaction among them?
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So far it seems that tweets and other writing are used to give primary sources like videos context. I think this is one of the big reasons that Storify was made, because by combining different forms of social media a news report can be created that's greater than the sum of its parts.
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