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Mainstream Media Finally Catching On To How News Propagates
Techdirt is reporting that the mainstream press may finally be "getting it" when it comes to how the next generation of news readers consumes and shares news. One student summed it up very succinctly by saying "If the news is that important, it will find me." "According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well -- sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter -- reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com -- with a social one."
Somehow news of Brittney's latest pecadillo always manages to find me despite my struggle to be ignorant of her existence. I don't even have to use her full name for you to know who I'm talking about. With mainstream media there is still the problem that they play to the lowest common denominator of consumers. The type who buy Star magazine.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
As the trend continues, people are going to be even less likely to hear opposing points of view. If your circle of friends is the only group that sends you news, and your circle of friends tends to think/agree with your point of view, you'll be even more insulated.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
I get a large portion of my news from slashdot. I find that maybe 20%, sometimes more, of the stories here are of above average interest to me. That's far better than scanning news sites, which anyway wouldn't find half the stories here. So I'm letting all of you function as my filter. Works well enough for the type of news slashdot specializes in. You know, for nerds.
For everything else, there's The Daily Show.
While this may be good, in that only news that interest people will spread leaving the boring stuff behind, it is bad for the obvious reason that Joe Geek may be poorly informed about a subject while finding it interesting. They may get excited about a given topic and forward it to all their friends and family, thereby spreading the news in a wonderfully viral way, but the "news" may be utterly uninformed and outright incorrect. Obviously, this effect is already taking place (how many of us have had non-tech-savvy parents send us emails about "forward this to ten people you know and Bill Gates will give you $1000"). Just because someone finds something interesting and "newsworthy" doesn't mean it's remotely accurate. Information now spreads faster than ever but so does misinformation...
Who don't have any friends.
;)
But you do get to share in a community of readers who never read the news articles or get the wrong end of the stick. I mean this wouldn't be slashdot if we didn't start reacting to the article summary that has little or nothing to do with the referenced article
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Instead of linking to Techdirt, could the editors please consider linking to the actual article?
Sure, that works for popular news. That's why CNN, foxnews, digg, reddit, etc all have news on Britney Spears or Brad Pitt. If the news gets that critical mass of people, it will make the rounds.
Naturally there will be certain circles where some types of news is more popular. But what hurts is that it reinforces the popular == good methodology. And that's what hurts me about people these days. They don't seem to be interested if they don't see one of two things. An immediate effect on them, or most of their friends being interested in it.
This is why I started the website in my sig. It's hard to find people who don't just read popular news, and like to think and discuss it.
The article is right in that news does propagate that way. But until we're at a point where we're propagating useful, knowledgeable news, we will still be doing a disservice to people.
How many of us get links to the economist in our email? It's certainly not popular on the social news sites. The potential is there with social news. We just need to get a larger mass of people disseminating useful news. Then we won't have to worry about things like "Mainstream media", as only the knowledgeable news will be propagated.
I wouldn't call this news, a more accurate term would be gossip.
My ex-stepdad always went on about how the New York Times was "the paper of record" and how there was all sorts of journalistic integrity. He used this argument to dismiss any news items I brought up that seemed too fringe or kooky.
Anyone who has been paying attention these days realizes that the mainstream media is pretty much bought and paid for propaganda. Good propaganda contains a high percentage of truth, that makes it harder to detect the spin. There are so many cases on record where there has either been a concerted and deliberate effort to twist the news for political and financial gain or there has simply been gross incompetence where journalistic safeguards failed to operate in the intended fashion.
"Americans are the only people in the world who believe their own government's propaganda." Well, probably not the only people in the world but certainly among the most notoriously credulous.
Our biggest problem with the media is consolidation, the major outlets are now owned by gigantic corporations who have a vested interest in "creating their own weather" by steering news coverage. With smaller news organizations, the primary goal is still making money but they make the bucks by finding and publishing the dirt rather than by suppressing the facts to keep the corporate masters happy. Media that rely on ad revenue are just as untrustworthy, just look at the game reviews. "Festering Piece of Crap 4, at least a 7/10!"
I think generational attitudes are changing. People in my parents' generation have become disillusioned with the news and people my generation and younger never had any faith to begin with.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Yeah, that pretty much sums up the self-centered nature of the 'younger' crowd** nowadays. Someone give it to me. I'm too important to do it myself.
*Google for 'smarter than a fifth grader blonde idiot' and she is the first item
**How I hate to sound like an old, bitter man. Ok, maybe the bitter part.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
As others have pointed out, one problem with this is that you only hear what your friends are hearing, so it's easy to become/remain isolated, leading to greater polarization. /. have speculated that Microsoft employs people to work on moderating stories on /. in Microsoft's favor, and it's well-known that Scientology does related stuff with internet newsgroups. It's hard to trust a big anonymous system when motivated, biased people can astroturf it.
In this week's New Yorker magazine, they talk extensively about the transition from newspapers to online news sources, particularly concentrating on Arianna Huffington and Little Green Footballs. With respect to polarization, the article points out that in countries where this is (arguably) already going on to a greater extent than the US, there is significantly greater engagement in politics, though whether that's because of or just correlated with polarization issues, isn't clear.
But the main thrust of the NY article is research. Traditional news companies, particularly newspapers, spend a *lot* of money on reporters, who are expected to research their stories. Obviously that doesn't always happen, as a number of large scandals of late have made clear, but on the other hand, there is no attempt whatsoever by most email-forwarding people to verify what they're forwarding, which leads to misinformed polarization, a worse problem yet.
The flip side of that is that a reporter is unlikely to run across the one disgruntled employee who is willing to spill the beans, while a much more broadly based concept of news reporting, where many eyes and fingers contribute to the work, is more likely to get information from inside sources... but there's still that problem with trusting them to be right. Already we see adblogs. Many people on
But, as the New Yorker article made clear, this is largely eulogy: newspapers are dying, and it's not going to take very long. (People in the article said 2040 or thereabouts, extrapolating from what we see now.) The question is whether political blogs and the like will take their place or whether something somewhere in between will show up. Huffington has hired actual reporters from newspapers to do some work. Wouldn't it be nice if some other user-content websites we all know about did the same?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
As the trend continues, people are going to be even less likely to hear opposing points of view.
As compared to the Old Media? ROTFL!
The former mainstream media systematically suppress the news they don't want you to hear or they don't want to cover. (They were PARTICULARLY blatant during the presidential primary season, where they systematically avoided covering certain candidates: Ron Paul, Alan Keys, and Dennis Kucinich to name just three where they were particularly blatant.) If you compare the coverage on the Internet and that on the Old Media you'd think they were operating in two different universes.
In particular: Ron Paul was VERY popular with the people who actually found out about him. His single-digit showing in most of the primaries, despite his all-time-record fundraising (virtually all from individuals contributing an average of about $100) is a measure of how small a fraction of the population is currently getting a significant portion of their news from the Internet.
On the internet your social contacts might bring something to your attention and/or help you filter it. But if your circle of friends is missing some point of view, the first time you do a search on it you'll find plenty of opposing voices - and other circles of potential friends if you happen to change your mind about the issue.
This will continue unless/until the operators of all the major search engines become as politically corrupted as the operators of the Old Media, figure out how to work their bias into their search engine results, yet still manage to avoid being replaced by more open competitors. (Or some world-wide Stalinist-style regime manages to censor the whole internet.)
So, no. For the forseable future switching to internet news and social sites from Old/Mainstream Media will increase, not decrease, exposure to opposing points of view.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And even if it is, it often isn't relevant to our lives. Yes, everything affects everything else at some level, but the truth is that most of what you read in a newspaper doesn't is irrelevant to you, out of your realm of influence, or merely speculative. Pick up a year-old newspaper and see how compelling it is.
Psychologically, it's interesting to consider that while a major tragedy may happen to you or someone close to you just a handful of times in your life, a major tragedy is happening somewhere to somebody every hour. There was a time when we were blissfully unaware of that fact. Now we have a constant barrage of it. It is wearying, and to cope we have to tune a lot of it out.
Hmmm, out of the last 19,801 BBC News stories here in my RSS reader, perhaps half a dozen at most were things that I or someone in my "link emailing social circle" would have come across by ourselves. This just sounds like the sort of Webtopia bullshit the Reg is good at calling out.... sorry, given a choice of having only the BBC for news, and only stuff that gets emailed around... I think I'll be sticking with the BBC and paying my license fee.