Slashdot Mirror
Net Users Taking Over the News
Josh Picker writes "the BBC is running a good piece about Net Journalism. '..Net users are taking over their [journalists'] role, forging a new kind of people's journalism.' it even boasts 'Slashdot Threatens Extinction' as a heading. how ominous! overall, a good article that definitely pertains to you guys."
This is a cry from people who feel threatened, and are trying to diminish their so-called competition.
/.) that host their own weblogs.
The 'old-school' journalists are just gripy that their hard-worked years of studying journalism through the old channels puts them side-by-side with some "uneducated" folks (or geeks, as in the case of
I'm personally glad that now I'm not purely limited to getting the 'news' from a handful of large corporations, but just as easily I can access hundreds of weblogs, grassroots pages, and the like.
Just like with the printing press, now a whole new wave of peoples can be heard, not just the ones with all the money.
No, it's better than journalism: it's training in thinking for yourself.
No journalist can be impartial. The most they can do is express their prejudice in way that allows you to divine the truth as reflected in their point of view. The sort of impartiality we've grown to accept from our media hides a whole bundle of prejudices that we're so accustomed to, many would deny they existed at all.
And sure, that's probably more effort than we've been expected, as readers, to exercise for quite a while. But it's not hard, and it will be necessary. When a new Internet user learns to ignore a "Good News" virus warning, they're developing the kind of scepticism we bred in our journalists in order to project our own innocence. In a world where news and rumours can come from any angle, I think we're better off without that innocence.
That is, on the guy from MSNBC.
On the one hand, you've got the guy from Cox saying that the users are breaking up the gatekeeper role of journalists by doing their own news. His response is that journalism must redefine itself in the face of changing times. While his ideas aren't perfect, it's still a good start for discussing the impact aggregators such as Slashdot and Linux Today have on journalism.
Then, the MSNBC guy stands up and blathers on about the gatekeeper role *expanding* and how the TV news model is going to *take over* the free-range Internet news model.
And guess what MSNBC's business model is? Yep. Coordinated content on the TV and Internet sides, so "the viewer can browse the Internet site to learn more about the TV news story". Do you think he's been a bit brainwashed on their corporate vision?
MS has this idea of people sitting in front of their WebTV, clicking on hot buttons appearing on the newscast that bring up a picture-in-picture browser with MSNBC-approved content, letting Tom Brokaw guide their browsing to the "right" sites. Baloney. If I had that, I'd find myself minimizing Tom & Co. and checking out independent online opinion on the news.
In fact, come to think of it, since I listen to radio for local news and use the Internet for the rest, I haven't watched TV news or read a newspaper in months.
Gee. Someone had better tell MSNBC's investors.
Actually a lot of the charm about /. is that there are AC postings.
/. I just read AC postings in a different mind-set (ready to forget it at any instant and
IMNSHO, AC postings make the conversation more diverse. On other sites, people just make up names
all the time and/or the conversation is just dominated by a few people (boring!)...
The moderation policy, as it exists, mirrors the real world quite well (if you ignore childish
behavior, it usually goes away). Likewize if poor posts are moderated down so nobody sees them...
Editorial control of dissussions is minimum and group controlled (just like real life)...
I suspect the very same people who deride AC posters, have self-importance issues, controlling
tendencies or simply have desires to dominate all discussion that they are involved with (a sign of
a low tolerance threshold...) Really, a 6 months? Isn't that a -bit- extreme?
On
move on)... And from time-to-time I also glance at the Score to see what other people think...
As for the other things, filters for posters might be a good addition for those people who don't want
to acknowledge the existance of people that they don't ever want to be seen agreeing with...
I read Slashdot every day. I love it. But I don't
consider it journalism. Journalists research their stories, and investigate all sides of the story, and try and discover the truth. CmdrTaco, Hemos, and all the other guys look at a list of interesting submissions and then put the best of those out there. The don't really check to see if it's true, or if there's more to the story. That's not really a bad thing, but you have to be aware of it. As an example, just what is the truth in the Packetstorm story? At first it seemed Harvard and the Anti-Online guy were totally evil. Now it seems maybe there's more to the story. A journalist would have spent time gleaning information from all sides of the story. Slashdot provided a quick link to one side of the story.
Journalists do their best to tell me the truth, and when they betray that truth I get angry and stop reading their work. Slashdot gives me the opportunity to discover the truth for myself, if I want to sit down and work at it.
And that's not journalism.
I like the analogy to a global conversation, but I don't like the comparison to a cocktail party. Cocktail parties tend to be accumulations of shallow people trying to prove to each other how important they are, in order to either bolster their egos or to get laid.
/. has always seemed to me to be more of a bull session after a long work day: a time we gripe, joke, & brainstorm over what we know.
While there are some shallow people around here (& hopefully I'm not one of them),
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I think Roblimo is a beast from ancient Greek Mythology. It has the head of a Rob and the body of a Justin.
The success of slashdot has more to do with the fact that it is a specialist rag with a good self-selective moderation policy. I would see it more as a cross between a cocktail party hosted at a professional conference with someone sneaking around with a mike, rather than the traditional newspaper which is tailored towards a mass audience (cae we say devolution to mediocratity here?). Like any specialise rag/zine whatever, it is highly dependent on the audience in mind, in this is case, generally highly educated computer professionals which results in a better signal to noise ratio than traditional newsgroups or ad-based paper publications (which of course aids for the widest possible coverage in their field).
:-).
I suspect that now that CT has some spare change to hire some Perl hackers, he could make a nice little sideline in licensing the software. (I personally would be interested in something similar to provide a grassroots community helpline). Some things that may be worthwhile tuning include
1) clear policy for submission (e.g. compulsary 6 month gag period for new subscribers while they observe the community norms)
2) more flexible extraction mechanisms (e.g. more sophisticated threading to reduce bandwidth)
3) perhaps more powerful navigation/selection features (e.g. only read articles from people who consistenty rank>2)
4) forward/backward links to related topics (actually not as easy as it sounds) so that people can understand the context and trajectory of the information vector
The internet is not radio, TV or newspaper and I personally think slashdot is a good step forward in this brave gnu world
LL
True, we get what is sensational and what sells, which is exactly why /. exists i think. This site is a place of concentration for news and information about a specific topic, which is directly modeerated by reader submission. we need the toplevel news sites simply to collect. then we filter and consume. darkfell@yahoo.com
While it true that stories aren't stored on /., in many cases I never read the actual story. Besides the fact the site is probably slashdotted, I'm more interested in what people here have to say about a topic. Often you will get much more information here than is presented in the article, so it is a waste of time to read them.
/. exercise brevity and with moderation it's easy to read according to how much free time you have, unlike external articles that require good skimming skills to find useful information.
People on
While the accuracy of information here is not as well researched, it usually doesn't need to be because it is written by engineers who know what they are talking about. Journalist generally aren't engineers.. consider the salary differences.
I see the stories simply as a focus point of conversation, and it is Rob who is picking the conversations, not the journalist. There are literally several hundred online articles published daily by major papers, most of them don't provide much new information.
-- Virtual Windows Project
"But they still need us as guides. They need to know what's important, what's true and what's useful. Our new role is as a trusted guide."
This is the kind of attitude that already turns me off with television and many newsmagazines -- the notion that we, the uneducated masses, are desperate for "guides" to tell us, "...what's true and what's useful". True, useful information is very rare. Instead, we get what's sensational and what sells.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
To many people a trend is just a fad until it's blessed by the New York Times or the BBC. While some of us have extrapolated much from this shift in where we get our news, to most people it's not yet real. Now some of them are getting it from their trusted news sources.
As for them being our guides, I wish them luck. Many of us have tolerated terrible news sources here in the U.S. for our entire lives. Finally, we can get news stratified to our interests and expertise, when we want it, and with both sides of the issue covered. To top that all off, we get it from people who aren't journalists but, rather, people who actually *know* something about the subject in question. No, we are only using the traditional news outlets to bridge into a future where there will be original sources covering every topic. The vast number of those sources will be filtered down to a manageable number by sites like our beloved slashdot.
It seems fitting that the BBC would recognize and report on this phenomenon. I'll bet NBC, CBS, and ABC will not be in such a hurry to speed up this process.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
You are right in claiming /. is nothing more than a news site. That is part of why I read it, because the topics are of great interest to me. When something happens in the geek world, I want to know about it and I look here. I don't read Salon or Wired because they don't target my needs. Rob and Hemos (and cowboy Neal) are the editors, they select only the stories they think are of interest to nerds, hence their motto.
/. And that is what I consider to be journalism. Someone with some knowledge of a topic adding to the story, so we can all read it and become more knowledgeable.
/., and I can't see any way to eliminate them without driving away all the good stuff as well. Rob and Hemos see that as well, and have gone to great lengths to improve the site without driving anybody away. I hope the andoverNet people also realise that, and weren't lying to Rob when they bought the place.
But there is journalism inside of slashdot, it is contained in the poster's comments. Not all of them, but enough to make me scroll through the list. I like the moderation system now in place. If I set my filter to 3 or higher, I can quickly read some good, well thought out posts. If I leave it at 1, I can often pick up bits of important information that adds to the context of the original story.
I am no longer surprised to see well written postings adding some extremely detailed information. I come to expect it in maybe half of the stories on
The flames and trolls can be ignored easily enough, they don't really detract from
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Everyone who doesn't go here seems to forget that few of the articles are actually stored on this server. There will still be plenty of demand for news websites like wired, msnbc, cnn, and so on because even if a billion slashdots sprung up catering to every possible intrest people would still be going through the slashdots to news sites, and the news sites would still get their advertising. We may watch less of the Evening News with Dan Rather, but we're still bringing them revenue.