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.
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
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.
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.