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."

Comments

Slashdot = A global cocktail conversation

[LL]

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

Re:Slashdot does threaten extinction

[jonathanclark]

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.

People on /. 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.

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.