The (open) future of news
First, we must start by defining news. At least I’ll explain what I consider it to be.
News is not something solely created by a high priesthood of journalists in non-smoky back rooms of some media organization. They do create news there. Lots of it.
Nor is it merely news organizations coupled with the fast and loose, breaking posts from a talented squadron of bloggers. They create news too. But wait, there is more.
The fact is, there is no strong line between who can create news and what is news.
The Rodney King video was an act of journalism. My wedding video was probably not (it could be, you don’t know my family).
My recent tweet (see Twitter if you don’t know what that is) saying “Good Night, all” is not journalism, but my next one about Google is definitely breaking news.
It’s not the creator or the medium that makes something journalism, it’s the substance. No doubt that professional journalists create more news than your average MySpace user. It’s their job. No doubt, they are more diligent about trying to be objective and telling both sides. But they make mistakes. They are even, dare I say, biased, even if they won’t admit it.
Okay, enough about that. The point is that we get our news from a variety of growing sources, fueled by syndication methods like RSS and Social Networks like Twitter and Facebook. Cheap devices and bandwidth have made it possible for countless people to contribute to the fabric of news flow than ever before. Nuff said.
Back when I studied Mass Communications at the University of Connecticut, we used to lament about the shrinking number of news sources. We used to say things like, “the number of media organizations has gone from over one hundred during WWII to less than 25 now,” or “you can fit the number of executive board members of all the media organizations in the country into one room.”
Well, those days are over. And with all the sources I mention above, it should just be one big party. . . right? Well, look out. There is a new editor in town; it’s the algorithm.
You see, we once criticized that the back room editorial policies weren’t transparent enough, and we heralded the transparency of the blogging world as the answer to that.
The only problem was that there are now too many sources to manage. We simply can’t handle it all. Yes, we rely on our digital social networks to do some moderating for us, but these grow as well, and contribute even greater amounts of noise. It’s not a self healing problem.
As well, we sometimes like to get a broader picture of what’s happening than our social network might afford. After all, that’s the beauty of greater sources. Greater perspective.
This has led to the rise of aggregators like Gabe Rivera’s Memeorandum and Techmeme. As well, it is a predominant way in which a whole bunch of mainstream web users consume their news with services like Google News and MyYahoo. Yes, you can personalize many of the systems, but an algorithm is often deciding what stories bubble up.
Perhaps you can see my concern. If we begin to rely on algorithms to filter our news consumption, if only partially, have we not discarded one opaque system for another.
It’s not a simple issue, but let’s try to use a simple example.
You may have heard that Google is going to archive the print editions of many newspapers, going back hundreds of years.
Now imagine that at a crucial point in history, many people want to know what happened in World War II . They search for it and Google displays the results. The black box algorithm that decides what articles rise to the top of that search will influence what people’s perception of that historical event was.
How about a more current example. People voting in the Ohio primaries on Tuesday may go to Google News and search for “Obama” and/or “Hillary.” Good for them. We need to know the issues.
The top results for articles could have a profound effect on the vote, and therefore the world. Did the results favor views that might lead voters on the edge to settle on one side or the other?
You might find the example extreme, but the fact is that an opaque system decided what people read, not a transparent one. It’s no longer the editor that sways public opinion, it’s the programmer.
Even Digg, a site that feigns democracy, has an algorithm that apparantly only a small monority of it’s users have have figured out and exploited. Or are they being exploited by the algorithm?
What we need is transparent algorithms that aggregate news, so that we are aware of what decided the results, even if we not in complete control.
In an ideal world we could mix and match plugins that controlled how the news is aggregated and sorted. Some will want to rely on a broader network, some on a less broad. Some will want to give greater weight to certain individuals and organizations.
The possibilities for forming our news consumption decisions are endless, and may never be perfected. We should strive to keep those decisions under our control, not the editor’s, not the programmer’s, and not the algorithm’s.
SIDENOTE: Prior to publishing this, I broke news about Google archiving old newspaper editions, on Twitter, just to prove a point. Most of the first readers of this post followed a link from there to here, so necessarily had the background knowledge I mention above.
P.S. Jeff Jarvis and some contributors are talking about the future of news organizations, a different but equally meaningful topic I’ll try to explore in another post.