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This weblog was developed and is supported by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College, CUNY
Mar
26
Aggregating the news
Posted by Vera Haller on Mar 26, 2008 under: multimedia, newspapers, online news, politics, television, video
An area I haven’t touched upon yet in this blog is the ability of the Web to aggregate news by subject matter. This may seem very obvious to some of you, but I wanted to draw attention to the way it affects traditional news Web sites.
More and more people are using searches such as Google and Yahoo news, which organize the news by topic and then list links to stories written by different news organizations. When you can see the top news stories from a selection of outlets, why go to just one site for your news?
This means that people are entering news Web sites through larger search engines, not by going to the home page and seeing what the editors have posted and chosen as the top stories. It also means people might not have the same attachment and loyalty to “their” news Web site like they used to have to the local newspaper. Just another example of how news consumption is changing.
Another type of news aggregator to watch are sites such as digg.com, which post stories, photos, videos and podcasts based on the number of times they are recommended by readers. I find these lists interesting but often skewed heavily with stories about technology, politics and the weird and whacky.
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3 Responses to “Aggregating the news”
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I use Google a lot, and it’s pretty interesting how the results can rapidly change based on recent occurences. I also think it’s true that editors are having less say of what’s front-page news, since people can just search their own topics and read about those exclusively. I think this is both a good and bad thing. It is very effective for the reader to get straight to what they want to know, but it is also a part of the problem for how newspapers are going to keep readers subscribing from now on. It does also seem more democratic, though. If an editor (who is human after all) has particular sympathies, it can definitely affect which stories make the front page and which stories do not even make the paper. So instead of reaching for a paper that you think you agree with (which maybe isn’t the best way to read the news anyway), I think it might be best to take in the news piecemeal from different sources. Of course 50 years ago people read more than one newspaper and followed this philosophy with print. If we can’t do that now with the internet, we should really be concerned with how lazy we’re getting more than anything else.
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