For a while now I’ve been using some relatively new sites that rank links according to their users’ preferences, such as
With these plus more traditional news sources, I never bother watching television news because when I do it seems like every story I already saw online several days before, often in several versions from several points of view (political, geographical, technical, etc.). Besides, TV gives you the news in brief, while the net gives you the news in multiplex.
Kevin Kelly has come up with a name for these things: Consensus Web Filters.
Meanwhile, Joshua Micah Marshall has come up with some datapoints or at least anecdotes about something that has bothered me about such sites for a while. Is the blogosphere derivative of the Mainstream Media (MSM), in that it just points at content that traditional editors and reporters produce, or does it produce significant content on its own?
Marshall’s post describes one or two cases in which the MSM has taken a story from a blog and printed it with no attribution as if it were new. Blogs at least almost always provide a link to their source.
Examining these consensus web filters in comparison to other filters and sources brings out a couple of other points.
They are somewhat similar to slashdot in being edited by large groups, yet they seem to have editing mechanisms that avoid the flamage associated with /.
They are unlike sites edited by small groups, such as boingboing in that larger numbers of people put in their opinions and thus cast a wider net. And they are unlike or Google News which select items purely automatically. The first thing I look at is an even older style edited news compendium: World News. This plus an array of specialized blogs, plain old newspapers and magazines such as the Economist, and, the most valuable of all, personal contacts.
The two points:
- Such a range of sources, accessible quickly and readily only online, provides perspectives on the news that no MSM publication can match. The closest MSM sources are perhaps the Economist and World Press Review, both of which I’ve been known to subscribe to on paper. But online you can get both, plus others.
- Consensus web filters and group-edited blogs and other online filters and sources often turn up articles or web sites or blogs that have not made the news yet help explain it, or news articles in publications in cities or countries that haven’t been noticed by the MSM.
Is there risk involved? Sure, you can be led to news sources that are misleading or just plain wrong. However, you have a better chance of finding corroborating or contradicting sources for the same story online than you do if you subscribe to a newspaper or watch television.
The bigger risk is that the MSM may be put out of business by online filters and sources. While I do worry about that a bit, I also reflect that the town cryer in the average medieval village probably didn’t like the printing press, either. Where are the captains of the news industry who can invent new business models that will actually work via the Internet?
-jsq