We’re all journalists now
Jinfo Blog

20th June 2007

By Tim Buckley Owen

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No great surprise that print news media continue to lose out to digital, or that their advertisers are moving inexorably to more measurable internet-based advertising. Outsell’s ‘News Market Size and Share Rankings’ report for 2006 shows that the news providers and publishers segment grew by only 0.5% last year. In its latest $295 offering – available to buy at http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/505 – Outsell offers its own recommendations for actions that news producers and publishers should take. In truth, though, is there much that conventional news media, offering a top-down service, can do? In a web 2.0 world, the rationale for formal news gathering and analysis seems increasingly under challenge. Even schools of journalism are starting to look at alternative models. The website of the Poynter Institute school for journalists recently carried a profile of Daniel Schultz, a bright twentysomething studying information systems at Carnegie Mellon University – http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=124370. Schultz has just received a $15,000 Knight News Challenge grant to develop the idea of an open repository for location-tagged user-created news. Schultz’s idea is that content would be managed democratically, and consumers of the service would be asked to maintain quality control, ultimately acting as second editors. ‘It seems to me that the journalism industry is looking to bring in 20 year olds with fresh ideas,’ Schultz says. ‘Oh, and technical know-how also helped I'm sure.’ Technical know-how is certainly being taken to new heights in the beta version of Silobreaker (http://beta.silobreaker.com). Originally launched last year, Silobreaker believes that, as content gets increasingly commoditized, there is great demand for more intelligent services than simple online news or content aggregation. We need smarter technology than traditional search engines, it says, and services that integrate structured and unstructured data, whether old or new media. So its aim is to aggregate news, blogs, research, audio, video and other digital media content from sources of all kinds – whether proprietary, shared, user generated or open access. It also expects to start adding user-requested and user-generated content in the near future. Intelligent search is then applied to the mix, to provide not only content but analysis as well. Silobreaker’s developers plead for patience as they continue to train the classification system and deal with various other performance issues. But director Mats Bjore has told VIP Wire that the response so far has been great. ‘Simpler, faster and more depth and precision sums it up pretty well,’ he says, promising to post feedback as he gets permission. So news dissemination based on democracy and/or technology? It sounds like the way of the future. But can you risk your corporate reputation on such sources without a great deal of additional quality checking of your own first?

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