Newsvine: create the news that you want to read.
Jinfo Blog

1st May 2008

Item

I tend not to write much about citizen journalism in Livewire as I know that what interests you most is news on information products that support your research needs. However as I review what’s new in news I keep stumbling across a number of web sites that are not only written by citizen journalists but are doing some quite interesting things with the way they display news and decide what’s important and what’s not. The latest feature is for news to be community driven: that is, news that’s commented on, voted on, and then pushed up and down the page according to the results. One that I’ve enjoyed using recently is Newsvine http://www.newsvine.com/. Its own newsgathering is based on the premise that ‘all stories originate with Associated Press’ so the site takes them straight from the AP feed. Other stories are added by Newsvine contributors by ‘seeding the Vine’ from online publications and newswires. It has a number of news categories – the usual suspects, including Top News, Local News (as long as you are based in the US), Business, Technology, Politics and Health. Each category page shows the top tags, the top wires, seeds and featured writers associated with that category. If you want to keep up to date on a particular category you can add it to your watch list. If you are expecting a story to break you will be alerted when it hits the site and, subsequently, you can see who is commenting on it and how often comments are made. So where does the community niche come in? Not only can you see the stories, and comment on them, you can also vote on the comments, which moves an individual story up the page if enough people vote on it. (There is no down-voting.) Newsvine gives you four reasons to chose its site: it claims to be the fastest place to read and discuss stories; there are no editors – the position of news on the page adjusts based on what users find important; the user can create a trail of interesting news stories and publish them on the site by ‘seeding’; and, the user can set up his/her own column. Newsvine provides a number of tools, one of the more unusual being the Newsvine Leaderboard. This shows an individual contributor’s popularity based on votes and comments received, and the number of articles and seeds that the user has added to the site. It also shows who is online at any one time. There are many ways to get news now – Newsvine is worth a look as it is innovative in the way it allows users to manage and participate in the site. Oh, and by the way, there’s a revenue sharing arrangement based on advertising placed around your content.

« Blog