Oct

10

Rant of the day: What’s on the News? Why is Newser Useful?

October 10, 2007 |

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(via Doc Searls) In Vanity Fair, Michael Wolf describes the rationale behind Newser.com (a very standard news aggregation site) and talks about the value of news.

It’s a long article, but well worth the read if you want to understand how some journalists feel about the internet.

Here are just some random thoughts about it and some excerpts at the bottom:

I grew up on newspapers. I grew up on watching news on TV. Today, I neither read a newspaper anymore, nor have I watched news on TV in years. Why would I? Today, I feel very much like this guy here about the mainstream news media.

We still need the news gathering organizations. But when it comes to making sense out of the news, I want to see experts, not journalists make sense out of it. And those experts I find online. By the time CNN has put a fake expert up on screen, I have already read six different opinions from six real experts and made up my own mind.

Michael Wolf decries that we get less and less news. I don’t know what world he lives in, but I get more news today than ever before.  I religiously scan at least six newspapers in four languages every morning online. I read blogs.

But there is one site I don’t need: Wolf’s Newser.com. It is just a news aggregation site with a bad design. There is enough of them out there already and if you read the article in Vanity Fair, you realize how he doesn’t quite get the whole online media business. Instead, he is sceptical about it. Doesn’t trust the algorithm.

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Here are some excerpts (note, when he is talking about ‘news’, he seems to be referring to newspapers and TV news only):

The job of the newspeople is to explain what makes news news—what makes news jump off the page or the screen, why it is not just merely data. That news is, for better or worse, a card trick. Holding people’s attention is the trick.

You can’t put this too starkly: the news as a pastime, as a form of media, is vaudeville. The news business—our crowd of overexcited people narrating events as they happen—is going out of business.

Indeed, most of the people I know who are interested in news, rather than, say, social networking, or solitary blogging, who believe news media might thrive, online or in more classic forms, are old.


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