The Ever-Changing World of News..

Last Thursday, we had guest speaker Bruce Koon of KQED Radio and Knight Ridder Digital lead us in a discussion about the transformative changes within the news business.

Before getting into the lecture, he surprised me by informing the class that he did read these blogs of ours, which honestly sparked a few butterflies in my stomach. I wonder who else reads this besides my classmates, Professor Lehrman, & Koon...

Anyway, Koon introduced the idea of the news business being in a constant state of "transformation" driven by technological changes. It's continually changing - from radio broadcasts to podcasts, print newspapers to blogs, television to the multimedia digital world. And with those technological advances come shifts in the behavior of both the journalist and the audience.

One of the most interesting tidbits that Koon brought up was that anyone can be a journalist. Basically if you release some sort of information to an audience, you can be considered a journalist. The everyday person could break stories just as quickly - or maybe even quicker now - than the professional news journalist. That's one of the reasons why many news sites have turned to featurettes like Twitter or RSS feeds - because the everyday person can release and receive news information immediately.

Another question that Koon brought up was how the news media can partner up with their audience since, according to Koon, "what we call the 'audience' is now the 'participant.'" So in other words, nowadays, the audience members want to be more directly involved with the news, whether that means releasing news themselves or voicing their opinions on the given topic.

Because of this, newer business models have formed to experiment with newer media technology. Sites like EveryBlock.com involve crowd sourcing, which places a task in the hands of the public, giving them the responsibility to gather data and report their findings back to the leader. Hyperlocal news is becoming more popular within smaller cities outside of the larger, metropolitan ones. It gives these smaller areas, like Half Moon Bay and the Bay's coastal region, more focus on local news relevant to their particular community and also gives them a voice that larger cities would tend to look over.

Citizen journalism is also popular with major newssites like CNN's iReport or BBC's Have Your Say. These allow the audience to submit their own news articles, photos, videos, etc. to the newssites, fulfilling their desire to more actively partcipate in sharing news with the rest of the world.

NewsTrust: Hunting for Quality News Articles Online

A few weeks ago, a guest speaker named Kaizar Campwala came to our class to talk about NewsTrust.net, a website dedicated to promoting good journalism online.

Thank goodness.

The site is still in its beta stage, but it already looks promising to me. It allows for a new type of "citizen journalism" where members can submit articles under a variety of topics ranging from foreign policy to social networking. Members can then rate an article on a one to five-point scale system based on ideals such as whether the story is informative, fair, well-cited, accurate, etc.

From this, the site also promotes news literacy, providing members with tools for evaluating journalism online. Readers can therefore view the most quality articles - those that received the top-rated reviews - and can also compare and contrast news stories about the same topic but from different sources.

I actually found myself spending more time on NewsTrust than I originally thought I would. I created a profile and revealed some information about myself in order to increase the impact my ratings would have. I found several articles on foreign policy, the given topic for our class that week, read them and rated them. This definitely allowed me to use critical thinking skills in regards to evaluating news online. I also included brief commentary to support my numbers.

Overall, I think NewsTrust is a great website with lots of promise for the future. The makers of this site still need to figure out a way to actually draw an audience to their site. When Campwala presented his slideshow about the company, he had one slide dedicated to what their ideal goal looks like. One example is to partner up with search engines so they can include a small tag at the end of each article showing its current rating based on the 5-point scale.

Hopefully NewsTrust will continue to grow and be able to achieve their goals soon.