DOCSLIB.ORG

“The Hype Vs. Reality Vs. What People Value: Emerging Collaborative News Models and the Future of News”

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
“The Hype Vs. Reality Vs. What People Value: Emerging Collaborative News Models and the Future of News” “The Hype vs. Reality vs. What People Value: Emerging Collaborative News Models and the Future of News” Hsing Wei – Spring 2006 KSG Harvard Masters Project This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 License Table of Contents An Introduction ..……………………………………………………….... 2 - Study Components ……………………………………………….. 3 - The Limitations of Popular Anecdotes …………...……………… 4 Part I: What’s Out There? Mapping A Corner of The Landscape ……….. 6 - Backing Up: Understanding the Context ………………………… 6 - Circling Back: Some Definitions ………………………………… 8 - Developing a Conceptual Framework …………………………… 10 - Features Structuring Participation & Production ………………… 12 - Features Structuring Community ………………………………… 14 - Strategies From the Real World: A Bit More on Why Communities Matter …………………………………………………………….. 17 - Identifying What is Distinct in a Model …………………………. 18 Part II: What Do They Think? Surveying the Community ………………. 19 - Methodology ………………………………………………………. 19 - Summary of Survey Results ………………………………….…… 21 o Demographics …………………………………………….. 22 o How committed are they: Notes on usage behavior ………. 22 o How do they seek …………………………………………. 24 o Why do they seek: Primary uses ………………………….. 24 o Trading off: What do users most value ……………………. 26 o Credibility ………………………………………………… 28 o On Aesthetics ……………………………………………… 28 o Do they make friends: Extent a politicizing force ………... 29 o Motivations for contributing to content …………………… 30 o Sources of information …………………………………… o Barriers to contributing: Reasons for not writing content or 32 posting comments ………………………………………….. 32 o Perception of challenges …………………………………… 34 o Perceived strengths over MSM ……………………………. 37 A Discussion of Implications: Tying it all Together ……………………… 42 - What is Natural and What can be Built ………………………….. 44 - Their Side of the Story: Summarizing …………………………….. 48 Appendix and References ………………………………………………... 53 A Big Thank You! To all those involved with these websites who took time to give their opinions, thoughts, and advice. Special thanks also to the Center for Citizen’s Media and its logistical support in building awareness and response to this study. 1 An Introduction There is much confusion over the hype vs. reality of collaborative news and interactive technology’s impact. What is out there? How should the emergence of these innovations be analyzed? How do they differ from the communication and knowledge offered by traditional news formats? How do they change the engagement of citizens to each other and to societal issues? And following from any resolution to this confusion, how can they be used to improve news media for the future? The scope of this paper cannot fully address all these questions, but it will provide a starting outline on some. Many in the news industry have been fretting over the emergence of bloggers. Nervous headlines tinted with fear and loathing raised the common question of who qualifies as a legitimate journalist, (the subtext, of course, being would the profession of journalism survive). While some have relegated bloggers to the sidebar, concluding that the old news giants with their resources (and own reporters now blogging too) would continue to reign, bloggers were just the beginning. A scaleable, next generation of We Media has emerged. While traditional news media are finally dipping their toes in the waters and paying attention, most are still far from understanding and adopting what is happening at the edges. In the growing mass of voices, the key players who will organize the clutter and engage the voices (now also the eyeballs) are still being determined. Those who figure out how to best aggregate and distill the cacophony will win a loyal base. Those who also figure out how to create sustained conversations among the distilled sound will win a potentially powerful base. The news industry is undergoing a period of transformation. Some academics have been looking at recent initiatives by traditional news media that incorporate blogging and other forms of interaction. This study focuses on the other end, at emerging collaborative news organizations where the degree of innovation is most dramatic. Primary examples include (but are not limited to) OhMyNews, Wikinews, Global Voices, Digg, Slashdot, Newsvine, and Now Public. These models offer a basis for interesting comparisons between innovative structures and formats. As predominately online entities, they also offer useful inferences about the entry of Internet goliaths such as Yahoo and Google that are increasingly playing in the space of news content. Moreover, unlike Technorati and other algorithm based news aggregators, these sites offer an 2 interesting view of the human dynamics at play in what is too often seen as a 0s and 1s programmed sphere. During the past few months, I've been attempting to understand the successes and challenges of these collaborative news sites and their structures. Through the rest of this paper, I attempt to make more concrete the manner and degree to which these emerging models alter the nature of news/information, the creation of community, and the role of individuals beyond that of a spectator. In short, the extent to which any of this hype is true and matters. Study Components In Part I, the background context that’s feeding the emergence of these websites is briefly described. Next, conceptual frameworks are introduced to provide one way of analyzing the structure of collaborative news engagement and community. This is followed by a rudimentary format analysis of a few key examples and feedback from real world practitioners on some of the challenges currently faced. In Part II, discussion of a large-scale survey adds texture to an often un-examined piece of the puzzle -- how and why people value and use these collaborative sites. Mapping those cited behaviors and values against alternative site structures provides useful inferences on the strengths and weaknesses of recent innovations. While time did not allow a detailed dive, an overview is established from which to discuss how the sphere of news and conversation has shifted. To recap, there are three main pieces to this study on which discussion is based. I) Establishment of a conceptual framework II) Format analysis of key examples III) Large-scale survey of users (3,167 responses), interviews with website executives (8) 3 The Limitations of Popular Anecdotes There is much hype in every direction about the potential promises and problems in the next generation of participatory news and interactive technology. While some focus on the prospects for public empowerment, others focus on the veracity of information, and still others focus on the benefits of community. Three short stories exemplify these popular assertions: Anecdote One: “Every Citizen Is A Reporter” Oft-credited with balancing the political debate and altering the course of the 2002 presidential election for underdog, Roh Moo-hyun, the website OhmyNews has changed the news media ecology in South Korea. 1 Since its humble, but ambitious beginnings in 2000, OhmyNews now mobilizes 41,000 citizen contributors.2 Capturing the enthusiasm of 20 to 30 year olds, OhmyNews registered 20 million hits a day in a country of 42 million during that rough and tumble election period. 3 Aside from its political and journalistic accolades (ranked 6th most influential news organization by Sisa Journal), this year OhmyNews also heard a loud “cha- ching” from investors -- a note sounding to the tune of $11 million from Softbank, which will contribute to the enterprise’s international expansion.4 Aptly the poster child for citizen journalism, excitement is brewing as its founder Oh Yeon Ho proclaims, “The traditional paper says ‘I produce, you read’ but we say ‘we produce and we read and we change the world together.’”5 Anecdote Two: “Who Killed J.F. Kennedy?” Last year, John Siegenthaler Sr., found himself on the pages of Wikipedia (the world’s biggest encyclopedia written and edited by the public), implicated in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. The former special assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and founder of the First Amendment Center, was put in the awkward position of tracking down the prankster who posted the false entry.6 Around the same time Digg.com, a website also open to public posting, experienced a similar incident. Someone calling himself 'KoolAidGuy' gamed their system. Using multiple accounts, he succeeded in promoting false stories, such as “Google acquiring Sun Microsystems” onto the front page.7 Both incidents were eventually identified and flagged, however critics sounded the alarm bells, predicting that scammers would manipulate stock prices and spread misinformation. As Digg and Wikipedia offshoot, 4 Wikinews, seek to establish themselves among a larger public, the shadow of these stories continue to cast a cloud on their credibility. Anecdote Three: “Who Wants to Know about Life as a Rubber Man?” On October 28, 2005 a seventeen year old from Indiana wrote a 565 word post on CurrentTV’s discussion board about his life with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder. “Long story short I have joint hypermobility and skin-hyperplasticity. Long words meaning that my body is about as flexible as rubber.” Wanting to reach collaborators for producing a story about living with this condition, he asked “Any rubber men or women out there in cyberspace right now?”8 Based on the post, someone emailed Current TV, an online and cable channel started
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Google Earth 11 Math Activity: Finding the Area of U.S
    All Things Google Welcome to Teq’s latest eBook! Whether you’re brand new to Google’s education tools or are just looking for some extra tips and tricks, this eBook will help you make the most of all things Google in your classroom. Contents Section 1-Search Google Search 1 "Google A Day" Questions 1 Searching with Images 1 Search for Recent Results 2 Section 2-Drive What is Google Drive? 3 Research Tool in Google Docs 4 EasyBib to Google Docs 4 Redefine the Feedback Process with Kaizena 5 Section 3-Forms A Quick Overview of Google Forms 6 3 Ways to Distribute Google Forms 6 Embedding Images in Google Forms 7 5 Fabulous Form Features to Fortify Your Fall Lessons 7 Grading Google Forms with Flubaroo 10 Section 4-Earth Google Earth 11 Math Activity: Finding the Area of U.S. States 12 Creating Virtual Tours with Google Earth 13 teq.com All Things Google 1 Section 1 Search Google Search Did you know you can be more specific when searching with Google? Using search operators (support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861) can help you specify your search terms to get exactly what you need. Check out a few of these examples: Calculate: 12 * 2 returns product and the web calculator Convert: 50 ft to m returns conversion and web convert tool Filetype: add filetype:pdf after search terms to return PDF files Weather: weather New York will return the weather forecast, in this case "New York" Define/Dictionary: define cat will return the definition of the word, in this case "cat" Site-specific search: site:teq.com will return results from a specific site, in this case "teq.com" "A Google A Day" Questions Trying to enhance your students’ research and creative thinking skills? A Google a Day (www.agoogleaday.com) may be able to help.
    [Show full text]
  • Disinformation and Propaganda – Impact on the Functioning of the Rule of Law in the EU and Its Member States
    STUDY Requested by the LIBE committee Disinformation and propaganda – impact on the functioning of the rule of law in the EU and its Member States Policy Department for Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs Directorate General for Internal Policies of the Union PE 608.864 - February 2019 EN Disinformation and propaganda – impact on the functioning of the rule of law in the EU and its Member States STUDY Abstract This study, commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs and requested by the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, assesses the impact of disinformation and strategic political propaganda disseminated through online social media sites. It examines effects on the functioning of the rule of law, democracy and fundamental rights in the EU and its Member States. The study formulates recommendations on how to tackle this threat to human rights, democracy and the rule of law. It specifically addresses the role of social media platform providers in this regard. ABOUT THE PUBLICATION This research paper was requested by the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) and was commissioned, overseen and published by the Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs. Policy Departments provide independent expertise, both in-house and externally, to support European Parliament committees and other parliamentary bodies in shaping legislation and exercising democratic scrutiny
    [Show full text]
  • Journalists' Use of Newspaper Comment Sections in the Newsgathering Process
    JOURNALISTS’ USE OF NEWSPAPER COMMENT SECTIONS IN THE NEWSGATHERING PROCESS ______________________________________________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School University of Missouri ______________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts ______________________________________________ By Lisa R. Brown Dr. Tim P. Vos, Thesis Committee Chair December 2018 The undersigned, appointed by the Dean of the Graduate School, have examined the thesis entitled: JOURNALISTS’ USE OF NEWSPAPER COMMENT SECTIONS IN THE NEWSGATHERING PROCESS Presented by Lisa R. Brown A candidate for the degree of Master of Arts And hereby certify that in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. _____________________________ Professor Tim P. Vos _____________________________ Professor Margaret Duffy _____________________________ Professor Clintin Stober _____________________________ Professor Amy Simons ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the guidance of my Thesis Committee Chair, Professor Tim Vos, and committee members, Professor Margaret Duffy, Professor Clintin Stober and Professor Amy Simons. I also owe a great deal of gratitude to the previous program advisor, Sarah Smith- Frigerio and her successor, Kathy Appuhn-Hodges. I thank my family for their support during my graduate studies, especially my father, Bill Brown, who inspired me to always continue learning. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Abstract v Chapter I Introduction 1 Chapter II Literature Review 7 Gatekeeping
    [Show full text]
  • Online Participatory Media and International News
    The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy Working Paper Series THE WORLD-WIDE CONVERSATION: Online participatory media and international news By Rebecca MacKinnon Shorenstein Fellow, Spring 2004 #2004-2 Copyright © 2004, President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved THE WORLD-WIDE CONVERSATION Online participatory media and international news By Rebecca MacKinnon Prologue This paper marks the beginning of a personal quest. After working for CNN in Asia for over a decade, I stopped to take stock. I asked myself: Did my job as a TV news correspondent remain consistent with the reasons I went into journalism in the first place? My answer was “no.” When I decided to pursue a journalism career at the age of 21, naturally I did not want to work for free. But my primary reasons for wanting to become a foreign correspondent were idealistic and public-service oriented. I believed that a democratic nation such as the United States could only have responsible foreign policies that truly served the people’s interests – and intentions – if the public received quality, objective international news. I wanted to make a difference. To say that I made no difference covering China, Japan, Korea, and other parts of Asia to viewers in the United States and around the world would be overly cynical. But by early 2004 I concluded that my ability to make a difference on issues that I felt were important was diminishing. In November 2003 I interviewed Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, focusing primarily on his decision to send Japanese non-combat forces to Iraq despite widespread public opposition.
    [Show full text]
  • Who Is Addressed in This Comment? Automatically Classifying Meta-Comments in News Comments
    Who is Addressed in this Comment? Automatically Classifying Meta-Comments in News Comments MARLO HÄRING, University of Hamburg, Germany WIEBKE LOOSEN, Hans-Bredow-Institute, Germany WALID MAALEJ, University of Hamburg, Germany User comments have become an essential part of online journalism. However, newsrooms are often over- whelmed by the vast number of diverse comments, for which a manual analysis is barely feasible. Identifying meta-comments that address or mention newsrooms, individual journalists, or moderators and that may call for reactions is particularly critical. In this paper, we present an automated approach to identify and classify meta-comments. We compare comment classification based on manually extracted features with an end-to-end learning approach. We develop, optimize, and evaluate multiple classifiers on a comment dataset of 67 the large German online newsroom SPIEGEL Online and the “One Million Posts” corpus of DER STANDARD, an Austrian newspaper. Both optimized classification approaches achieved encouraging F0:5 values between 76% and 91%. We report on the most significant classification features with the results of a qualitative analysis and discuss how our work contributes to making participation in online journalism more constructive. CCS Concepts: • Information systems → Content analysis and feature selection; • Human-centered computing → Social media; • Computing methodologies → Supervised learning by classification; Neural networks; Cross-validation; Additional Key Words and Phrases: user comments; computational journalism; algorithmic classification; end-to-end machine learning; word embeddings ACM Reference Format: Marlo Häring, Wiebke Loosen, and Walid Maalej. 2018. Who is Addressed in this Comment? Automatically Classifying Meta-Comments in News Comments. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2, CSCW, Article 67 (November 2018), 20 pages.
    [Show full text]
  • Expanding Employee Protections
    THE HARMS OF RACIST ONLINE HATE SPEECH IN THE POST-COVID WORKING WORLD: EXPANDING EMPLOYEE PROTECTIONS Tatiana Hyman* In one year, the COVID-19 pandemic and egregious incidents of racial violence have created significant shifts in the United States’s workplace culture and social climate. Many employers are transitioning employees to long-term or permanent remote work, and conversations about racial justice are more pervasive and divisive, especially on social media. With people spending more time at home and on the internet, hate speech has increased and inspired global conversations about curtailing its harmful effects. Unlike many other countries, the United States does not penalize hate speech. Nevertheless, its harmful effects have reached the workplace, and employers have fired employees who posted offensive speech on their personal social media pages. Penalizing racist or offensive social media posts is left to employers’ discretion, resulting in inconsistent court rulings. More specifically, some courts have found conduct outside of the workplace and on social media to be actionable in workplace harassment claims while others have not. This Note proposes that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission should expand its guidelines to state that courts should consider racist hate speech on an employee’s personal social media page in the totality of the circumstances in Title VII hostile work environment claims. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................ 1554 I. THE HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT AND SOCIAL MEDIA HATE SPEECH PROTECTIONS .......................................................... 1561 A. Development of the Hostile Work Environment Claim ... 1561 B. Employer Liability for Harassment Claims .................... 1565 C. Tension Between Racial Harassment Claims and Sexual Harassment Jurisprudence ........................................... 1566 * J.D. Candidate, 2022, Fordham University School of Law; B.A., 2017, University of Pennsylvania.
    [Show full text]