Media
“If the news is important, it will find me”
Brian Stelter has a great piece in the New York Times that I urge anyone interested in the media business to go and read right now — I’ll wait — and that includes reporters, editors and (most of all) managers, and probably IT departments and designers as well. The context of the piece is political reporting and political news, but I think the points Brian is making are relevant to the entire industry as a whole.
It’s not that there is anything earth-shatteringly new in the piece, mind you. But I think it does a great job of describing how digital “word of mouth” — in other words, social networking of all kinds including Twitter, IM, Facebook and so on — has become a dominant means of news delivery for young people in a way that I’m not sure old geezers like myself quite grasp, no matter how often people describe it (and Stelter knows whereof he speaks, since he was still in university when the NYT hired him away from TV Newser). As Brian describes it in the story:
In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.
And then Stelter mentions Jane Buckingham of the Intelligence Group, a market research company, and says that during a focus group, one of the subjects — a college student — said to her:
“If the news is that important, it will find me.”
Think about that for a second — or longer, if necessary. I think that sums up, in ten simple words, what has happened to the way that many people (and not just young people, but those who use RSS readers and blogs and social networks as well) consume the news (Mark Cuban seems to think so too). Not only is there just so much of it out there that it’s virtually impossible to consume it all, but the very fact that someone you know — or trust — has passed on or blogged or Twittered or posted a link makes it more likely that you will read it.
Are most websites designed with this kind of principle in mind? Not really. Most of them are still designed as though people read the news the same way they do in the paper — starting at the front and moving page by page towards the back (of course, many people don’t read the newspaper this way either, but that’s another story). In reality, people come from every conceivable angle, dropping into stories and then disappearing, finding them through links and posts and Digg and elsewhere.
If the news is that important, it will find me.
Discussion
for ““If the news is important, it will find me””
Uh, would you say "if knowledge is important, it will find me."? No.
Obviously this approach wouldn't apply in all cases, or with all kinds
of knowledge, Michael -- some kinds of knowledge are obviously worth
seeking out on their own. Are you saying that every article in a
newspaper falls into that category?
In any case, not everyone has the time to seek out knowledge in every
place it might pop up -- why shouldn't they find it however they can?
Isn't that better than not finding it at all?
Ummm.
Yes.
millenials are masters at networking. they are in control of their likes and dislikes in ways we didn't dream of as kids and teenagers. these are people who grew up with "america's funniest videos" and "the real world". Privacy? Voyerism? their definitions are very different from ours.
knowledge, if is important, will get to them because they have networks of people "watching their backs" and taking care of their pipeline.
if you are my age, you became an adult in the 80s, at a time when you had to choose between "networking" to get a job and become a yuppie or saying FU to the man and punking out in one club after another.
trust me. networking, the way they do it, has NOTHING to do with the 'networking', the dirty word i loved to hate in the 80s.
Sorry, I am not from the USA, perhaps it means I don't have the background to understand completely, but from what you say I understand that creating a network of relationships spares you the pain of seeking your own sources of information (news or knowledge, i think the distinction is irrelevant). This tends to promote a passive way of getting informed, and is therefore very dangerous : what I get from my network is not necessarily traceable, nor true (factually... as far as this word as any meaning). In that way of behaving towards information, I delegate the checking for relevance to others, who delegate it to others, who... This means I am even more vulnerable to gossips, hoaxes, or simply mistakes or misunderstood pieces of information. It is the dream of advertisers and public relation people.
Saying if info is important it'll find me is just like saying when i'm really hungry somebody will appear and give me a sandwich. It can be true if you have some good friends "watching your back", but if it does not happen in time it is deadly, and it is not reliable.
I take it just as a mistake in the sense of the implication. Passing to your network information that you think is important does not mean that you will receive the important information when you need it (the importance being relative to each node of the network). Believing so is just letting your network decide on what sould be important to you. This makes you vulnerable to manipulation.
perhaps the difficulty here is the confusion of the two terms 'knowledge' and 'news.'
News is a small group of facts, some of which may have a dubious quality to them, and geared towards relating a particular situation and/or analysis of the event.
Knowledge has more of a perspective of the event which can and usually does, have a greater perspective of the events, theory or accumulated group of facts as they fit into the landscape of the total wholeness.
Networking via people you trust, or will come to trust, is more active than the process of depending upon the process of depending upon the network of televisions and newspaper accounts. For as a participant in a network, the news you receive will only be as reliable as the news you transmit. This becomes a swap meet of information. You have ideas and observations which are not possible by another human being, strictly because you are you and no one else. You transmit these things and receive observations which others have as well.
Important news, such as major catastrophes, governmental declarations, and other such things were quickly passed through the word of mouth channels even before the advent of the internet. However with the development of social networks on the internet, this information travels in real time to a wide variety of people, who then pass it on to other people and therefore the news becomes filtered into its importance.
Importance is not something that has to be known right away. The knowledge of the events on 9/11/2001 is more important than the instantaneous absorption of the event itself. If someone did not know about it for a week or two, their life would not be significantly downgraded, if at all. and perhaps it would have even enhanced their life to not watch it over and over again on the passive networks(television)
News is time-sensitive. Knowledge isn't.
-Aidan
Thanks, Aidan. That's an excellent way of putting it.
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 9:18 PM, Disqus
"Are most websites designed with this kind of principle in mind? Not really."
you need to qualify this because not everybody as you note, comes through the front page. to paraphrase what zeldman said succinctly in his book, "Designing with Web Standards" : Search engines are not only your biggest audience.
to keep this in mind, it's not the design that one has to think of as in "what does my front page look like", it's the information architecture, especially the implementation of taxonomies, that really makes a difference in creating multiple participation planes and points of entry in a blog.
Thanks for making that point, Liza -- I think you are right. And when
I said "designed," I meant not just the way they look but also the
structure or the way they work.
and that was half a paraphrase :D
it should have said, "Search engines are not only your biggest audience, they're also blind". meaning, that accessibility is a big deal in making all those points of entry happen.
which, btw, is very much how millenials, the subjects of the article, think of. "accessibility" is a big deal : blogs, twitter, myspace, livejournal, facebook, texting, phone, email .... you get the point.
to me, btw, this is not a generational thing since people like you and me share to a certain degree the same networking practices ---but that's why for our generation we're nerds, geeks, outsiders by being in the vangard.
with the millenials, we're talking about a whole generation of you and mes.
and, btw, even within the "digital divide" context the idea holds.
i'm writing a paper about this which is why am soundboarding here ;)
I think you are onto something :-) I'd love to see the paper when you're done.
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 6:59 PM, Disqus
Mathew, it turns out that by sharing this item on Google Reader, those who subscribe to my feed, or my Friendfeed found it this way. That means it works!
Thanks for proving my point, Louis :-) I think it's on Techmeme and
YCombinator's aggregator too, judging by my server logs.
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 9:39 PM, Disqus
as it turns out that is really how del.icio.us and stumbleupon work too - "like minded" people suggest things for you to look at.
This was true a hundred years ago.
The more important, relevant or impacting a piece of news was, the more likely you would hear about it, and the sooner. Other factors effect it, like, the number and type of a persons contacts, as well as other factors. But otherwise, the essence was as true then as now.
I like to read the news too but I'd admit that most of it is like junk food.
Extremely important and urgent news, like "A large monster is approaching this city. Run for your lives!" will probably reach me right around when I need to know it. Would I like to know it as soon as possible, with as much advanced warning? Sure. That's another issue. But if it's important and relevant to me, it will find me or I will stumble on it. Or... it will stumble on me, as in: "Run for your lives! It's Gojira! Goj--" *squish*
Mike, I would agree that this is not really something new -- and Brian
mentioned that in his NYT piece. What is happening (I would argue) is
that it's occurring a lot more, and a lot faster.
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 10:35 PM, Disqus
This blog post is proof that if news is that important it will find me. I found this blog through another site which choose to link to you and I would never find the NYT article if you didn't linked on it. Rather then the site I found it on link to the article, they linked to you. This is then essence of 'word of mouth' on the internet.
Genius.
Usually the news of an extremely wonderful, sexy, important, life-changing local conference reaches me on the day after the conference ends. And I go, oh, shit. Why can't the news about these things find me BEFORE they happen?
Exactly, Natch -- excellent example :-)
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 11:13 PM, Disqus
depends on how you define "important"
most kids define it as "what everyone else is talking about"
so, yes, "important" news will "find" you simply BECAUSE everyone else is talking about it
If you want to know about more than what's already on everyone's lips, you have to look for it yourself.
It's a great approach, one that keeps my RSS feed list from exploding from 250 to 1000 – those blogs that have 1 good post in 20 I no longer subscribe to, that one good post will find me.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the news websites were jammed all day. At my office in downtown Toronto, we would call out to each other if someone actually got onto a news site, and people would gather around that monitor for information about the World Trade Center attacks. The next day I noticed that the corner newspaper boxes were ALL emptied (sold out) by midday. Would these things not be the case if it happened now? In five years?
I think they would likely be the same. But how does that contradict
what I described? I'm not saying that newspapers are going to be
obsolete -- just that the way people find the news is changing.
On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 4:10 PM, Disqus
I think trust and credibility are two criterion that we had to take for granted before we had the distribution platform that we enjoy with the internet today. Now, news is filtered through by people we trust directly, or in the case of social news sites, by a community we can trust. While it doesn't always work, more often than not, we can get relevant news we trust, and very quickly. Unless traditional news organisations figure out a way to do the same, they will struggle.
I agree, Shafqat.
Tremendously important concept - that if the news is important, it will find me. I had this same quote in my book, Media Rules! -- I was talking to Mark Lukasciewicz from NBC News about a focus group that he did with young women regarding Nightly News.
Thanks for the comment, Brian. I hope Mark (who is Canadian, by the
way) keeps that in mind now that he's in charge of NBC News' digital
operations.
On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 5:49 PM, Disqus
Matt after reflecting on this idea it really riled me. Online news via social networking is closer to just extending the wasteland than it is to news nirvana.
http://www.webguild.org/2008/03/important-news-...
As I said on your post, I have to disagree with you, Joe.
Yes, the echo chamber is a real problem, and it's true that people are
often distracted by frivolous "news," but I still think the value of
social networking overcomes that. The friends I rely on to bring me
great links or bring things to my attention are (like me) interested
in a broad and diverse range of things, both deep and shallow, things
that I may not pay attention to -- and I like to think I serve the
same function for others in different ways.
That's what I mean by news finding me.
On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 8:41 PM, Disqus
In order for this to be true, people have to be immersed in networked (new) media.
We should be careful with the assumption that "young people" are immersed in new media and "old geezers" aren't.
I teach citizen journalism at a local university and I'd say less than 10% of them use these things regularly.
Blogs and microblogs are not a generational phenomenon - I think rather that they appeal to a certain personality type.
You might be right, Matt -- but I think the principle extends to text
messaging, IM and Facebook. And at least judging by my own research
using my teenaged daughters, that is how they get a lot of their news.
I'm a 19 year old, highly connected college kid and I would change that to:
If news is relevant, it may find me.
The important stuff, I have to seek out.
For example, just today a friend read me a funny passage from CNN.com about couples getting even with each other. It was not important, but it found me.
I still have to actively seek (via RSS subscriptions) what I know is important - political/economic news.
Thanks for the comment, Kevin -- that's a good way of putting it.
On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 2:16 AM, Disqus