In the past week, I’ve been tuned in and turned on to the debate surrounding the death of the newspaper, and possibly to the editors, journalists and other parts of the formal structure that delivers us, citizens, the news. I will admit, that I am a stereotypical 25 year old. I don’t watch the local news, I barely watch any network news channels, and I do not have a newspaper subscription. I abhor the San Francisco Chronicle, and the majority of my newspaper news comes from the New York Times daily news digest. My primary sources of news include the 15-20 minutes of NPR I listen to on my way to and from the gym each morning, and the weekly Economist. All this said, I do have a particular affinity for the newspaper. After all, my favorite activity has always been to read the New York Times Sunday newspaper, spread out across the table, and breakfast sitting nearby. If, it’s possible, my grandparents are sitting at the table with me because they provide excellent commentary.
Last Saturday I attended UC Berkeley’s School of Information (my alma mater), primarily because I wanted to hear John Markoff, of the New York Times, speak. I read Markoff’s book “What the Dormouse Said: How Sixties Counter Culture Shaped the Personal Computing Industry” in the Summer of 2006, and have been a fan of his ever since. Markoff’s speech was uncharacteristic of other commencement speakers because rather than offer life lessons to the new graduates, he took the opportunity to propose the “death of the newspaper” problem for the graduates to solve.
The few remarks that I have still been pondering include the following:
- Markoff stated that the average New York Times newspaper subscriber spends 30 minutes per day reading the news, where the average New York Times online subscriber spends 30 minutes per month reading the news.
- He fully believes that there must be another way of supporting the business of news, editors and journalism besides advertising and subscriptions; it is now our job to figure out that other “way”, i.e. business model.
- He likens the way in which we are consuming news online – via blogs, rss feeds, twitter, short headlines – now to the crank of the Model T; very exciting at the time, but outmoded, in retrospect. Essentially, sometime in the future we will look back at the present and be glad that we’re no longer consuming little packets of information at rapid fire.
Markoff alluded to a large point I learned in my Quality of Information class at the I-School. The technorati, and now the twitterati, have stripped away the formal institutions of editorialship. We’ve decided that we don’t need a news channel, newspaper or government telling us what is important information for us to know. We can decide for ourselves what information is important to us, and which opinions we want to hear. If the other old adage of the internet - a wide open place where people can explore new ideas that challenge their existing beliefs – was true, we would be better off in this situation. Unfortunately, homophily (“birds of a feather flock together”) is ever present in studies of human behavior online. This means that different opinions are less likely to circulate outside of those people that already hold those opinions. In theory, with journalists and a really balanced editor, news consumers should be presented with both sides of every story. Without these people, this most likely is not the case; people just don’t look for opinions different from their own.
The writers of the Economist’s “Tossed by a gale” took a very traditional look at the downfall of the industry and the takeover of the “citizen journalists” of the internet. While Markoff spoke to the human experience of consuming news, the Economist offered a more analytical view of the problem, using statistics and commentary from editors and politicians. One paragraph struck a deep chord with me:
The Wal-Marts of the news world are online portals like Yahoo! and Google News, which collect tens of thousands of stories. Some are licensed from wire services like Reuters and the Associated Press. But most consist simply of a headline, a sentence and link to the newspaper or television website where the full story can be read. The aggregators make money by funneling readers past advertisements, which may be tailored to their presumed interests. They are cheap to run: Google News does not even employ an editor.
It was primarily this last sentence that sparked off my internal debate this week, which I externalized to a few friends via personal conversations. My original thought was that the Economist’s definition of an editor led them to misinterpret how Google News actually works. Most dictionaries say that an editor has to be a person, but I argue that it does not. As a user interface designer and engineer, I can say that applications are structured in a way to guide the user down a particular path of actions and assumptions. The design of Google News and its functionality certainly act as an editor, particularly the default “sort by relevance”. This functionality is not a person, as the definition of “editor” states, but performs the duties of an editor.
Google News determines “relevance” by identifying particular news sources as more trusted or reliable than others. This simple act is editing. When a user searches on a topic, the service will offer an article written by CNN over John Doe’s blog, which might be reposting the same content that is on CNN or reporting their take on the topic. A search by date may show both sites with the same article. After Google decides which sources are more “relevant”, its news items on the “relevant” sites rests in the hands of actual journalists and editors. This means that Google News relies on editors employed at other institutions to decide which news is important for the user to know. A friend of mine called this layered editoring, as the preference of different sites over others is based on the reputation of the editors from those sites.
If I have proved to you that Google News search by “relevance” acts as an editor, and the entire service rests on what we call layered editoring, then we can say with confidence that the following two are true: If all the editors in the world disappeared, then Google News could not work. And, if there are fewer newspapers in 10 years, Google News is going to be far worse, not any better. Then we better believe that Markoff’s hope for another business model to support the news industry is out there and ready to be implemented if we are going to have a way to filter through to well-written articles by real journalists.