Editors – the future DJ’s of the news world?
The media landscape is becoming more fragmented, and media habits are changing rapidly. New technology and new platforms give us more choices, and nowadays we are watching TV and surfing the Internet at the same time, or reading the news on our cell phone on our way to work.
Print newspapers have been predicted an imminent death, but according to a McKinsey report, they are still the most trusted medium. Some of that credibility rubs off on the online versions, a fact that could help the newspapers in the fight for readers and profitability. Because with today’s abundance of information, credibility is not to be taken for granted any more. And that challenge is going to be even greater as the number of news sources increases almost by the minute. How to distinguish between personal statements, rumors and facts? Maybe the newspapers’ (both print and online editions) role in the future is to check and confirm that the source is reliable and to ensure diversity when it comes to topics?
Without newspapers or similar reliable sources to give us a news overview we know we can trust, we could risk either spending too much time to dig down into one or a few themes, or sifting through a lot of useless information searching for reliable sources. During the situation with the ash cloud from Iceland, a search for “volcano + airplane” resulted in 795 000 hits. Where to begin? Which sources should we trust?
Media houses are very aware of this, and are continuously working on new solutions and different ways of presenting news. Unfortunately, the changes that are made are too small, and they come too late. I, for one, am looking forward to the day I can get my morning news served a la The Twitter Tim.es. But it would have to be in a much more flexible format with more variety, where the themes are less auto-generated – and with good editors to ensure that the information comes from reliable sources.
Or how about letting the newspaper be partially a social platform? There are already online newspapers that to a large extent rely on user-generated content and selected bloggers as well as journalists, but where the user-generated content is quality checked by moderators. The French newspaper Le Post (a subsidiary of the prestigious French newspaper Le Monde) is already using this model, and after two years of operation they have approx. 2.5 million unique visitors per month.
In December 2009, Google announced their Living Stories Project, which is a completely new way of presenting news. In short, the main idea is to present each news story in a more dynamic way than the current format with static articles supplemented with fast facts and links.
A Living Stories page is basically divided into four main sections; a summary, a timeline, an update stream and one or more filters.
Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have helped testing the concept. The project is now completed and the articles are no longer being updated with new information, but here you can see an example of one of the stories in The New York Times. It may not be the perfect way of presenting news, but it’s definitely a good start.
According to LWN.net, 75% of the readers preferred the new format to traditional ways of presenting news stories, and – this is something all online newspapers would be happy to experience – they spent “a significant amount of time exploring stories.” when the articles were presented in the Living Stories format.
If this becomes a common way to present news stories, one can also imagine that the role of the editor will be different in the future. Maybe they will be responsible for selecting the main topics/feeds of each story, defining which 2 or 3 tags to sort the information flow by and which sources of information to base the story on, thus giving each story their own personal touch.
Probably each editor will be developing their own style of presenting stories, leading to us seeking out the newspaper and the editor we like the best. You’ll soon get a favourite editor or two because you like the choices they make of sources and trending topics and the information package they put together on “their” stories. You trust that they are going pick the right sources and the right tags to give you the best information.
So maybe we will get editors with celebrity status in the future, or maybe there is a whole new profession emerging; the info-DJs?
