Weak links: In the emerging network of local news start ups, flow matters. June 30, 2011 {*style:<b> A new report for The Chicago Community Trust analyzes news flows in Chicago and provides a thought-provoking analysis of the city’s emerging news ecosystem and the roles of key information providers and sharers.
It also shows the potential power of Web savvy community news start ups and nontraditional information providers as a new news environment takes shape. </b>*} In the national, often web-ideology-driven debate about value on the Web, on organizations doing the expensive work of actually producing original content. But . Nowhere is this more apparent than in my home base, Chicago, where feisty news start ups like Gapers Block , Windy Citizen and dozens of others, frequently link to the best content on other, lesser known sites. As Andrew Huff, editor and publisher of Gapers Block told me this week in an e-mail: ( I am an advisor to the Trust’s Community News Matters project as a Knight Foundation Circuit Rider .
By Michele McLellan, 06/30/11 at 3:17 am. The seven steps to a successful aggregation strategy for your news organization. Media have changed in ways that now make aggregation essential to the mission of almost any news organization.
Readers face an abundant and growing volume of news and news sources. Most cities now have independent news websites, forums and blogs covering neighborhoods and particular topics. Other professional news outlets are stepping up their output. Someone has to make sense of it. Someone has to look beyond his own newsroom and give readers a comprehensive digest.
This does not diminish the great value of your own original journalism. Here are the seven things you’ll need to decide in order to design a smart aggregation strategy and make your website a central hub of community information and discussion. 1. The easiest way to get into aggregation may simply be to create an automated feed of the latest headlines from other news sources. Storyful. The Human Algorithm. When I became a reporter, almost 20 years ago, my job was to dig up scarce, precious facts and deliver them to a passive audience.
Today, scarcity has been replaced by an unimaginable surplus and that audience is actively building its own newsroom. Journalists the world over are struggling to cope with a social and mobile tsunami of ‘user generated content’, to use an increasingly inadequate phrase. Twitter and YouTube will overwhelm news organisations who can’t master their potential. A common mistake for those seeking to cope with this profound disruption is to confuse technology with innovation. Algorithms, apps and search tools help make data useful but they can’t replace the value judgements at the core of journalism.
Genuine innovation requires a fundamental shift in how journalists think about their role in a changed world.