I found the following (and the headline above) at CyberJournalist.net:
Tech Crunch editor Mike Arrington said sites like Digg are going to fundamentally change the way news is consumed by consumers even more than blogs are – and transform journalists’ jobs in the process as well.
“People are more and more realizing that editors aren’t necessarily the best ones to be filtering what’s the most important news,” he said at a panel on”User-Generated Content and Trends for 2007″ at the Online News Association conference.
He predicts there will be a fundamental split between the news gatherers and the news filterers, and that people will turn to one type of site, like Digg, to filter the news, and just use to places like The New York Times and Reuters for the actual information. As a result, he thinks the jobs of journalists will fundamentally change to focus primarily on the news gathering.
If you are unfamiliar with sites like Digg, you can skip the rest of this.
The company I work for operates three state news networks (Missourinet, Radio Iowa and Wisconsin Radio Network) with bureaus in Jefferson City, Des Moines and Madison. The men and women who staff these newsrooms work hard gather and report the news. They dig up a lot of the stories on their own and some are contributed by reporters at our affiliated radio stations.
These stories wind up in the radio newscasts (and sports reports) we send (via satellite) back to the affiliate stations. And we post some or all of them to our network websites. In some sense, we are attempting to cover and report on the most important stories in the state. That’s my oversimplification of the process but good enough.
Other news organizations are doing the same thing. And a relatively small number of reporters and/or editors decide which stories get play and how much.
Here’s my question and, as I said above, if you’re not a Digg’er you won’t know what I’m talking about…
What if readers were digging (or burying) stories based on how interesting or important they found each? Would the stories our newsrooms are reporting get dugg? Or buried?
Can we take the position that four people in our newsroom are more qualified to say what is important than the news consumers reading the stories? I think most journalists would say “absolutely.” And most readers would answer, “No way, Jose.”
I’m already relying on a number of trusted (by me) bloggers to filter my news consumption. When Doc Searles or Jeff Jarvis or Dave Winer point to a story… I’m inclined to follow the link.
What I’d really like to see is a Digg-like site for each of the states where we have networks. It would be interesting to see if our stories made it to the coveted home page.
One final thought: If you are a journalist or involved in the news business/profession in any way… and have no idea what I’m talking about… uh, never mind.
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