Social news not the same as ‘the news’

Just a quickie update. Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. wrote his own take on social news sites and crowd beha­viour therein back in March. He explains how untrue stories with a catchy title can very easily become widely dis­sem­in­ated. On the plus side, though, having thou­sands of editors also means that these stories are exposed as being false equally quickly. He thinks site com­munities that take a hard line on mis­in­form­a­tion and ensure cor­rec­tions are given as many votes as incor­rect stories are the ones that will flourish. Ultimately, though, he says it’s a matter of time before people grow up to realise that the front page of such sites is not ‘The News’ in the way the front page of a news­paper is. It’s a col­lec­tion of articles, or even just head­lines, that a number of people found interesting.

I take a similar view myself when it comes to a lot of ‘citizen journ­alism’, but I’m a bit more hopeful about its future. Yes, it’s easy to write anything you want without much fear of any serious con­sequence. And yes, it’s cur­rently fairly simple to get pretty wide coverage for this. But the thing is, sites that publish lies will surely lose readers. What’s more, the com­menting systems that are so integral to the blog exper­i­ence allow anyone to correct you instantly and, talking to the authors of a couple of high-​​profile blogs, people do. And thus the exposure of your mistakes become a per­manent part of the site, some­thing most of us want to avoid. This is a good thing, of course, because once bitten, it makes blog authors more careful about what they write. With news voting sites, once you’ve dis­covered that you ‘dugg’ a story that turned out to be untrue, won’t that make you a little bit more cautious going forward? Similarly, while a lot of mistakes and bad writing appears in Wikipedia, it’s con­tinu­ally being cor­rected and refined, so that over time it gets better and better.

That’s very dif­ferent to tra­di­tional media, where your editor and subed­itor — and hope­fully your training and pro­fes­sion­alism — will stop you making as many mistakes in the first place. But, on the other hand, the mistakes that do slip through tend to take a long time to be cor­rected, if at all, and those cor­rec­tions can quite easily be buried on page 32.

The madness of the masses

You see, the faster the news services the greater the chance of error. Social news sites can beat any tra­di­tional news site based on speed–but they are always going to suffer from the madness of the masses. The upside is that social news sites expose mis­in­form­a­tion almost as quickly as they dis­sem­inate it–will people remember the cor­rec­tion or just the incor­rect headline is the rub. Sometimes they will, some­times they won’t. The masses, and managers, of these sites are going to need to focus on cor­rec­tions as viol­ently as they do mis­in­form­a­tion, or the social news sites will turn into glor­i­fied message boards/​chat rooms.

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• When col­lab­or­a­tion fails