Does online-only news narrow readers’ understanding? | The Australian October 12, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentThat’s what an Australian ad/comms agency suggests, drawing on its survey of 200 people:
“…by using online as an exclusive source of news people are starting to consume more information but — and this is the important point — across fewer topic areas. […]
…as consumers of news we’re becoming increasingly intelligent or knowledgeable about very niche topic areas, but from an overall perspective, our understanding of world and national events is a bit more superficial. […]
…70.1 per cent claimed that the internet allows them to avoid news topics that are not of interest. […]
…online news readers are not typically venturing outside the same few topics or information areas — 59.9 per cent tend to read information from the same sections.[…] However, 62.7 per cent of people claim that when they buy a paper they often read articles that they hadn’t intended to.”
Is crowd-sourcing edging into mainstream journalism — or is it just an online survey? October 8, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Journalism, National newspapers, News, Online, citizen journalism, reporting , add a commentHow far did asking readers for their input help Jay Rayner with his Observer article on genetically modified foods, published last Sunday? He found it a mixed bag — and a lot more work, he says.
It involved digesting hundreds of emails and online comments, says Rayner, including 159 comments on the original request online — but:
In the end, although I didn’t set out to do it this way, almost every single research paper I consulted came via our call to arms, as did three of the four main interviewees (two from each side).
My impression is that this kind of crowd-sourcing has been edging more into mainstream journalism — but often in a different way from Rayner’s “exercise in open-source journalism” (as he calls it).
Take another current example: the BBC’s iPM asking for readers/listeners to flag up what element of their spending has been hit hardest by the ‘credit crunch’, which it’s plotting on a map. Similarly, the Times Online sought readers’ comments on its 2008 Budget Survey, plotting them on a Google map — Andy Dickinson helped out. This survey-style approach is automated, of course, and so can handle large numbers of responses — clearly essential when we’re talking about more than 22,000 responses, as with iPM.
There may be a trade-off. Go for as many responses as possible, with a narrow set of questions and possible responses (so it can be readily automated). A large response might make results more reliable and/or representative. But it’s still essentially a survey, even if it has the online equivalent of bells and whistles.
On the other hand, a Rayner-style invitation to contribute is more blog-like and open-ended — which means a human has to read and digest the responses. But a ‘click here’ survey wouldn’t get you research papers and interviewees.
In the end I suspect there’s a place for open-ended crowd-sourcing, surveys, and much in between. Including pointers that help to produce a scoop.