Cold comfort
2009-07-17 09:44
Who really sets the news agenda nowadays? Who breaks the big stories? With the rise of the internet it's become almost impossible to untangle the interlinked ecosystem of bloggers (or "citizen journalists") and the online offerings of traditional media.
But a fascinating study at Cornell University has done just that. Instead of painstaking manual analysis they came up with a brilliant way to analyse huge swathes of information during the frenzied news cycle of the 2008 US elections.
Using cunning web search algorithms they scanned 1.6 million news providers and blogs for distinctive phrases that acted like digital footprints, and analysed how they spread between the sites. One such phrase - Obama's infamous "lipstick on a pig" quip - is the centrepiece of the study.
In essence the study found that blogs trail traditional news providers by two and half hours. In other words it seems to prove that bloggers get their leads from "real" journalists - that they follow rather than set the news agenda.
Anecdotally this seems obvious. On the whole Bloggers tend to analyse rather than expose. The millions of amateur bloggers out there don't have the time or resources to break news about Iraq or Washington when they are sitting in a living room in Liverpool or Lydenburg.
But the research is also flawed in many respects. Firstly, as the Nieman Journalism Lab point out, the researchers defined mainstream as anything indexed by Google News, but many prominent blogs are part of that index and so would tend to distort the results.
And then there's the problem of how to define a blog. This seems obvious but is an increasingly grey area. The Huffington Post may have begun life as an "insider" political blog, but now it employs nearly 100 fulltime employees.
Even in South Africa, which (according to our survey last year) doesn't yet support one fully professional blogger, there's plenty of grey. Are the journalists and experts who write for Thought Leader bloggers or columnists?
And if you do make money from your blog, like the cheekily amusing Seth Rotherham of 2oceansvibe, does that make you a professional journalist? Does it even matter?
Another hole in the study is the absence of Twitter, although the researchers could never have predicted how influential the plucky micro-blogging startup would become when they started the study early in 2008.
We can only hope they will repeat the study and include Twitter. I suspect that Twitter will lead all other by at least 30 minutes, proving that a huge part of its value is as a source of news leads (rather than actual confirmed or "hard" news).
Cornell's study will be comforting to traditional media players, desperate to maintain their hold on daily relevance, but that comfort is both false and short lived.
Professional blogs will continue to grow and spread, eating into their markets and undermining their business models.
In reality media is a just an ecosystem of people that filter the world into packets of easily consumable information. What the internet has done is removed the costs of publishing that information, and thus flooded the world with information sources.
The challenge for the future is filtering and ranking those sources - separating the real information from gossip, spin, exaggeration and outright lies. If traditional media has any hope of surviving they need to recognise their inherent value as a filter, and not hanker after the days when they were a source.
- Alistair is Social Media Manager at 20FourLabs.
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