The Neiman Journalism Lab had an interesting story by Tim Carmody recently on “Journalists have lost control of the story”: Twitter, tech bubbles, and the nostalgia of the technology press. It discussed how the “accelerated news cycle of blogs, Twitter, and other digital media forces the technology press to work at the same speed as the investors they cover.”
They quoted Thomson Reuters’Connie Loizos who said. “Thanks to Twitter and, to a lesser extent, other social media likeQuora, information about startups and financings has become much more porous,” spreading good and bad information equally quickly, and in volume. “The first story out wins.” Reporters are not only competing against each other for scoops but also saavy investors and others who want to game the system in both legit and bad ways.
The article uses the termChurnalism, to refer to this situation and state that it is a much bigger problem than just press releases and wire stories. It is now everywhere and creating an echo chamber unprecedented in its size and reach. This echo chamber can crowd out more thoughtful analysis.
Picking up on this theme there was an interesting tweet that could a lot of play at SXSW
@robinsloan The way to cover big news in 2011 is not “here’s what happened.” It’s “here’s how to follow the story”http://t.co/sMqGOuh
It was reported and commented in Economist article,Meet the Curators. The article notes that that “aggregation” or “curation” of other people’s coverage is becoming recognized more and more as one of the indispensable elements of journalism. They add that, “Being able to scan a vast range of material, determine what’s reliable, relevant and sufficiently objective, decide what will actually interest your particular readers and arrange it in a way that they can use are not trivial skills.”
Continues @http://www.fastforwardblog.com