Editors or Algorithms: The new push for meta-journalism

I know the Online News Association conference is happening this week because nobody will shut up about it on twitter. It sounds like a really cool place where journalists are getting together and thinking innovation—which is exactly what needs to happen.

Jeff Jarvis posted this morning about Tina Brown’s speech and plans to launch an online site called The Beast, which plans to aggregate news with a team of more than 20 editors.

I posted a while ago about the opportunity for newspapers in aggregating content, whether that happens because staff pick stories or because the crowd votes things up or down. But the real question about aggregation is this: what happens to everyone’s job?

Jack FM

There’s a radio station called Jack FM that broadcasts in Los Angeles and makes gobs of money. They play random sections of Top 40 tracks from the 80s and 90s, and have no DJs. It’s all automated music and commercials.

You pay one tech to keep the equipment running, you pay for the broadcast fees, the lights and electricity, and then you laugh maniacally all the way to the bank.

Jack FM figured out that paying DJs, unless you’re Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh, is a losing proposition. So they skipped the whole thing.

Newspapers are on their way to that same crossraods. How essential is the editor? how much do they need staff journalists?

Netscape.com and Meta-Journalism

Back when Jason Calacanis ran Netscape.com for AOL, it lived as a sort of cyborg-digg-clone, where stories were submitted and voted on by users (just like Digg) but then as those stories became popular, editors and journalists (called navigators) would kick in and do some research, debunking or verifying the information, getting quotes, doing research, and generally doing to the things that “the crowd” tends to overlook.

It was a great service and I have no idea what happened to it. I can only assume it was unprofitable.

That’s worrisome because it suggests that aggregation can only be done profitably with algorythms or by relying on the wisdom of the crowds.

Not only would I rather find a solution for papers that saves a few jobs, but it seems like a bad idea to rely only on computers or groupthink to uncover and promote the things that are newsworthy.

In the long run, I suspect that newspapers will get used to the internet (or the new startup newspaper entrepreneurs will), and we’ll find a way to subsidize the editors and journalists by selling ads all the way down the long tail, basically the way Google operates.

But it will be interesting to see what Tina Brown comes up with. It just might work.

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