In the world of news, change is in the air and even billionaire News Corporation director Rupert Murdoch can smell it: I believe too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers.\
Murdoch is right: Our generation doesn't consume the news like previous ones did, forcing traditional news outlets to play a long-overdue game of catch-up.
But what is it about us modern news consumers that has media executives in a tizzy, turned the traditional anchorman into a relic and contributed to reduction in newspaper circulations?
For one, we don't put much stock into traditional broadcast news—I think it's unlikely that our generation will have a Walter Cronkite or a Ted Koppel. While Jon Stewart has become an icon, he's more of a comedian/commentator than a newsman. In former CBS News Director Andrew Heyward's words, he's the second paragraph in the conversation between news producers and news consumers that's arisen in the wake of cable news pundits and, more importantly, the blogosphere.
Granted, the hype surrounding ""new media"" ignores the fact that a good blogger is hard to find. But thanks to the elite armchair pundits, journalists have never been held more accountable for their mistakes, improving the quality of the news for everybody.
According to Heyward, the rise of news aggregators such as Google News, Yahoo! News and Digg.com empowers readers with an endless amount of choice and convenience. To the dismay of The AP, Reuters and other reporting agencies, modern consumers are less concerned with where the stories come from than they are with an article's relevance to their lives.
Heyward suggested that many modern consumers get their news unbundled—a Yahoo! News story here, a blog summary there and other bits and pieces coalesce to form their news intake. According to Heyward, the increasing ""iPodization"" of Americans has made the notion of an album quaint and packaged news less appealing.
While this technological shift has the potential to make the news deeper and more valuable to the consumer, readers need to tread carefully online—it's messy out there.
Whereas most respected newspapers and news magazines aim for a relatively centrist choice of content, blogs, podcasts and their ilk aren't subjected to any editorial process. They can be filled with inaccuracies, gossip and extreme bias.
UW-Madison professor of journalism Jack Mitchell said that ""the fact is that most of the people who participate in blogs or these other democratic media ... they don't have any new information. They're just using existing information, massaging it, selecting it.""
To borrow a brilliant term from Stephen Colbert, don't get caught up in the ""truthiness""of these media. Colbert defined truthiness as ""the quality by which one purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or intellectual examination."" The lesson? Read quality blogs for their deep insight and analysis, but always do it with a skeptical eye and your brain, not your gut.
It's easy to find the news you want online. While this process of self-selection makes readers happy, it could also lead to some disturbing consequences.
Mitchell said that the modern mode of news consumption ""will intensify divisions, because [your beliefs] will keep getting reinforced ... right-wing people go to Rush Limbaugh and left-wing people go to MoveOn.org.""
To avoid this ""self-reinforcing cocoon of information,""as Heyward described it, this generation of readers needs to be perceptive. Thankfully, growing up with the Internet has made us the most sophisticated news consumers ever.
UW-Madison journalism professor Greg Downey has a great formula for news-savvy web-heads. He uses RSS, software that brings together multiple news sources of the user's choice and conveniently organizes them on one comprehensive page, to create his own thorough news environment where The New York Times and The Economist hold court with partisan blog news source AlterNet, the hugely popular Daily Kos blog and local weblogs like Dane 101, the collaborative blog for Madison.
""This whole environment is really interesting,"" Downey said, ""because I can see news flowing internationally, nationally and locally all in one place and see the relationships between [the stories.]""
Heyward said that like artists, journalists must make order out of chaos, but I think he missed the full story. I believe that news consumers also can make order out of the chaos online. With enough discretion, common sense and a diverse RSS page, modern newsreaders can paint a picture of their world that's more accurate, deep and meaningful than ever.
Adam Dylewski is junior majoring in genetics and life-science communications. Next Monday, read how the news-making game might change in the wake of the Internet. Letters? Send
them to adylewski@wisc edu. \
