The changing face of news online

May 6, 9:04 AMDenver Internet ExaminerMari Kurisato

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So where do you find your news?

Newsreporting at Lightspeed

This article is likely to be biased. Some of that bias is obvious.  I write for an online news source, as a tech blogger, and my beat is the Internet, or at least the part of it that matters to Denver. So yes, while many still do get their news from the porch or the rack next to their coffee shop on the way to work, this article will (mostly) focus on  news online.

We all know by now where MY favorite news source is. I've practically mentioned them in every article recently, though it was really the Hudson River plane landing that made Twitter a popular news source from a media perspective. My favorite Twitter news feeds are @CBS4DENVER, @BreakingNews, and @INDT,The trouble with Twitter, though is that the news might be reaching you as it happens, but all too often incorrect information is passed along the world wide network  before more accurate news sources can dig in deep.  The H1N1 outbreak was the perfect storm example,  because within hours of the first reports of swine flu the Twitter network swarmed with conflicting messages, and very little facts, until the Center for Disease Control started countering the fear based messages with facts on their own Twitterfeed.

Perspective:

The problem with news reported by regular citizens, no matter how well meaning they are, or how long they've been at it, is that the quality of citizen reporting varies to a greater degree than those who investigate, analyze and report news for a living. We're not just talking being guilty typos or grammar that would make Strunk and White scream and wail, but also (more importantly,) a greater degree of factual errors. Investigative journalists have more resources than newsbloggers generally, a tried true method of pounding the pavement here or across the world to investigate the news, corroborate it with third party sources. They have the funds to do that. They have editors, if not a staff of fact checkers to find errors. Mea Culpa on that, as well, though thankfully crowdsourcing editors (you, the readers) has given me the ability to go back and correct mistakes. But many "newsbloggers" don't, and while they are on the rise, AP schooled newspaper investigative journalists are finding it harder to get paid.

Clearly since I am in the first camp, I think there is and should be room for both types of news-sources, but as the venture capital raising failure of the INDENVER Times shows, things are tougher for those who do this for a living. Without journalists to disseminate the raw data that's reflexively reported on the web, all the information at hand loses its perspective, and real news gets drowned out in the chatter of a billion "tweets." So the problem as I see it, is that newsbloggers need to take journalism more seriously, and more importantly, the public at large needs to take active steps to ensure the news sources they care about are well funded and represented.

Chicken Little?

Maybe I'm over reacting, and things aren't as bad as they seem. Maybe the hordes of unemployed journalists will join the ranks of the millions of the unemployed, and move on with life, becoming water color painters. We still have have the Denver Daily News, the Westword, the Denver Post,  the Denver area news stations, like 9 news,  or CBS4Denver Fox31,  my employers,  and the In Denver Times is still around. Is that enough?Too much? That's a lot of media clamoring for your eyeballs and resulting advertising revenue. 

I don't really have any answers, as you've probably guessed by now. Many questions. I definately think the face of news online as well as offline is changing, but what about you? What do you think? Survival of the fittest? That might be the newsblogger, who costs far less to fund than the journalist and fact checkers. But is free worth the price?

One last question. Where do you get your news? If you want to post a URL, email and I'll attach it to the column at the end here.

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