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Can a crowd really edit our daily paper?

Victor Keegan

News selection based on the "wisdom of crowds" could turn into the madness of crowds.

ONE OF the most fascinating questions is what, if any, future there is for newspapers as the creative destruction of the Internet gathers pace. What is happening to the media is merely a high-profile version of what is going on in almost every other activity from politics to film-making. The digital revolution is turning ordinary people into both creators of content (whether videos, online journals or books) and arbiters of the process that decides what gets published and how it is rated.

Some people are familiar with automatic newspapers of the kind provided by Google, which trawl the world's media and assemble stories in merit order according to the number of links they have to other sites. You can also design your own paper by typing in the topics you want to appear on your customised page. It is often too slow to display important news because of insufficient links but the miracle is that it does it at all — and is free. Most newspapers rightly believe that the benefits of being linked to Google's search engine, with its increasing global reach, outweigh the disadvantages — that they cannot charge.

But now a new generation of news sites such as Megite and Reddit, which enable readers, not algorithms, to decide the prominence of stories is gathering force. The biggest by far is Digg.com, which has upgraded its service to embrace world and business news as well as technology. People press a "Digg" button when they like a story or blog they have come across. These are aggregated so that the most popular rise to the top. Improvements just announced enable you to read stories that your friends consider "diggworthy" and to access subjects that interest you but are buried beneath the 2,000 stories processed daily.

Later this month, Digg will let you watch real time graphic representations of stories as they arrive. Digg is still pretty small by web standards, but it clearly has huge potential. It is all awesome, but it won't necessarily kill off newspapers.

News selection based on the "wisdom of crowds" may be brilliant when applied to technology stories but could easily turn into the madness of crowds and the death of serious news if applied to everything that happens.

A journal in which all content is judged by readers runs the danger of making the most popular, gossipy tabloid look distinctively upmarket. The survival of newspapers will depend on how quickly they absorb new technologies. Services such as Google News need newspapers because without them they would have nothing to recycle. This raises a paradox: the more successful they are, the less successful they will be because they will kill the golden goose that has been feeding them.

The need to be the first blog on the block to spread a bit of regurgitated news, complete with your own spin, is not obviously a way to become a trusted brand. Speed is the enemy of depth.

Newspapers still have a vital role in generating trusted content. Whether it then appears on printed paper, on a portable screen, on a website complete with video (making it converge with television) or a mobile device (where the potential has only been scratched) remains to be seen. At least newspapers, unlike the music industry, are not trying to deny that a revolution is taking place. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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