This is scary. Tewspaper, which proudly bills itself as the 'online newspaper with no writers', has just launched in the US. It uses 'crowd-sourcing' (how we hate that word...) to rank news stories, and using various social media technologies we don't pretend to understand, provides local news for five cities - Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and New York.
It is - sorry but there's no other way to put this - utter shite, of course. No one in their right mind would choose to use it over a proper news website with, you know, proper journalists. It's not great to look at, it's just recycling other people's content and it can't even do that well. As we write this, the top 'National Politics' story is Fox News' 'Ex-Race Horse Makes Recovery After Equine Hell'.
So, if it's rubbish, why is it scary? Because this, unfortunately, is the future we face - an ever-decreasing number of journalists having their copy repackaged in an ever-increasing number of ways by an ever-increasing number of computers. The opportunity to publish a newspaper or run a news website without paying for any journalists at all is, to marketing/publishing types, pretty much irresisitible. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
1 comments:
It looks to me like an aggregator (albeit a bad one). Aggregators require content, which in turn requires journalists to create it somewhere down the line. The existence of this website does not stop ESPN, Fox News and all the other sites it aggregates from needing to employ journalists, so I don't really see what the problem is.
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