News Makers of the Digital Era

The traditional avenues of news gathering are giving way for the new. People are no longer excited about yesterday’s news. The news of today is in the now and the internet has come a long way to whet humankind’s appetite.

Then and Now:

Starting with RSS feeds in 1999, the internet has come a long way in making news available through dedicated apps and sites. Today, over 70% of tablet and smartphone users get news on their mobile devices each week and 43% get news on their mobile devices every day. According to the State of the News Media 2015 report, there are two trends seen in today’s journalism – first, is the erosion of traditional news gathering mechanism and secondly, more and more newspapers and magazines are going digital.

Let’s look at each of these factors in detail:

Erosion of Traditional News Gathering Mechanism: No longer do newspapers post journalists in the arid African deserts or the icicles in Greenland. The journalist has moved away from the investigative hero image with the advent of more broadcasting and less investigative reporting. Satellites are doing the job of continuous monitoring and reporting. Live events coverage crew has reduced by 35% the world over with the advent of live streaming apps.

Going Digital: With mobile device ownership continuing to rise, availability of cheap mobile data and free Wi-Fi in many places, it is only natural that everything is going e-tail and same is the case with newspapers. Digital news is cheap, you pay only for the content you want to see and what newspapers lose in subscriptions, they gain in digital advertising. This is evident from the fact that digital advertising has gained 27% y-o-y since 2011.

New Avenues of News Gathering

According to a survey by Pew Research Centre, 72% of adults in the US get news from friends and family including social media. This shows a strong trend in the rise of crowd funded news content and the rise of the citizen journalist.

Facebook posts, tweets and Instagram pics have the power to go viral and show the audacity of the content creator versus the diplomacy of traditional journalism.All this points to only one thing and that is the shift of the news and media industry from being content centric to consumer centric.

Given below are some of the ways in which social media combined with the power of analytics can be used to gather and deliver news:

• Follow Hashtags: The hashtag concept of Twitter and more recently Facebook can be used to determine if any unique hashtag has been created and trending in a while. The power of analytics can be used to determine the place of origin, trending geography, demographics and several other factors which make a tweet/post viral
• Geo tag of the content: If there is a trend of a large number of posts and photos being posted from a particular area in a given time, this data can be analysed and monitored if any major event has taken place and is in scope of being a major news item
• User Sentiment: Analytics combined with Natural Language Processing can be leveraged to determine the characteristics of the user generated content like positivity/negativity, field (World news, politics, sports etc). This will be useful in placing the news and also sharing it with people having similar interest.

What to be wary of?

 While utilizing user generated content is one thing, making sure it is delivered right is another big responsibility. The data from social media can be easily misrepresented, tarnished and even become the target of rumour mongers. Content authenticity and security are areas which cannot be overlooked. Data validation platforms need to ensure this; some basic checks might look like:

• Determining how many times a particular item was posted by unique users and their locations
• Number of social media channels trending the same news item
• Automating the verification process of the content posted on social media

With online getting mainstream and social becoming mainstay, the day when you read news updated by the second by fellow users and proof read by computing platforms is not far away.

 References:

1. State of the News Media Report 2015

2.  Pew Research Reports on Digital News App Trends