Millions of people go online every day to read the news. But many online news sites do not adhere to strict journalistic and editorial guidelines designed to keep reporters honest. Instead, many sites have forged their own paths, adapting and bending existing standards.
The end result is that readers have access to more news than ever, but they face a glut of information that is not always logically sorted or carefully edited by traditional standards.
As printed papers fade in popularity and the Internet dominates, young people may turn to narrowly tailored sites specializing in news they care about. Blogs that come and go on a daily basis may replace magazines like “People” and “Seventeen.”
The effect this will have on democracy will be profound, though specific effects remain largely unpredictable.
Right now, three of the most popular online news sources are Yahoo! News, Google News and the Drudge Report. But there are also countless smaller sites people turn to for news.
Online blogs are perhaps the most problematic new information source. One of the most memorable examples of blogs-as-news occurred in the days following the 2004 presidential election. Blogs and similar sites led the way in criticizing early exit polls that showed Sen. John Kerry leading President Bush. These early blog reports caused a stir, but their weak reporting and lack of credible sourcing meant the stories died before they really got off the ground.
But other, more traditional forms of news dominate the online landscape.
Yahoo! News is most like a normal newspaper. I talked with spokesman Brian Nelson, who fleshed out the details of how Yahoo! News works.
Like most newspapers, Yahoo! subscribes to wire services, such as the Associated Press, Reuters and the Agence France-Presse. These services have traditionally offered hard news feeds with solid reporting and strict ethical guidelines. Yahoo! also has deals with approximately 100 other news sources, including papers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. For the most part, Yahoo! highlights these first-rate news sources.
Also like a newspaper, Yahoo! has a team of editors who pick the top stories and hand-select “full-coverage” sections that include a collection of stories on topics such as the Middle East or the election.
Google News takes a different approach – human editors do not edit the page at all.
Google spokesperson Eileen Rodriguez directed me to a Google Web page that explains their news selection process: “The headlines on the Google News home page are selected entirely by a computer algorithm, based on many factors, including how often and on what sites a story appears elsewhere on the web. This is very much in the tradition of Google’s Web search, which relies heavily on the collective judgment of Web publishers to determine which sites offer the most valuable and relevant information.”
There is no doubt the Google News page delivers a dynamic mix of stories, but the editor-less approach also produces strange side effects. Perhaps most serious is that Google’s algorithm makes no distinction between editorials and straight news. A recent example of this was an Oregon Register-Guard editorial that served as the front “news” story on Bush’s Cabinet shuffle.
As for the Drudge Report, a recent study found it to be the “most centrist” news site sampled. But Matt Drudge is personally responsible for picking most of the stories – and in some ways, his site resembles a blog more than a real newspaper.
There appears to be little institutional framework to underlie the site. He links readers to various external news sources, including AP and Reuters. But he is able to select and report stories with near impunity compared to a traditional newspaper, which must answer to its readers.
Neither the Drudge Report nor Yahoo! or Google allow readers to write response letters like a traditional newspaper – there is no obvious way for reader feedback to occur. Only Yahoo! offers a message board where people can anonymously post about news stories.
Political science Professor Matthew Baum said he thinks “gossip disguised as news” – as occurs on blog sites – is a bigger problem than editorials on the front page of a site like Google.
He said people using Google News are probably not the “average” news consumer, and should be able to tell the difference between an editorial and a news story.
The changes seen in the world of journalism will have a significant effect on the future of news reporting. But it is hard to predict what future generations will know about journalism, or what they will want to see.
Lazzaro is a fourth-year political science and psychology student and editorial development director for the Daily Bruin. E-mail him at dlazzaro@media.ucla.edu.