Some possibilities for using the Internet to redefine news agendas

It is early days for both of these services but it seems that the agenda for Abuzz, contrary to the promotional material sent out about it, is being driven by the organisation, and askme.com is descending into a closed-shop forum for a small group of interested parties. These are not the outcomes required for a new model of journalism that is inclusive and sensitive to audience needs.

The key improvement, though, is that on these sites, users are not simply provided with a menu of offerings that are supposed to appeal to them. These sites are inviting their audience to ask questions that the audience finds important. This is a step towards a truly interactive information environment. To change the underlying paradigm of journalism, media organisations must make their audience feel that it is part of the process. Making themselves publicly available is not something that online (or offline) journalists welcome, as Online Journalism Review’s Jerry Lanson found out. My own experiences trying to contact journalists have been similar: if a contact point is provided for them at all, the journalists are reluctant to respond to any emails they are sent.

This is quite understandable, given the insular traditions of journalists besieged by fans, promoters or crackpots, but it does scant service to the possibilities for a new technology. If the dominant mentality of news organisations is to change, these attitudes and practices must go first.

So, how can it be done?

I don’t pretend to have any easy answers to that question. However, here are two different approaches that provide food for thought and further consideration. First, and easiest to implement, online publications could provide a feedback form to readers, on which they could specify the topics they think are important or ask questions they would like addressed by reporters. Providing forums and discussion threads attached to articles, which is a common practice, is one version of this. However, existing features only allow the audience to react to the agenda set by the publication. The organisation needs to go the next step and allow the audience to determine what will appear in the next edition.

This would require the results of the feedback forms or posts to a thread to be stored in a database and, using some form of aggregation analysis, used to deduce trends and major topics of interest or, at the least, to reprioritise the agenda for subsequent editions. This does not necessarily imply dramatic changes.

There are some obvious problems with this approach. As I write this I can hear editors groaning that readers don’t necessarily know what they want, and academics decrying the sample as statistically invalid. There is also the objection that collecting this information is not the issue, getting editors to pay attention to it, as noted above, is the hard part. Devising a workable application for this suggestion is similarly difficult. It is not feasible to simply assign a reporter to follow the request of every audience member.

The other suggestion, then, is more revolutionary and correspondingly more difficult to implement. It involves redefining the role of (at least some) reporters as "information brokers". Put simply, the organisation uses some of its vast store of information and research capacity to specifically address the information needs of readers.

The advantage of this is that production is immediately demand-driven and hence it is more likely that the person asking the question will pay for the service. As noted above, this is best suited to high-value niche information that is not easy for the general public to obtain or interpret. Reporters, on the other hand, have access to sources and archives that could be harnessed to answer specific queries.

Whether this would be profitable or not depends largely on the nature of the enquiry. For example, some searches currently performed on public libraries’ microfiche archives of past editions could be done much more quickly using a database of previous articles. To some extent, this service is already offered by some online versions of newspapers, and users have demonstrated a willingness to pay for it. In any case, if properly implemented, the service could have the secondary value outlined above.

At the higher-value end of the information spectrum, responses could harness the expertise and resources of specialist reporters and maximise the organisation’s return on their investment in creating that expertise. There are always details omitted from any story, whether because of space constraints or because they weren’t relevant to the chosen angle. Answering readers’ questions allows the reporter to provide those details to those who want them and to obtain further information to use in subsequent stories.

This model of journalists as information brokers would, of course, require a rethink about story structure and presentation. It makes no sense to sell the information to someone and then give it away in the next edition/post. Perhaps the model used by research companies such as ACNielsen – you can have the summary gratis, but the full report is gonna cost ya – might work.