The Neiman Journalism Lab had an interesting story by Tim Carmody recently on “Journalists have lost control of the story”: Twitter, tech bubbles, and the nostalgia of the technology press. It discussed how the “accelerated news cycle of blogs, Twitter, and other digital media forces the technology press to work at the same speed as the investors they cover.”
They quoted Thomson Reuters’ Connie Loizos who said. “Thanks to Twitter and, to a lesser extent, other social media like Quora, information about startups and financings has become much more porous,” spreading good and bad information equally quickly, and in volume. “The first story out wins.” Reporters are not only competing against each other for scoops but also saavy investors and others who want to game the system in both legit and bad ways.
The article uses the term Churnalism, to refer to this situation and state that it is a much bigger problem than just press releases and wire stories. It is now everywhere and creating an echo chamber unprecedented in its size and reach. This echo chamber can crowd out more thoughtful analysis.
A large part of this problem is the need to appeal to search tools, like Google, that are driven by popularity. The most popular is not always the most interesting or most relevant. How do you find what you did not expect? The Darwin Awareness Engine takes a different approach. It avoids popularity to use Chaos Theory principles and let the content self-organize around relevant themes.
No tool can guarantee to find the most interesting or relevant stories but the content visualizations within the Awarenes Engine give viewers a better chance to use their human cognition capabilities to seek relevance and find interesting anomalies that a tool based on popularity. Here is more about the Awareness Engine.
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