Can a crowd really edit our daily paper? [The Guardian]
Can a crowd really edit our daily paper? This is the lead question for an opininon piece by Vic Keegan of the UK newspaper The Guardian.
“The digital revolution is turning ordinary people into both creators of content (whether videos, online journals or books) and arbiters of the process that decides what gets published and how it is rated.”
However, Keegan is not convinced that this approach might work for anything but niche publications.
“News selection based on the ‘wisdom of crowds’ may be brilliant when applied to technology stories but could easily turn into the madness of crowds and the death of serious news if applied to everything that happens.”
“A journal in which all content is judged by readers runs the danger of making the Sun look distinctively upmarket.”
Keegan concludes that “newspapers may turn out to have a comparative advantage in becoming “trusted sites” at a time when an explosion of blogs not only makes it impossible to read even the best of them regularly but also to decide what is true.”
