Stringer a freelance journalist, who is paid for each piece of published or broadcast work, rather than receiving a regular salary. (From the Wikipedia entry for stringer)
I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of bloggers and others as news sources. There was a time when newspapers and radio networks had stringers all over the world feeding them stories. This was how we knew what was going on and it worked well. Stringers were good reporters and they knew the areas that they were in. But that doesn’t work as well as it used to, because it’s expensive to fly people around the world and get them to where the stories are.
So I was thinking the other day, what if we used bloggers and podcasters from around the world as stringers. The benefit here is that there are already folks producing news worthy content just about everywhere in the world. People are reading blogs about the war in Iraq, written by people there everyday. Then the tsunami hit it was bloggers that got more news out faster than any of the major news sources. All that needs to happen is that we need to collect, organize and sort the incoming information so folks can find what they are looking for.
There are already a number of folks doing this kind of blog aggregation: BoingBoing, Synaptic Junction and Alternet Peek. And we now have keyword based searching thanks to the fine folks at Tecnorati. But even all of this doesn’t complete the picture.
The reason that newspapers like the New York Times were such important voices was that not only did they collect information from around the world they also edited it for content and then categorized it so that folks could find it. But how do we do that with blogs and podcasts? You could spend lots of time googling for things that you wanted to read, but then you have to wade through lots of garbage to find the good bits. What we need are editors.
What we can do now that we couldn’t do before is automate some of the categorizing of information. Since we can include meta data with things like podcasts and blog entries can have categories and tags assigned to them, we can sort with that. If we add on top of that some people to preview at least some of the content to make sure that it is what it says it is and tweak the categories we could have a fairly good news service.
Anyway, this is just an idea. I’d love to know of anyone doing this kind of work. Or what folks think about the idea.
Implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.
