In honor of Mashable’s five-year anniversary, this series is supported by IDG. Join social conversations to market your brand with IDG’s social advertising platform, IDG Amplify. Learn more about how it works here.
The social network of a reader is quickly becoming their personalized news wire. That’s because in the last five years, a revolutionary shift has taken place in the way we consume news. We have gone from consuming news through traditional media and news websites to having the news broadcast to us by our social network of friends. In fact, 75% of news consumed online is through shared news from social networking sites or e-mail. Social news is finding us.
Readers who still actively seek out the news want, and almost expect, it to be personalized and customized to their tastes and interests. News organizations, social networks and technology companies are all attempting to respond with sites and tools that address this changing shift toward a personalized social news stream.
Personalization of News and the New Social Editors
The shift toward personalization of news is in many ways a response to the problem of noise, but also a shift from trust in news organizations to the individual people you know who now often act as curators. Jay Rosen, New York University journalism professor and media critic said, with credit to Clay Shirky, that “there’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.”
“The social stream is a means to filter success. Relying on friends and a personal network to filter the news and point out the best stuff solves that problem Shirky identified,” Rosen said.
Also, the trust that readers place in people they know isn’t the same as the trust they place in news organizations, Rosen said. But prior to the evolution of the web to its current social state, people who you know couldn’t be news sources the same way that big media companies could. But now in a sense they are able to, he said. That’s because people have an influential voice in the new and social distribution model, and are just as integrated into the conversation around the news as the news makers themselves (and many times they are the ones to make the news too).
“People can use the [Facebook] news feed and their Twitter streams as their editors,” Rosen said.
Friends as Your News Wire
News organizations that see this shift are hoping to enlist users as their “editors” by making it easier for them to engage their content on social platforms. Some companies, like National Public Radio, are starting to pay attention to their audiences in the social space and are investing resources to learn about their consumption habits.
After having a presence on Facebook for more than two years, NPR decided to take a closer look at its more than 1 million Facebook fans with a survey. Andy Carvin, senior strategist at NPR, said he had a certain hypotheses, including one that stemmed from his own reliance on his Twitter and Facebook friends for news: Do people really use their social network to get news? After more than 40,000 responses to the survey, 74.6% said that Facebook was a major way in which they received news and information from NPR, and 72.3% said they “expect” their friends to share links to interesting information and news stories with them online.
“It’s not that people have lost interest in the news, it’s that they have shifted platforms,” Carvin said.
Realizing the shifts in consumption behavior, Facebook is beginning to partner with, and provide resources for, news organizations and publishers to more effectively use the platform. Most noticeably, you can now see what your Facebook friends have “liked” or “recommended” on sites like CNN or Washington Post. Washington Post, for example, has prominently integrated Facebook’s Social Plugins into its site for a social news experience:
Your friends’ recommendations on news sites get connected back to their social profiles, showing up in their “recent activity,” so you can see what your friends are reading without going to the news sites themselves. Justin Osofsky, who leads media partnerships for the Facebook Developer Network, said news organizations are using these plugins to not only drive traffic to their sites, but also to provide readers with tailored and targeted content.
“There’s a lot of value in having a personalized experience. It makes the experience more rich,” Osofsky said.
Now publishers are able to use some of Facebook’s tools to add a social element and deliver targeted content to the right audiences, on and off Facebook. For example, publishers now have the ability to publish relevant news into the streams of fans in a specific location, instead of just blasting news to all their fans. As news consumption evolves on Facebook, it’s news feed is likely to become more focused and targeted.
A Customized News Homepage
Despite news consumption shifting toward social streams, media sites are learning some lessons and are experimenting with ways to provide readers with a customized experience. The Los Angeles Times, for example, worked with VisualDNA to create Newsmatch – a visual quiz users take that learns their personal tastes and interests and creates a personalized page of content that they are likely to be interested in. After a reader takes the quiz, the site remember them and offers a page of personalized content for their reading.
LATimes.com Managing Editor Sean Gallagher said the quiz helps readers discover content they’re looking for, but may not have known the site has. “The homepage is just the tip of the iceberg, and this helps them find the journalism they’re interested in,” Gallagher said. He said that the “holy grail” of news personalization is the recommendations model that sites like Amazon.com have built, but something like that will be possible as news sites are able to generate more data about their readers.
Consumption Control and Aggregation
Before news sites began offering any elements of personalization like that of the Times’s Newsmatch, technology companies like Google were looking for ways to offer users control of their consumption habits through products like Google Reader and Google News. More recently, Google News has gone through some transformations in design and functionality that shift the product from aggregated news search and discovery to include personalized consumption.
Now the site includes an aggregated local news section and a “News for you” section that enables you to add news topics based on your interest and adjust how often you read these topics. It also lets you switch how news is presented visually on the page. And of course, now users can share the news on various social platforms. The shift has taken place as a result of changes in consumption by users, said Chris Beckmann, product manager of Google News. The limitations aren’t the number of sources available for users, but finding content that is relevant to them, he said.
“We want to present news that is most relevant to readers,” Beckmann said. “We’ve just really begun in terms of personalizing news that we present to users.”
But with all the personalization that’s taking place in presenting content to users, Beckmann said that it is balanced with serendipitous content – news that readers don’t know they might be interested in but are then able to discover.
“People want to know more about what they care about, but they also want to know about new things that haven’t happened before,” Beckmann said. This is why Top Stories are still shown prominently on the Google News page, with the personalized section directly below it.
Serendipity in an Age of Personalization
The question is how serendipity and personalization will work together in users’ consumption habits. Though users want news that is tailored to their interests, the consumption through a social recommendation is perhaps an example of how serendipity works with personalization. Users receive content from their friends who know them and understand their interests, but also refer them to content they may not have been aware of.
Perhaps a telling example of this is one from a different kind of consumption: Music. Long before news companies were considering personalization, Tim Westergren was thinking of how to solve the personalization and discovery problem for music. The result was the Music Genome Project and Pandora Radio.
Westergren, founder of Pandora Radio, said the problem is people have a limited amount of time and there is an enormous amount of music out there. So how do you find the signal in the noise? Pandora’s technology helped solve the problem with relevancy to the users’ taste. Sound familiar? Serendipity and discovery of good content is a key part of the service, Westergren said. It’s not a popularity contest of bands. It is completely level and helps users discover bands they didn’t know they would like, he said.
Visualizing Social Content
The area that perhaps needs the most exploration and room for innovation is how to visually present social and personalized content to readers. Many of the social streams, for example, are quite text-heavy in their design and yet images are often effective in drawing a user’s attention to a piece of content.
We’re starting to see some attempts that effectively present this content specifically on iPad devices through news apps like Pulse, Apollo News and Flipboard.
Akshay Kothari, co-founder of Alphonso Labs, said the idea for the Pulse iPad application was inspired in part from his own frustration in consuming mobile content. He was getting news from multiple sources, including mainstream, blogs and social content.
“You get news from so many sources today. Gone are the days when I would spend an hour on The New York Times website and that was it,” Kothari said.
The idea was to combine these elements into one place where users can personalize their consumption and sharing. But more importantly, the stream of content is more visually appealing with a focus on images tied to content. With it’s new “My Pulse” feature, users are also now able to get a stream of what other users they choose to follow are sharing.
Flipboard is the iPad’s “social media magazine” application. It specifically focuses on visualizing the information in users’ social streams, while at the same time enabling you to select other popular news sources to create a total package for a personalized social news stream.
Carvin from NPR said there are some unexplored solutions to making the social information we consume more readable, visually attractive, and a design that gives the user more visual control. “A lot of these services are trying to imitate the online newspaper, but I don’t think this is the best solution,” he said.
What’s Next? A Credibility and Trust Index
Though news is increasingly social and user-generated, the persistent fear is one of credibility and a flaw in measuring a curator’s knowledge on or interest in a topic. This problem could be improved by enabling users to develop more targeted news feeds on personalized topics of interest, but also by identifying specific sources and curators of information as more or less credible than others.
Rosen, of NYU, describes this as news curators with “levels” of knowledge attributed to them, analogous to player levels in game design. For example, if you’re just coming to news about the “fight over immigration in Arizona” and you have heard mostly noise but know nothing about it, you’re a level one user, Rosen describes. This would provide readers with more focused news that is tied to their knowledge, and help filter through the noise on a specific topic.
Carvin said he’d like to see a similar model applied to sources sharing news as well. Not only who is sharing the information, but who is knowledgeable, he said. This could also include sifting sources based on whether they are eye-witness to an event or are experts on the topic, both of which add value in their own way, he said. Such a model could then help establish a credibility index among users as sources, helping consumers better decide what information is credible.
Solving such a problem will be crucial as we move toward a more social consumption norm. In the next five years, it very well could be that you’ll be more likely to have news find you through the social graph than consuming news through traditional means of TV, radio and even news websites. Consumption itself is almost no longer the sole focal point, but instead the focus is also on the way readers can share, repackage, and customize new to fit into their personalized social news stream.
Series supported by IDGIn honor of Mashable’s five-year anniversary, this series is supported by IDG. Join social conversations to market your brand with IDG’s social advertising platform, IDG Amplify. IDG Amplify gives advertisers a way to amplify their brand messaging by tapping into the power of social conversations. Learn more about how it works here.
More Social Media Resources From Mashable:
- A Look Back at the Last 5 Years in Social Media
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- 5 Useful Tools to Track Twitter Unfollowers
- How Freelancers Might Use Social Media in the Future
- 5 Terrific Twitter Mapping Tools
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, enot-poloskun
I did a stupid thing yesterday. I didn’t practice what I preach. What did I do? Very, very foolishly I edited a file on one of my sites on the server. How stupid is that? I have lost count of the number of times I have railed at people for being so silly and then I go and do it myself. It is one of the stupidest things to do and I paid the price as I was greeted with a completely blank screen. Couldn’t get into the backend, site disappeared. Phrases like ‘Oh flip’ and ‘Botheration’ passed my lips.