Well we have already looked at networked journalism in the mass media age and how online networks provide contacts to journalists. This time the conversation will focus on how the rise in online networks can help spread news content and get as many people as possible consuming it. The trigger for this entry is a lecture from Antony Mayfield from ICrossing entitled ‘Journalism in the Age of Networks’.
On a personal note I generated ‘traffic’ for this blog simply from a Facebook status update. A friend, Ellie who had no idea that I was blogging and indeed why, found my blog, commented on it thus creating a conversation. She had two ways of taking part in this conversation one being through the blog itself or the other directly to me on Facebook. Whilst this is only minor compared to the vastness of the web and Ellie only heard about my blog as she is a friend it does demonstrate, on a very small scale, how online networks can help to spread news literally.
This year it has been announced that for the first time over 50% of Internet traffic is personal. I am guessing that this is largely due to the popularity of social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. This must mean that the news media has to be involved in social networking to get their messages across. Many, if not all, have RSS feeds, many have applications on Facebook and profiles on twitter. The problem with this is that these all need selecting by the consumers and users of the Internet so can easily be ignored. Because of this these applications have to be simple to install otherwise people will ignore them.
One of Antony Mayfield’s final points was that media outlets must distribute their content everywhere to get noticed on the web. This is a huge task and I imagine totally impossible to achieve. The way, other than being available on social networks, that media can get noticed on the web is through search engines. I have a feeling that the letters S E O (search engine optimisation) will haunt journalists for the next few decades.
In recent lectures I have learnt that google results show twitter and blog results before standard web pages. Therefore, news can be broken on a blog before a main website in order to generate more traffic from a search engine. Yet, journalists must remember (and I imagine in some cases reform) the way they write for online, as the title of their blog posts must easily be picked up by a search engine. This meaning that their titles must be simple and reflect the headline of the story.
So there are many platforms for news within Internet networks, although I fear that if on every page, visited by the ‘normal’ Internet user, there is a link to a news website or news portal then they might lose interest. People might refuse to enter into conversations if they feel bombarded by them.
…as with all of this who knows?
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1 comment:
And now you have another reader. Keep it interesting!
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