Newser – my latest news curation tool of choice

Tag Archives: News

Newser – my latest news curation tool of choice

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Newser has recently come to my attention and is a news curation tool – or in other words, a user generated or edited take on what’s happening in the world.

I have been banging on about curation to my colleagues and anyone who would care to listen for a long time and some people agree with me that curation is the future, while others doubt why it’s so important.

For me, with so much content out there on the internet, curation sites and to a lesser extent aggregators are a great way to get a different take on things.

From a PR perspective, curation offers real opportunities. For example, brands should be curating content too, to show that they are experts in a given field, or aligning themselves to a given specialism, topic, person or campaign.

As I have said before, my favourite curation tool is The Twitter Times because it pulls together content based on your Twitter feed – a real time newspaper. As it is aggregated from your Twitter feed there isn’t a feeling of the content being biased towards sources from the USA.

Alltop.com is great because the user can edit the content and have more control by creating their own page. Popurls also remains a great place to start the day and find out what is happening in the world, while the Daily Perfect brings your Facebook friends into play too, curating what they are interested in.

What is really disappointing is that there is no British curation tool. All the curation tools I have just talked about are American so have a biase in some way to US sources. Whoever launches a British aggregator, will make a lot of money.

American (broadcast) media is often cricisised in the UK for its low quality analysis, but when it comes to digital news, the Americans have a far more sophisticated choice of content. Please can some clever website developed create a British aggregator to rival these others!

So, back to Newser, my latest favourite place to find news. Yes, it is American, yes some of the content is low on quality, but every now and then the site pulls up a real gem of a story to keep you hooked.

To close this post, here are some video clips to give you more insight. The clip here is an interview with Michal Wolf, creator of Newser. For some reason the clip won’t embed in this post. Michael is a little bit OTT (Over The Top) when he talks about the end of journalism as we know it, but he does raise some interesting points.

Facebook and News – is it that Important?

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An interesting debate is rumbling about Facebook and its role in news. Some voices are evangelical about the social network, while others doubt why news organisations are putting Facebook at the heart of their digital strategy.

Earlier this week, Techcrunch recently criticised US news agency Associated Press (AP) for diverting Twitter users to their Facebook page. The blog couldn’t comprehend why AP would want to drive traffic to Facebook and not to their home page.

Of course, you need to understand this story in the context of TechCrunch’s on going dispute with AP. The two parties are not the best of friends.

To the common onlooker, diverting their users to Facebook and not your home page, does seem a little odd. On the other hand, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Social media, Steve Rubel, thinks that Facebook could soon “swallow the internet!” There is data to show that Facebook is now the number one source of news on the internet, greater than Google News.

Facebook news traffic

He sees a day when there could be a “siteless” internet and thinks AP’s move is ‘visionary.’

In the short term, it is the role of the Public Relations professional to decide how best to integrate social media, such as Facebook into PR campaigns. While Facebook is a great tool for brands, using it to make news sharable can be seen as more difficult than using Twitter, Digg, Reddit or other such sites.

However, in the future as more and more realtime services are integrated into Facebook, the changes Steve Rubel talks about could become a reality.

Or, of course, a new unexpected technology might come along and change things again! Nothing in the world of web 2.0 happens as expected. However, it is worth keeping an eye on Facebook – it is not just a place to update your friends on what you had for lunch.

Interesting further reading:

You can create your own personal news channel in Facebook. I still prefer Twitter, but it is possible and people are using it

Slowly and surely Facebook is adding to its news functionality, such as this social search tool

How else is Facebook spreading news? The Daily Perfect is a classic example.

Dear @CharltonBrooker, I do love your Newsswipe programme

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Newsswipe is a satirical look at the media, from angry, shouty Guardian journalist, Charlie Brooker. This video is from the last series, therefore it’s “old news” but still amusing in the extreme. The new series is funnier still because it benefits from greater topicality. It’s on BBC4 at 10pm every Thursday. Sky Plus it!

BREAKING NEWS FROM DORKING!

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Contrary to popular belief, the regional news will never die. Not when there is a voracious appetite for hard hitting news. Just see this Pulitzer Prize winning example from the Dorking Advertiser:

http://www.thisissurreytoday.co.uk/dorking/Dorking-s-famous-albino-squirrel-dead/article-1458385-detail/article.html

Dorking’s famous albino squirrel is dead

Saturday, October 31, 2009
A much-loved white squirrel was killed after he was hit by a car in Dorking this week. The squirrel was killed as he crossed Mill Lane just after 3pm.

(Thanks to @jonwelsh for the tip off.)

Stephen Fry: editorial values vs trending topics

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The curious point raised in my mind over the coverage of Stephen Fry’s decision to leave Twitter was concerning the level of coverage it received.

In old media decisions are made over whether a story is newsworthy or not – or they should be anyway. This is an intellectual decision based on the editorial values of the media outlet.

In new media (e.g social) it is very easy to see appealing trends, and along with trends come traffic. Therefore media outlets want a piece of the traffic and can decide to divert eyeballs to their own media space by running a trending story, such as Frygate.

This is what happened yesterday. The ‘Stephen Fry exit’ saga started to trend and other media outlets wanted to take this traffic. The story really was a none story, e.g man decides not to use website, then changes his mind shock.

Of course this sort of populism has been happening for a long time in old media too. It is just more transparent now that, through Tweetdeck, users get a live feed for the most talked about stories of the day. It goes back to the old argument of whether media has a mission to deliver news or provide eye balls to advertisers.

So, the Stephen Fry story is not a story, but perhaps an indication of how social media is changing editorial decisions.

From a PR point of view – I think my clients can learn a thing or to from this episode. Beg, steel and borrow your audience* from where ever you can (without doing a Habitat!!), but do it in a plausible, subtle and tasteful way. Do it well and your online profile will be boosted. Do it badly and you are toast (so hire professionals to advise).

For example, by writing this post I too am joining in on the feeding frenzy and getting a share of the Stephen Fry traffic. The only difference is that I am not a news channel set up to provide our nation with news.

Some might say, it’s not appropriate for brands to do divert traffic in this way, especially in the corporate or business to business marketplace. Well, they’d be wrong. Yes Frygate is not the right topic to use but corporate brands can borrow traffic from other places. Simply by identifying industry trends and then tapping into the online communities in which they operate or want to target. Yes the traffic will be lower, but much more targeted and a better match. For example a technology client should tap into the hot topics on Techcrunch and then into the billions of technology blogs that are in the blogosphere.

*sorry Fernando, I’ve stolen your concept

(Excuse any typos. I wrote this on my Blackberry. It was only meant to be a short post but I got carried away)

SERVICES