As with most of his other announcements, this one is interesting in part because of what Rivera says, but also because of what he doesn’t say. What he does say is that many of the headlines that publishers put on their content don’t suit the site’s purpose, which is to communicate as much useful information as possible, as quickly and efficiently as possible — and so he and his team of editors are going to rewrite them in order to fix that problem.

Techmeme is getting an editorial voice

But if you continue beyond just the critique of modern headline writing — which is well worth a read, because it has a lot of truth to it — you get to one of the more interesting parts of the change, which is that Techmeme isn’t going to just rewrite headlines to make them clearer or more explanatory, but is also going to inject some editorializing as well. As Rivera puts it:

“While most of the headlines we write will elevate details present in the story, we may on occasion even use a headline we write to challenge, correct, refute, or even undermine what we’re linking to, if we feel that gets our readers closer to the truth as we see it.”

Although Rivera downplays it somewhat in his post, this is actually a fairly significant change. Previously, critics of the site have muttered to themselves about Techmeme’s biases and how it allegedly preferred certain sites or writers over others, but all they had were unspoken signals like the placement of stories, which they had to read like tea leaves. Now, Techmeme will be making it obvious which headlines it either agrees with or wants to question — in other words, it will have an editorial voice, however small.

The balance of power continues to shift

As Rivera notes, rewriting headlines isn’t unheard of for an aggregator: the venerable Drudge Report has been doing much the same thing for years (although it also routinely gets criticized for doing so). But for me at least, this is just a small part of a much larger ongoing transformation in the way the media industry works, something we and others have been writing about for some time — namely, the rise of aggregators and middlemen, and the shifting balance of power between them and content creators.

To take just one example, a recent Pew study found that a large proportion of news consumers now get their information from third-party sites like Google News and other aggregators — and in many cases readers don’t even remember what the name or affiliation of the site was where the content originated. And it isn’t just traditional news aggregators that are contributing to this phenomenon, but also services like Twitter and Facebook, where a recommendation or a link with 140 characters of commentary can send a flood of traffic.

Rivera notes in his post that he is only going to rewrite headlines, and has no intention of writing his own stories as well — but even the fact that he has to say that shows how much the ground has shifted already. And in many ways, Techmeme still has a lot of power when it comes to influencing where people go for their news, and all it has to do is write a few words. Welcome to the new media landscape, and good luck with your headlines.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Abysmim and AP Images

NewsCred has long relied on automated curation tools to find and deliver relevant content to its clients, but now the company is adding something more to its journalism — humans. This morning, the company announced a new service named Editorial Curation that lets NewsCred clients buy hands-on human help for their story collection.

Senior editor, Claire Lambrecht, explained that the new service is composed of eight journalists with newsroom experience at places like the New York Times and Slate. She added that, while NewsCred has used humans to aid its robot curation for a while now, this is the first time humans have been offered as a stand-alone service. The idea here is that clients who buy access to NewsCred’s fire hose of news stories can now have a personal editor who has real-life newsroom judgment — such as what type of story should be at the top of a page and for how long.

She says that NewsCred’s automated “semantics can get the ball to 5-yard line but that [human] curation is the touchdown” for clients that want create a complete content experience. Lambrecht said that some clients are buying the human curation in five hour blocks, while others are paying to use it around the clock. NewsCred would not disclose exactly how much a human editor costs but did say that the price varies depending on how much editorial support a client wants; for instance, a brand might pay more for NewsCred to compile special photo features while another might simply want to pay an editor to ensure negative stories don’t surface (Pepsi, for instance, is probably not keen about reports on the New York mayor’s efforts to ban glutton-sized sodas).

The NewsCred announcement coincides with a shifting perspective on automated news. While some feared that the arrival of robot story writers and editors would phase out journalists, the human touch now appears to be back in fashion. For example, the founder of two popular aggregated news sites, Techmeme and Mediagazer, recently talked about the power of human news judgment and the editorial influence of the New York Times.

To get a better idea of how NewsCred works in practice, here’s an earlier write up of how the New York Daily News used it to create a separate news vertical to target the city’s large South Asian community.

(Image by F.Schmidt via Shutterstock)

This morning, the top of the Drudge Report blared “DOMINATE: GOOGLE SEEKS TO OWN .MOM, .DAD, .KID .. MORE.” The headline is just the latest example of a recent “dominate” meme on Drudge that paints Google as a lawless and sinister surveillance power. While the site has also blasted other tech players (such as Facebook over its stock swoon and Apple over labor issues), Google appears to be a favorite target. In recent months, Drudge has hit the company with dozens of negative headlines like “Dominate: Google ‘doesn’t trust anyone’” and “Google grabs secrets of private lives.”

The attention could prove a headache for Google given the Drudge Report’s influence in shaping media and political narratives. The site gained fame 15 years ago year by reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal and has since become an internet fixture with its mix of headlines that range from cannibal crime to the Iranian military threat.  In a report last year by David Carr of the New York Times, Gabriel Snyder, a veteran of Gawker and the Atlantic, described Drudge as “the best wire editor on the planet.”

The Drudge Report’s significance lies in its ongoing ability to drive traffic. Mashable reported last year that the Drudge Report far outstripped Twitter, Facebook and reddit in leading readers to news sites. With an estimated 14 million visitors, it is also regularly listed as one of the top three most popular political sites.

It’s unclear if Drudge’s anti-Google animus is personal or political. Even though both sites opposed an unpopular anti-piracy bill called SOPA last January, Drudge is a longtime conservative partisan and may be slamming Google because of the company’s connections to the Obama administration. Drudge did not reply to an email request for comment.