Mark Little, founder and CEO of social-media platform Storyful, thinks that we do. At the recent International Journalism Festival in Italy — where the former foreign correspondent and news anchor discussed the idea with me over breakfast — Little said that he had floated the idea of a “Perugia Declaration” (named after the city where the conference was held) as a way of trying to formalize how media outlets of all kinds should deal with user-generated content.

Giving credit where credit is due

Little expanded on this idea in a recent post at the Storyful blog, where he described how the current process of using videos from “citizen journalists” is chaotic at best: while some outlets do their best to link to the original source — or at the very least the original uploader — other sites don’t give any at all, or provide a tiny credit line that says “Credit: YouTube,” which Little says is like putting “Credit: Telephone” on a newspaper report.

“In an age when every member of your audience is also a potential reporter, the old rules no longer apply – but the new rules either don’t yet exist or are not enforced. Most major news organizations have some basic guidelines governing the use of user content and some, like the BBC, have dedicated UGC units. Consistently applied standards are, however, the exception. Even as the news industry grows increasingly dependent on user-generated content it remains chronically confused by it.”

Helping to track down and confirm the original sources of “user-generated content” was one of the goals behind creating Storyful, and many media outlets now use the service as a way of getting access to verified content during a breaking news event. The service also recently started helping to represent creators of “viral videos” and other user-generated content in their dealings with publishers — in effect, becoming an agent for them, and taking a cut of the proceeds in return for its efforts.

But Little sees news-related content as a different animal entirely — almost as a public good, he said — and he wants media organizations to agree on a kind of Creative Commons-style format for giving credit to the original uploaders or citizen journalists who capture that kind of content.

“Eyewitness video of a tragic but important event – natural disaster, conflict, plane crash or terror attack – clearly has immediate value. But does it have a price? Should it be sold as a commodity? I would argue that the value of this exceptional content takes the form of a public utility. It may generate secondary commercial value, but it should not be privatized.”

A “public service video licence”

In effect, the Storyful founder is suggesting that media outlets collaborate on the creation of a Public Service Video License, which would guarantee that video content would be credited to the original rights-holder (provided the rights-holder wanted to be publicly identified), and that any media entities using it would be required to give credit in a specific manner — and would only be granted a limited sub-licence to re-use the content.

Little adds that such a system would also have to prevent “scraping” or unauthorized duplication of content somehow, either through watermarking or something like YouTube’s Content ID system.

Would an approach like the one Little is suggesting work? While I sympathize with his viewpoint, I’m not sure it would. Preventing scraping or duplication, for example, would be almost impossible or prohibitively expensive — as the music and movie industries have discovered. And if all the system does is provide credit to the original source, Creative Commons and/or the “fair use” principle of U.S. copyright law would seem to already cover most of that territory.

That said, however, I think the goal is a positive one: namely, to get media companies to make providing this kind of credit part of what they do in a semi-formal way. For too long now, social-media platforms have been seen by many as a place where you can take content for your own purposes without having to provide credit to anyone. If a Perugia Declaration is what it takes to jump-start such a process, then maybe it’s an idea worth exploring.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Petteri Sulonen and Rosaura Ochoa

This trend isn’t specifically a result of the growth of social media or even the rise of the web in general, Stray says. In fact, the research he describes — a study published earlier this year (PDF link) by two researchers at Columbia University — shows that it has been going on more or less continuously since the beginning of what we call the mass-media era in the 1950s (an era that itself may just have been an accident of history, as I discussed in a recent post). “Contextual” journalism of various kinds has been climbing steadily and conventional fact-based reporting has been declining.

As Stray puts it: “Journalists are increasingly in the business of supplying meaning and narrative. It no longer makes sense to say that the press only publishes facts.” He notes that no one really needs a news organization whose sole job is to tell us what the White House is saying when all of their press briefings are posted online — an extension of the principle that now “sources can go direct,” an idea proposed by media theorists like blogging pioneer Dave Winer. As a result, Stray says, journalism has to figure out how to “move up the information food chain” and provide more than just facts.

If context is all, what happens to objectivity?

Interestingly enough, both Stray and the authors of the study note that this kind of journalism doesn’t even have an agreed-upon name. Some call it in-depth reporting, some call it longform journalism, some refer to it as analytical or explanatory, but it has no established terminology. As the study’s authors note:

“Although this category is, in quantitative terms, easily the most important change in reporting in the past half century, it is a form of journalism with no settled name and no hallowed, or even standardized, place in journalism’s understanding of its own recent past.”

Stray, who runs a data-visualization project for Associated Press and also teaches computational journalism at Columbia University, says that he believes one reason for the lack of discussion about this change in the media is that it conflicts with the view that journalists have to be scrupulously objective — in other words, that they provide “just the facts, ma’am.” If everything requires context and interpretation, then that means an end to the rigid version of objectivity that many journalists were trained to accept and the rise of other values such as transparency and engagement.

“This seems to be a tricky place for truth in journalism. Much easier to say that there are objective facts, knowably correct facts, and that that is all journalism reports. The messy complexity of providing real narratives in a real world is much less authoritative ground.”

It may be messy and complex, but I think Stray is right when he says that the shift must be made — and that the desire for context helps explain the rise of unbalanced outlets like Fox News, but also of commentary-based journalism of the kind practiced by publishers like Gawker Media and even individuals like Andrew Sullivan. Where the trend ultimately takes us remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn

There’s no question that some of the reaction to the company’s job posting has strained the bounds of credulity: media gadfly and failed media entrepreneur Michael Wolff, for example, wrote about how the person who became Twitter’s head of news and journalism would have a job “more important than Jeff Zucker’s at CNN,” one that would be like “running a network news division in the 1970s or 80s, the biggest job that there has ever been in news.”

“Given the choice between being the executive editor of the New York Times or being the first Twitter news chief, you’d be well advised to think twice.”

Twitter says it isn’t a media operation

Wolff’s description is more than a little hyperbolic — but at the same time, not entirely untrue. Emily Bell, head of the Tow Center at Columbia University and former head of digital operations at The Guardian, described Twitter recently as “the most significant invention for journalism since the telephone,” and her opinion is shared by many in the media and outside it. For all its flaws, the service that started as a simple messaging app with a weird name has become a critical piece of the real-time information and journalistic infrastructure.

In his interview with PBS MediaShift, Luckie — who got his start doing social media for the Washington Post and was hired by Twitter last year to be part of their growing media-outreach team — downplayed the company’s media ambitions, saying the service wants to be a partner for media companies, and has no intentions of hiring reporters or editors, creating content or doing any of the other things that traditional media entities typically do.

“Twitter doesn’t have ambitions to be a news operation. Because Twitter is so central to what a lot of newsrooms are doing, naturally there’s a lot of hype around this position. No, Twitter has no editorial team. We’re not out there curating news, or saying, “here’s the source that you have to go to.” We’re not writing stories. We’re simply providing a platform for other people to do so.”

But I think Luckie’s response — while perhaps being technically true — misses the much larger point about what we mean when we say “digital-media entity,” and the increasingly powerful role that Twitter and other tools and services are playing in that ecosystem. In a nutshell, much of the power that used to reside with the creators of content has been moving to those who have platforms to disseminate it.

Where does the power lie in media?

The reality is that hiring journalists and creating content, as valuable as those things are (and I would like to stipulate that they are hugely valuable, before any traditional media fans get out the tar and feathers) is only part of what constitutes a media entity in the digital age. The other factor that is almost as valuable — and perhaps even more so, depending on your perspective — is the ability to aggregate, filter, distribute and monetize that content.

For a long time, traditional media entities like newspapers and TV networks owned both of these aspects of the media ecosystem, but that is no longer the case. Now, the most powerful platforms for distributing — and potentially monetizing — journalism and other kinds of content are not made of paper or TV tubes or coaxial cable, and they are not owned by family-run media conglomerates. They are companies like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook.

It’s true that Twitter in particular has focused on selling itself as a partner for media companies, rather than a competitor, which is one of the reasons why CEO Dick Costolo has tried hard to resist any attempt to paint the service as a media entity. Instead — as with Luckie’s interview — the company would much rather describe how it works hand-in-hand with media outlets, the benefits that accrue from having a strong Twitter presence, etc.

Twitter is a partner, but also a competitor

At the same time, however, blog pioneer and digital-media entrepreneur Dave Winer has a point when he repeatedly warns media companies that Twitter is not their friend: in a very real sense, as I’ve tried to argue before, Twitter has built a powerful media company without having to create any of its own content — and every TV network “crawl” that features tweets, and every newspaper story that mentions a reporter’s Twitter handle subtly reinforces that position.

Even the use of Twitter Cards or “expanded tweets” is what I’ve described as a double-edged sword for media companies: it promotes their content, but it also shows an excerpt that might be enough to satisfy many readers — in exactly the same way that Google does with Google News, something that many media companies have criticized and even required payment for.

I am in full agreement with Emily Bell and others who say Twitter is one of the best tools for journalism and media that we have ever seen, and there is no question that it has changed the media environment for the better in a whole range of ways. But let’s not kid ourselves about whether it is a media company or not — it obviously is, in almost all of the ways that really matter, and other media players need to be as clear-eyed about that as possible.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn and Flickr users Socialsidekick

Friedman is no stranger to the vicissitudes of modern media — she was laid off as the editor of GOOD magazine last year, after the publication decided to pivot and become a kind of social network for user-generated content. But in her CJR piece, she describes how on a recent speaking tour she grew frustrated with the numbers of people complaining about a lack of jobs, a lack of money and the rise of short-attention-span media like Twitter:

“Again and again, I found myself playing the role of cheerleader, trying to convince tired and broke journalists to get excited about the future of media.”

There is far more good than bad

As the CJR columnist acknowledges, it can be hard to motivate journalists — or anyone in the field of media — when reports from research outfits like the Pew Center lay out in bald detail how the business model for much of what we think of as the mainstream media is rapidly disintegrating, with nothing obvious to take its place, and when the number of journalists employed in newsrooms is lower than it has been at any time since the 1950s.

But Friedman argues — I think fairly persuasively — that there are far more benefits available to journalists now than there have ever been, if they choose to see and make use of them. Among other things, she lists:

Reporters have more access to sources: Thanks to the web, social media and other tools, “it’s never been easier to find and reach out to anyone.” This is unequivocally true, especially with the number of potential sources who have their own blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, etc.

Consumers have access to more media: Your job may have been more secure in the past, Friedman says, but now if you have something to say you have the ability to reach a much larger group of readers, and they have much more choice (this is also one argument against paywalls, she says).

Journalists get more engagement: Reporters used to work for years with little or no response from or engagement with readers (which some no doubt preferred), but now you get more feedback than you could ever want. Says Friedman: “I know a lot of journalists hate this, but it’s a good thing.”

Chaos promotes creativity: When traditional paths to professional success are closed, Friedman argues, “those of us who love journalism so much we’d never give up are forced to redefine success – and our methods of seeking it.” And there are more routes to success than ever before.

Disruption also produces opportunity

To some, this may all have a certain Pollyanna-ish feel to it, but I think Friedman is right — and in many ways she is saying something similar to what Matt Yglesias at Slate argued recently, when he responded to the Pew Center report and said that in his view news consumers were better off than they had ever been (although many disagreed). Jay Rosen made a similar case for why the internet is good for journalism in a debate hosted by the Economist in 2011.

Yes, much of the traditional media business is in turmoil, and the road to profitability — or even survival, for some — is far from clear. And it’s easy to look at the chaos of social media and “citizen journalism” during something like the Boston bombings or Hurricane Sandy and assume that we are much worse off, both as journalists and as news consumers (an argument I have tried to counter). And there is no question that many bad things come with the good.

But as Friedman argues, that same chaotic environment is what produces new things, many of which may grow to become powerful and positive tools for journalism — in some cases better than the ones we have. It’s easy to succumb to the gloom, but the reality is that while disruption of the kind the media world is experiencing creates great upheaval, it also creates great opportunity.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly and Shutterstock / Feng Yu

Retwact — whose full name is Retweet Retraction — is the brainchild of a programmer named Stonly Baptiste, a developer in Pennsylvania. In a nutshell, the service archives your incorrect tweet with a correction or apology of your choosing, then shoots a link out to all of your followers to try and encourage them to read the corrected version. In addition, it also sends an @ mention and link out to the first 100 people who retweeted your original incorrect message, in the hope that they might also help spread the correction.

Correcting tweets would be complicated

As it turns out, this latter feature appears to have run afoul of Twitter’s terms of service, which are designed to prevent spam accounts, and Retwact’s account was suspended on Thursday. Baptiste says that he plans to go ahead with the other features regardless, and may even make his project — which received a lot of support on Y Combinator’s Hacker News forum — open source.

The impulse behind a tool like Retwact is an obvious one: as Wired writer Mat Honan notes, there is a sinking feeling whenever you tweet or retweet something that is incorrect (or turns out to be incorrect), and it would be nice to be able to retract or remove not just that tweet but all the subsequent retweets of it as well, to clear up the public record. Honan joins a growing chorus of critics asking for a correction mechanism (or trying to design one, as some members of this post-Boston Branch discussion did).

Adding that kind of editing or retraction/clarification ability seems to be something that is within Twitter’s grasp: in the same way that it has built hooks into Twitter’s code so that media companies can embed video clips and other data within its “Cards” or expanded tweet feature, it would theoretically be possible for Twitter to add a hook that would connect a mistaken tweet with its subsequent corrected version, so that both would follow each other around the social web.

As Twitter engineer Nick Kallen has explained, however, the likelihood of Twitter actually building in this feature seems somewhere between slim and nil — in part because they driving force behind most of the company’s changes over the past year or so (with the exception of expanded tweets) has been to strip functionality and features away rather than to add them. An editing or correction function could also theoretically be abused in a number of ways.

Twitter is a real-time stream

But more than that, I think Kallen puts his finger on the problem when he says that adding correction features would change the nature of what Twitter is in a fairly fundamental way. The whole point of the service is that it is a stream of content that never stops — and the only way to correct a tweet is to send out another one. In that sense, it mimics conversation, which is also inherently un-correctable except through more conversation. It may be flawed and messy, but that’s the way information works now, for better or worse.

And yes, this has obvious flaws, because the correction never travels quite as far as the original mistake (as Craig Silverman of Regret The Error has pointed out). But over time, I firmly believe that Twitter becomes what Sasha-Frere Jones of the New Yorker called a “self-cleaning oven” for news.

On top of that, I don’t think adding an editing or correction function like Retwact would actually help all that much. People would continue to believe whatever they want to believe — as wrong as that might be — and no matter how thorough the mechanism was, it wouldn’t stop those who created their own manual retweets or retweets of retweets. I also think that having errors emerge and get stamped out over time is a positive process that creates more skepticism about real-time news, something that we need to encourage. It is a process, not a finished product.

So as much as I cringe internally whenever I send out a mistake — which I have done, and will no doubt continue to do — I hope Twitter ignores the requests of its critics to implement an official editing or correction function.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Hirurg

With that kind of backdrop, seeing either the founders or their service as playing even a small role in the future of news may seem like a deranged Silicon Valley fantasy, but there is something interesting in what RapGenius is trying to do — and not just because Andreessen Horowitz invested so much money in it. And it’s also worth noting that at this point in the evolution of media, no idea is too bizarre or outlandish to be dismissed out of hand.

Crowdsourcing through annotation

The idea that crowdsourced annotation of some kind could be part of how news-gathering evolves isn’t entirely crazy. Felix Salmon of Reuters wrote a post recently about RapGenius in which he wondered whether annotation could take the place of comments, a format that is becoming less and less useful all the time. And other services are also experimenting with annotation in interesting ways — including former Twitter CEO Evan Williams’ Medium, which launched a similar feature that allows writers to collaborate with readers.

It’s easy to see how this could turn into a disaster, of course: just take the usual ad hominem attacks and trollish behavior that occurs in the comments on YouTube videos and multiply by the number of news articles. The Reddit thread where users tried to identify the Boston bombers seems to have soured many journalists on that site as a vehicle for crowdsourced journalism of any kind (although I have tried to argue that this is unfair and short-sighted).

Obviously, anyone experimenting with this approach would have to find a way of moderating these kinds of contributions — either via human editors, or through a reputation system like the one RapGenius uses, which is similar to the way communities such as Slashdot work. And this approach can clearly produce value: Wikipedia seemed like a bizarre idea to begin with too, and yet it has produced better-quality content than teams of experts who were paid for their work.

I will confess that when I first saw examples of RapGenius annotation, such as the posts that Marc Andreessen has contributed to or the letter to shareholders that Groupon founder Andrew Mason wrote, I thought it was a neat gimmick but nothing worth spending much time on. There have been other attempts at adding annotation layers to the web (including Andreessen’s own attempts at Netscape), and all of them have failed miserably. And of course it’s entirely possible that RapGenius will fail as well — in fact, it’s more likely than not.

New things often seem ridiculous

But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it might be worth exploring this idea, instead of writing it off as ridiculous. And part of what influenced me was a reminder from Dustin Curtis of how many new things seem to be underwhelming — or outright crazy — and yet go on to become substantial and interesting, and valuable. Certainly Twitter falls into that category for me: I thought it was an inconsequential amusement, and yet it has done more to change the world of journalism than any single invention since the telephone.

As venture investor Chris Dixon (who is now a partner at Andreessen Horowitz) has said, channelling disruption expert Clay Christensen, the next big thing always starts out looking like a toy.

What would happen if the New York Times or Washington Post implemented something like RapGenius, and allowed annotations on top of the text? They might start with approved commenters or loyal readers, or those with some expertise in the topic, rather than encouraging a free-for-all. But the principle at work is the same as that driving any pursuit of “networked” or “open” journalism: namely, the idea that there are people out there who know more than you do.

How we allow that to occur is the only real question, not whether it will occur — because it is happening, whether journalists like it or not. Is RapGenius one way of doing that, or is it a sideshow that will ultimately prove to be worthless? We have no way of knowing until we try it.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn

The young Brit created Summly to try and help solve the problem of consuming news content on a mobile device (something a number of others are focusing on as well, including San Francisco-based Circa). The app created machine-generated summaries of news articles, and D’Aloisio said in a phone call from London that he wants to see what Yahoo can do by applying the same kind of algorithmic approach to some of the company’s other news and entertainment content:

“It’s going to be a really fun journey. To see where we can take our technology with Yahoo’s focus on mobile under Marissa Mayer will be really exciting… there is so much opportunity to take these daily habits like weather, news, stocks and sports and use technologies like Summly to really turn them into an A-star experience. And I want to be there for as long as I feel is necessary to get Summly and Yahoo really doing well with mobile.”

Yahoo has a chance, D’Aloisio says

Although Yahoo has been criticized by many (including us) for being too large and slow to adapt to the new age of digital content, D’Aloisio said that he is excited about joining the company, and thinks that Yahoo under Marissa Mayer has a chance to be great again:

“Definitely with the approach they are taking at the moment — they’re moving at light speed, and it’s really exciting to be joining the company at this stage, because there’s so much opportunity in the next 12 to 24 months to take technologies like Summly and the other assets they have, like the newsroom and all of this content, and take it to the larger mainstream.”

The Summly founder said that while many see Yahoo as an also-ran, he thinks the company still has a chance to take advantage of the millions of users it has:

“Yahoo to me, as the founder of a company, is one of the biggest opportunities you could have — it’s one of those classic internet companies… the fact is that they have massive leverage in the industry, they have hundreds of millions of people coming to their content every month, and it’s really exciting to be building for that scale. That’s the exciting thing — it’s the scale that Yahoo brings, and that user base, that I really want to build products for.”

A “surreal journey” at times

D’Aloisio also admitted that he was surprised at how something that began as a hobby has turned out, and how much he has accomplished at such a young age:

“It’s a surreal journey. I guess I always saw this as a hobby — it’s just a passion of mine. And the fact that it’s [resulted in] an acquisition is something I never expected… and it wouldn’t have been possible without Horizon Ventures and Li Ka-shing, who took a gamble on me as a teenager. I really owe it to them and to everyone who has been by my side supporting me.”

The young entrepreneur said he has had a number of learning experiences along the way — including one described in a Gizmodo post from 2011 entitled “How I Made a 15-Year-Old App Developer Cry” — but added that it has been “a really incredible journey,” and he is looking forward to the next chapter with Marissa Mayer and Yahoo. One thing is for sure: If everyone at the company was as eager as D’Aloisio seems to be, the company would have no reason to fear the future.

“There’s lots of content in the newspaper,” Berlow noted. “After viewing the most-emailed stories for a few weeks, I asked myself, where did all the news go?” Think back to the Presidential debates, Berlow said. If you focused solely on topics provided by news algorithms, you’d be reading nothing but stories about Big Bird and binders full of women.

Amplifying crowd behavior is a start when it comes to managing societal data but we need to flip the approach, Berlow said. ”How do we harness and amplify our collective creativity to solve the world’s problems?”

To do this, we need to find crowd-sourcing solutions that aren’t just the sum of parts, but are greater than the sum of parts. Photocity is a good example, according to Berlow. It takes user submitted 2D camera images and creates 3D images from them; a product that didn’t exist until the crowd’s data was assimilated.

This leads to one of the biggest challenges of our time with data: The personal data problem, where you are both the customer and the product. How can we spark a new personal data economy?

Through the WeTheData.org project, Berlow offers a suggestion, finding how all of our personal data is interconnected. By gathering human input first on approximately 90 personal data challenges and mapping this complexity, the project determined that the top problems emerging are digital access, digital trust, data literacy, platform openness.

This may sound obvious in retrospect, Berlow said, but “so too was gravity after we discovered it.” And now that the personal data economy problem is better defined, algorithms can be applied to focus on the biggest issues, not every single one.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on paidContent .

Google showed off some prototype apps at the South by Southwest interactive festival that it came up with for its virtual display, including interfaces for photo-sharing and other services that either used voice commands or touch menus that rely on the device’s touch panel (which sits on the side of the headset). One of the apps it demonstrated was a New York Times app — designed by a developer at the newspaper — which mostly just pulled up headlines, but also allowed the user to ask for the story to be read aloud.

Voice interface, real-time, location aware

The voice interface for Glass is one of the obvious differences between it and other devices, although both the iPhone and Android phones support similar features for specific tasks via services like Siri and voice search. The need for audio input with Glass is driven in part by the size of the display, which is probably one of the most significant limiting factors when it comes to content: since it projects only a small virtual screen, there isn’t a lot of real estate for images or large chunks of text.

So what would the perfect news app designed for Glass look like? What follows are a few ideas I came up with — feel free to add your own in the comments:

• Short excerpts: If you have limited real estate, then you need to be concise, so a headline and a short snippet of text would be ideal — at least as a starting point. In addition to Google News, there are already a number of services that are focusing on this approach for mobile devices, including Circa and Summly (Circa will be part of our startup showcase at paidContent Live on April 17). Theoretically at least, news-wire services would be best equipped for this kind of content.
• Real-time updates: In addition to concise summaries of news stories, Circa also offers another interesting feature that would be very useful for a device like Glass, which is the ability to “follow” a story and get real-time updates as they arrive. In a sense, this would be like a news-specific version of Twitter — very short, real-time and likely curated or filtered by an editor, whether a human being or an algorithm or both.
• Designed for voice and touch: As the Google prototype shows, voice is going to be an obvious interface for Glass, and using the touch panel will also be important way of interacting with the content. That means a news app that can be navigated via spoken keywords (next, more, etc.) as well as one that is segmented in some way so that chunks can be chosen quickly and easily with a tap. This would require news outlets to do a fair amount of work with metadata and tagging of their content.
• Location aware: To me at least, one of the most interesting aspects of a mobile device like Glass is that it knows where you are, and thanks to Google’s image-recognition technology, in many cases it even knows what you are looking at. The potential for adding useful information is huge, and Google has provided a glimpse of what that might be like with its Field Trip app, which adds “augmented reality”-style data. News updates and archives could be a significant source of useful information about specific locations, events and objects.
• Prescriptive data: In addition to Glass, one of Google’s more interesting pieces of technology is Google Now, the dashboard it provides on some Android platforms (and may be bringing to iOS) that pulls together information from a variety of sources — calendar, email, photos, traffic — to tell a user what they need to know. Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson envisioned this kind of content in 2011 as part of a future in which heads-up displays appear on objects like mirrors, photo frames and eyeglasses.

Not just news, but useful information

The migration of content to mobile platforms like Glass — which in many ways is just part of the ongoing evolution begun by mobile phones and tablets — poses a number of challenges for traditional and even new-media outlets. The technological know-how to take advantage of Google’s APIs, and to structure and tag content with metadata that will make it useful, is one challenge.

Another challenge is the ability to think of information in different ways: not necessarily just as “news” but specific kinds and formats of news, or even more broadly as simply “useful information” for someone wearing a mobile device. This isn’t something that most traditional media outlets are used to thinking of as important, but they are going to have to start doing so.

That’s not to say every news organization has to suddenly divert resources to the creation of content for Google Glass or other heads-up displays — but it does mean they need to start thinking about what it would involve now, and transforming some of the ways they produce content to take advantage of it. Not only will those skills will be useful for all kinds of mobile devices, but if they don’t start the evolution soon, Google will fill the data gap itself and they will be left on the outside looking in.

Images courtesy of Flickr users Thomas Hawk and Arvind Grover

The New York Times has written about one recent example of user-generated content gone bad: namely, a video clip of a baby pig “rescuing” a hapless baby goat who is trapped in the pond at a petting zoo. Within hours of the clip being posted to YouTube last fall and subsequently shared on Reddit, it had appeared on The Today Show, NBC’s Nightly News, Good Morning America and dozens of other channels — and why not? It was incredibly cute, and had a feel-good message of the kind that morning shows in particular enjoy.

Of course, the video turned out to be a clip from a new TV show, which the creators manufactured and then uploaded as a kind of viral-marketing ploy. Not only did the baby pig not “rescue” the baby goat, but the producers of the show had to spend hours building an underwater track to even get the pig anywhere near the animal — and in the end they had to use a trained pig, after the one they were originally planning to use showed no intention of going into the pond.

Does it matter whether these clips are real?

As the NYT piece notes, when NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams introduced the video clip, he said he “felt duty bound to share this” with the audience, and added that he didn’t know whether it was real or not. Is that enough of a disclaimer to absolve a media outlet of responsibility for figuring out whether something can be verified or not? Many would argue that it is not. Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute compared it to “a form of malpractice” for journalists (McBride has more on that in a blog post about the incident at Poynter).

@mathewi No. Even though it may seem trivial because it's a pig video, it's embarrassing and adds to distrust of the media.

—
Liz Heron (@lheron) February 27, 2013

Obviously, part of what shows like Good Morning America do is pure entertainment — in other words, not journalism by any stretch. But clips like the baby goat rescue show up on programs like The Nightly News as well, and the hosts rarely say anything about whether a clip is real or not. In some cases, these videos come right after a news report about something serious. How are audiences to know when something is “just entertainment” and therefore hasn’t been checked?

In another recent incident, a video purporting to show a golden eagle snatching a small child from a park went “viral” on the social web and showed up on a number of media outlets. It too turned out to be fake — the creation of some hard-working students in a computer-generated imagery course at a school in Montreal. The students deliberately chose something that seemed almost believable, based on “urban legends” of such incidents in the past.

We need to be careful what we amplify

Interestingly enough, the clip was debunked within hours of being uploaded, by another young programmer with some expertise in computer-generated imaging (as well as by other outlets such as Gawker, which pointed out obvious signs others could have noticed). But as with many corrections in a digital age, it took longer for the truth to propagate than it did the original video — and many of the outlets that shared the original didn’t bother to update their audience with the facts.

Om wrote recently about how one of the key responsibilities of journalists in this new age of “democratized distribution” of information is to pay attention to what they choose to amplify and what they don’t, and incidents like the baby goat video bring that home with a vengeance.

If all a media outlet is doing is sharing the latest video from Reddit or a tweet from a celebrity, how is that adding anything meaningful to what viewers can get elsewhere? It isn’t. And if traditional media continue to imitate their online competitors like BuzzFeed or Reddit without adding anything of value, then they will likely find that audiences are happy to go to the original source of that content rather than relying on the TV news to find it for them.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo