@jpmcardle

Lately some of us here at Normative have been working on a new project that is exploring some of the space between traditional and social media.

A big part of the project is around social consumption of news information, and enabling users to have a better dialogue around and with the authors of particular pieces of content.  There’s also a large analytical piece to the project, around optimizing content for particular users.

There’s a lot of really quirky interaction design problems inherent in a site like this.  Of course, there’s some of the same challenges that we’ve all come across when designing complex experiences, such as user flows and page layouts.  However, this project in particular has a number of interesting problems. These problems, such as personalization, sharing, business models, analytics, and the tension between editorial and advertising are ones that we don’t have all the answers to.

One of the problems that we’ve tried to work through is an effective optimization of personalized content.  The main problem with personalization is that, when done poorly, it can often preclude differing viewpoints in the effort of serving up relevant content.  When this is in the form of making a guess about a product you might like, it might make the thing you’re actually looking for a little more difficult to find.

When this model is applied to news, there’s an additional wrinkle.  You might not hear an opposing viewpoint, a clarification or a follow up to the original article, because it is never surfaced to you.  Even today, in our search results on sites such as Google and Bing, we can see the effects of this type of personalization and how it impacts the information we consume ( The Guardian had an interesting article on this very phenomenon: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/12/google-personalisation-internet-data-filtering ).  This has very real repercussions with regards to informed civic debate, as some users may never see certain information because an algorithmic calculation considers it something they aren’t interested in.

An additional quirk with social news is how it is spread.  You are more likely to believe news that you hear from “friends” than from third party sources, even if they are actually the same content.  A couple of recent examples of this is the misinformation in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the death of Jackass star Ryan Dunn, where the misinformation from social networks creeped into traditional news reporting.  Word travels fast on social networks, particularly because they don’t require fact checking of any kind; you implicitly trust your friends, and by extension, a good chunk of the information they share with you.

When you combine this with the fact that most remember the emotional impact of the first heard “news”, even if it is wrong and later corrected ( http://tandfprod.literatumonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470218.2010.497927 ), it becomes even more imperative to design effective systems for consuming, discussing and sharing social news.

Another quirk that has to be thought through is the hierarchy of reportage.  Increasingly, news sites such as the Toronto Star and the New York Times are testing headlines to see which combinations of words and stories are able to gain the most click-throughs.  The stories that perform well are often elevated in the hierarchy of the homepage (similar to how larger stories are above the fold in traditional news papers).

The dynamic, almost real time nature of this interaction takes the shaping of news narratives to a different level.  Editors and business leaders have always been involved with journalistic coverage; the difference is the frequency and timeliness of their impact.

When the business model of these sites (which are often mainly based on ad impressions and click-throughs) is combined with a data driven reportage strategy based on the number of people reading, it creates a number of problems.

Surfacing only the most popular stories is a potential issue.  Just because a topic isn’t interesting to the majority of people doesn’t mean that it isn’t important… one example that comes immediately to mind is the coverage of the bank bailouts in 2009 to the present.  It is in the public interest to know about the machinations of a policy that is such a large part a country’s budget, but that doesn’t change the fact that, for most people, reading about it is as interesting as watching paint dry.  Perhaps the same could be said about this blog post!

Of course, most advertisers want to be associated with the content that is being read most, which is another pressure on the hierarchy of reportage.  Traditionally, there has been a very strong line drawn between editorial and advertising, but with most traditional journalistic organizations haemorrhaging money ( http://pewresearch.org/databank/dailynumber/?NumberID=1234 ), this line is increasingly becoming blurred.  While not traditional journalism, this effect can be most clearly seen in gaming journalism, where a controversy over advertisers influencing review scores almost brought down one of the most respected gaming sites on the net, Gamespot.com

Another problem with social news is the integration of comments with news stories.  A trip to any major news site will show at least one story with a large number of comments, and chances are that a good portion of them are involved in some sort of flame war or extreme rhetoric.

These comments are often separated from the story themselves, creating an almost separate narrative from the story proper, one that is often based on emotion.  One of the ways we are trying to mitigate this problem in our designs is by exploring alternate commenting patterns that place the emphasis around other elements of an article.  By associating comments with particular phrases, images or paragraphs, we hope to focus the conversation and create more of a debate.

There are a lot of problems to think through in a project of this scale, in this space.  Indeed, many of the problems go beyond the scope of the project, such as the changing relationship between news organizations and the consumers of news, and cannot be changed.  By sharing some of these problems, and our thinking, we want to open a dialogue about what the future of news might look like.  We hope you’ll comment and have your say!