Making News Newsworthy
Just how newsworthy is the news? I like news. I can spend hours reading it, especially online where there are more rabbit holes to disappear down than Central Otago.
But I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it. News online both interests me and frustrates me in equal measures.
I love finding out new perspectives on things, reading stories from other countries and learning from people whose world view differs to mine. The world is a truly interesting place and it is one of my pleasures discovering new things about it.
But my problem is you often have to actively seek out these different views and contrasts. Algorithms are not our friends. They are well intentioned in that they want to show us stuff they think we would like, and they have proved to be exceptionally adept at keeping us hooked by serving up related stories with their tasty headlines.
But to me it is a bit like a bag of chips, you enjoy the first few, and then you carry on and eat the rest of the packet when you didn’t need it, but you were too useless to stop yourself. And now you don’t much feel like dinner.
Everywhere you turn on the internet there is more of the same offered up to you by these obliging little algorithms. The unintended consequence is that they are helping to reinforce your world view and create the illusion that it is quite mainstream – regardless of the views you hold.
My second problem with online news is the dross that is served up masquerading as news. We bang on about the rubbish stories pretending to be news, but it only survives if it has an audience. ‘But that’s not me’ you say, ‘it’s all those other idiots out there who give these stupid stories oxygen’ (and I’m an above average driver BTW).
My solution is that they have separate sections, a genuine news section, and a ‘we know you will be interested in this, but if we are honest this is not actually news, we just write these stories because we know it drives traffic and we have to make money this way because we were stupid enough to give all our content away free in the beginning’ section.
Determining which section some stories appear in could be pretty subjective as it would depend on the editor’s perspective. To solve this, each story could be ascribed a newsworthy score (based on criteria around: originality, meaning, impact, mention of celebrities or superfood etc). Then we give control to the reader by having a slider control on a news website that allows them to choose the degree of real/junk news they feel like viewing.
To give us greater insight to the author’s viewpoint we also create author profiles. These could be automatically generated with all the data that Googlebook and Instaflix collect on us. These organisations know us better than our parents as our digital footprints can describe a frighteningly accurate picture of most of us.
This detailed profile of an author would be assimilated based on their web browsing history, articles written, posts on social media, emails sent, movies watched, events attended, and friends (and their online activity).
Based on this information they are then rated on the following scales:
An original thinking score that shows the degree to which the articles written offer genuine new insight.
A bollocks score that rates the author on a continuum that indicates how truthful or otherwise they are.
A Trump score that shows where they sit on the political spectrum.
A rip me off score that indicates how often their articles are similar to others online.
A green score that shows whether they are a climate change denier or genuinely care about the planet (probably highly correlated to their Trump score).
A ‘my shit doesn’t stink’ score that rates their opinion of their opinion and openness to other views.
As to the privacy concerns, you get around this by allowing the authors to control the publication of their ratings. Those who are fair, honest and informed should have no problem with publishing theirs.
And the authors who don’t choose to publish their ratings are pretty much saying that their credibility would be impacted by doing so – which in effect achieves what the rating is designed to do.
I think this is genius. This would make it much easier for the reader to turn that packet of chips into a tasty broccoli salad and give themselves some healthy brain food!
