I’ll give credit where it’s due. My journalist friend MM mentioned that years ago, Yahoo democratized news by providing access to newswire feeds. See exhibit A below.
Earlier this month, I was assigned a project – to develop a fact sheet on the top 15 social bookmarking tools and websites.
For the uninitiated, here’s a convenient definition ripped from Wikipedia.
“Social bookmarking is ‘a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet’”.
Some of these sites have caught my attention because they’ve pushed the line that they’re democratizing news – a different kind of democratization that MM referred to when speaking about Yahoo’s newswire function.
So on the one hand Yahoo is promoting the democratization of news through free & open access.
And on the other, sites like Reddit, NewsVine and Mixx allow users to determine what makes the front page by way of the popular vote (or in this case, the click!). Democracy in action.
Some commentators have lamented the loss of the journalist -gatekeeper function but I don’t see fourth-estate journalists losing out. The credible, substantiated, fact-checked stories still have to come from somewhere. It’s just publication, circulation and the end user experience that will continue to evolve.
