Citizen Publishing vs. Data-Driven Curation of Newsfeeds

Will algorithms replace the curators or is there a place for citizen publishing, now that technology has enabled mass content creation and citizen journalism?

We live in an Era of Empowered People. There is no doubt about it. Technology doesn’t just empower us to self-organize and collaborate to solve big problems (like the Arab Spring), it empowers individuals in almost every other aspect of their life — disrupting industry by industry.

Currently, we see a massive transition from media publications to newsfeeds. Where we typically have received manually curated and edited publications of content created by a selected few, we now see a shift towards technology and data driven newsfeeds curating content created and shared by anyone.

The question emerging is if the act of curating and publishing quality content will be totally replaced by recommendation engines personalizing newsfeeds? If not, will hand picked and hand curated content published via digital platforms continue in its current hierarchical form or be challenged by citizen publishing?

Technology Driven Networks Replacing Hierarchies

Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) describes it nicely how technology driven networks replace bureaucratic hierarchies in his talk at LeWeb at the end of 2013. A trend he believes we’re just at the very beginning of.

The media industry has of course been one of the first to notice this shift, with traditional news, tv and radio organizations being challenged by technology driven networks like Twitter, YouTube and SoundCloud. In these networks, we are all reporters and content makers and the crowd is determining what is the most important (by retweets etc.) — which in turn gets surfaced to the top in a real-time feed (on our phone).

A Global Field of Journalists and Content

Led by new media companies like Huffington Post, we’ve seen a shift over the last decade towards aggregation of content and journalism. Traditional media houses still have a way to go in order to understand that content creators are available globally via technology; as they in most cases still rely on in-house reporters and journalists.

New terminology like “citizen journalism” arise, and by building new competence and technology around aggregation and curation — these new players are capable of tearing down the walls between editorial teams around the world.

The question is no longer “if content creation will belong to fixed hierarchies”, but “how the massive amount of content created will surface to the top and where it will be published — now that everyone can be curators, editors and publishers”.

With this in mind, we see that emerging publishing platforms address curation from two different angels; data driven vs. manual.

Curation and Publishing by Algorithms

While Huffington Post and alike have been instrumental in organizing and leveraging communities of content creators around the world, it’s now interesting to see how new entrants challenge their traditional “one size fits all publishing strategy” by having recommendation engines as the core of their publishing strategy.

Having accepted that content can come from anywhere; we’re now seeing technology pushing in the direction of extremely personalized publications of quality content. It would be wrong to state that Huffington Post and their peers have not been proactively personalizing their publications, but looking at the value proposition of new platforms like Zite, personalization becomes the foundation of the publishing strategy — not an add-on.

It’s quite obvious that every service nowadays wants to play the publishing game. Newsfeed optimization becomes a game every digital leader wants to play. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ all have an algorithmically optimized newsfeeds aiming to publish content that engage their users.

In a world of personalized and adaptive newsfeeds being the predominant “publication” of content; curated and edited by advanced data analytics — are we well on our way towards what Eli Pariser in his TED Talk from 2011 refers to as “online filter bubbles”?

Citizen Curation and Publishing

In parallel to the innovation focusing on tweaking relevance in various newsfeeds by the use of sophisticated algorithms, we see some platforms who still bet on the relevance of manual curation.

Traditional media houses and publishers still operate within hierarchical organizations editing and curating the content created by a small set of creators. They typically publish this on the front of their websites or mobile apps, distributing their content to a very broad segment. With share being the new click, their content quickly find its way to more targeted channels (like the various social newsfeeds); thereby diluting the importance of their own manually curated front pages.

With a different mindset, we see that aggregators like Flipboard launch functionality that enables everyone to become curators and publishers. In 2013, the community of Flipboad-users created and published nothing less than 5M manually curated magazines on their platform.

Veteran entrepreneur and challenger of the traditional written media, Evan Williams, together with his co-founders recently opened up Medium — a new platform for everyone’s stories and ideas (used to write this note). This is not just a place where it’s easy for people to write and share stories, but a place where people can curate their own collections; as broad or niche as they want them to be.

“Our collective, casual, everyday shares demonstrate that millions of people have the power of a printing press at their fingertips. (And they use it.) That is an amazing advancement. We think there’s more to do (…) Now that we’ve made sharing information virtually effortless, how do we increase depth of understanding, while also creating a level playing field that encourages ideas that come from anywhere?” (Ev Williams in Welcome to Medium)

I must agree with Fred Wilson in his statement that we’ve just started on the replacement of bureaucratic hierarchies with technology driven networks. Leveraging the fact that everyone now has the potential to be a reporter (citizen journalism) or content creator, and combining this with algorithms to surface top stories will continue to challenge traditional media houses.

However, I strongly believe that due to the risk of filter bubbles and the lack of serendipity in recommendation engines optimized for engagement, we will in the time to come rely more and more on “citizen publishing” (like Flipboard’s magazines, Trove’s topics, Medium’s collections or some other platform) as a complement to the data driven newsfeeds and traditional media brands. If this will only be for magazine type of publications, or also for more traditional news remains to be seen.