How the blogosphere bends the news agenda

In simpler days it would take quite some effort to spread nonsense around the world. The costs associated with the transmission of information were such that mass media were generally only accessible to the rich and the professionally trained (journalists). These days, with the world of media being completely disrupted by digital technology, and as a result the rise of untrained content creators having increasingly large potential reach, the more nonsensical your garbage, the quicker it can transmit (assuming that you have connections in the right places – but those “right places” are way more serendipitous than they ever have been in the past).

I work for Microsoft. It means that I need to be very careful about what I say in places like this blog (even though it expresses my, not my employer’s opinions). It means that sometimes, once in a blue moon, my views can be picked up and amplified (like the article I wrote last year about what motivates developers that seemed to hit a particular nerve, and was no doubt more popular because of who I work for rather than my scintillating prose). If I were to say something utterly ludicrous like, say, “the next version of Windows will be able to be installed on bananas” then there is a slight chance that it could get picked up, taken out of context and turned into “news”; I won’t say some things that are less ludicrous because there is a very real chance that it could get picked up, and an even greater chance that it could be career limiting.

What is “news” is very different in this socially-connected, Internet age. In the old days, a proper journalist would have looked at my banana claims, noted their context, made a judgement, and then probably looked for something more interesting to do. But what we are seeing today seems three-fold:

1. the traditional media are increasingly cash-starved, and so the sum total experience of professional journalism in the industry is falling as it becomes a harder and harder place to earn a decent living (particularly it seems in the “trade press”)
2. performance of an individual journalist can be increasingly “measured” to individually attributable readership statistics, which in turn have a risk of raising editorial decisions based on prospective hits
3. the non-professional world of blogs and social quickly amplifies outrageous stories so that professional stories emerge that are nothing but comment on ill-informed conjecture in the blogosphere.

Take, for example, this from the last 24 hours, or any number of speculation pieces related to whatever the latest rumours might be able what’s next to emerge from Cupertino.

We have entered a world, it seems, where a certain level of crazy, mixed with a certain level of credibility (often borne of very loose network connections) can take a piece of fiction and turn it into object truth in seconds. News has never been about objective “fact” – it’s always, always tinged with subjective viewpoint; but in the traditional values of the journalistic profession sources would be checked and a level of due diligence completed. We seem to have exited that world quite rapidly, and the consequences are quite scary…