The New News Intermediaries

1
The New News Intermediaries

• Kirsten Swearingen
• December 15, 2000
• Information Access Seminar
• Professors Buckland and Lynch

2
What is disintermediation?(in the context of
online news)

• Removing the middleman--minimizing the
  journalistic filters between newsmakers/events
  and the news-reading public.
• Example CNN Election Coverage
• Primary source documents
• Audio and video
• Discussion groups
• E-mail addresses of journalists
• Immediate updates not bound by traditional news
  cycle

3
Example of Disintermediation(according to some)
4
Is Disintermediation for Real?
5
Intermediation Lives!

• Why should the Internet eliminate
  intermediaries? Intermediaries are usefulthey
  help clients to economize on information, search
  effort, and other expensive things.
  Phil Agre
• I dont have the time or the energy to make
  sense of the raw data on every issue thats out
  there Id rather base my assessments on the
  informed opinions of journalists I can trust.
  - David Futrelle,
  Salon

6
The State of the Industry

• Some statistics
• 5 news sites appear in top 20 of 100hot and Media
  Metrix lists
• News is the 4th most popular Internet activity
• One third of Americans go online for news at
  least once a week (as of June 2000)
• 15 receive daily news reports from the Internet,
  up from 6 two years ago.

7
Internet Gains Popularity as a News Source
Percent Who Use/Read 4-5 Times/Week
8
What is News Online?

• Site affiliated with traditional news sources
• Newswires
• Aggregators/portals
• Alternative news sites
• Personalized news sites
• Push services
• Magazines?
• Web logs?

9
Hypersyndication
 

• Sources
• API
• Reuters
• BusinessWire
• Distributors
• ScreamingMedia
• Wavo
• ISyndicate

 
10
Aggregation Examples

• Moreover
• The Paperboy
• NewsHub
• NewsLinx

11
Another Way to Aggregate

• NewsMaps
• Headline visualization
• Scalable

12
Making the News Flow

• XML-based Metadata Standards
• News Industry Text Format (NITF)
• News Markup Language (NewsML)
• XMLNews
• Rich Site Summary 1.0 (RSS)
• Internet Content Exchange (ICE)
• Common Data Format (CDF)
• Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard
  Metadata (PRISM)

13
NewsForms

• XML-based standard proposed by Erik Mueller,
  Signiform
• Used to convey detailed information about news
  content
• Major categories include
• Works with NewsExtract (to apply to existing news
  stories) and Padoof (search engine to retrieve
  items based on tags)

14
Example NewsForm

• 19990125T181917Z
• Earthquake
• 900
• 143
• Civil Defense
  Official
• COL
• 4.29
• -75.68

15
Other Developments

• Virtual print experiencehigh resolution display
  equal to print on paper
• Next generation PDF, designed for viewing on
  magazine-sized tablets
• 3-D Printing (stereolithography)
• Uses rapid prototyper to create solid, plastic
  obects from 3-D computer renderings
• News reader could print a copy of a discovery
• Voice command news on demand

16
Topics for Future Study

• Continue tracking the technologies for improving
  access
• Metadata
• Display
• Consider trend towards homogenization
• Topical access
• Close look at the category/channel names,
  priority levels
• Compare to print newspaper access points

17
Thank you!

• Questions?