Online News With a New Angle

By Leslie Walker
Thursday, June 22, 2006

To see who will create the Internet newscast of the future, look into a mirror.

You and millions of other readers are being cast as Internet news anchors by a fresh crop of Web sites that may well represent the future of news.

Chief among them is Digg, a technology news site where story position is determined entirely by readers who submit links to articles and vote on them. Digg's computers use special formulas to analyze which stories readers are voting for and commenting on the most and then elevate those to its home page. What's displayed on Digg are summaries and links to articles on other news sites and blogs, not the actual stories.

Having attended plenty of meetings at which editors debate what goes on a newspaper's front page, I am fascinated by this attempt to create a front page of Internet news by analyzing reader behavior.

Digg ( http://www.digg.com ), which launched in September 2004, draws 8.5 million monthly visitors, who make 2,000 daily story submissions. Yesterday, top entries included a review of the Opera 9 browser and a story about MySpace adding restrictions.

Today, Digg plans to announce a makeover that will expand its repertoire beyond computing and into general news categories and add customization features to go live next week.

"We are leveraging the collective wisdom of the Internet masses to sift through these stories and apply their interests to it," said Jay Adelson, chief executive of the 15-employee company, based in San Francisco. "Digg's philosophy is to create more user-controlled experiences that will give every type of reader the news they want."

In a nod to its popularity, Digg got a well-heeled competitor last week -- AOL's Netscape.com, a general Web portal being transformed into a Digg clone with a few twists. Netscape's and Digg's news summaries are free and will be supported by advertising. The new Netscape site is in preview mode ( http://www.beta.netscape.com ) and will officially launch July 1.

Its key differentiator is the human touch -- real, live reporters and editors. In addition to letting visitors vote on stories to determine their play, Netscape is hiring eight full-time and 15 part-time journalists to add an editorial sensibility on top of its popularity-based layouts.

"While people are quick to praise the wisdom of the crowd, being an old-school journalist, I look at the wisdom of the crowd and know it can quickly turn into a mob mentality," said Jason Calacanis, who founded Weblogs Inc. but now runs Netscape's makeover for AOL.

Netscape's staff picks one story to spotlight in a box at the top of the home page, while the articles below are arranged solely by popularity.

That makes the site a hybrid between Digg's user-shaped layout and the editorially dictated pages of traditional news sites, such as washingtonpost.com. The Post's and the New York Times' sites have hybrid-like features. The Post lists the stories that have been e-mailed or viewed the most, while the Times prominently displays a "most popular" story box on its home page.

But these hybrids are mostly the reverse of Netscape's -- a few user-controlled layouts in the form of most-viewed and most-e-mailed story lists, which are subordinated to the main, editor-controlled news layouts.

Calacanis described the role of Netscape editorial staff as "meta-journalism," which he defined as adding original research or context to stories that visitors deem popular. "Maybe it's a follow-up interview, fact-checking or research," he said.

One example he cited involved a story about an AOL subscriber who called customer service to cancel his account and tape-recorded the call. The AOL employee resisted the cancellation in the call, which was posted online.

"We called the person who had the AOL account and interviewed him," Calacanis said. AOL wound up firing the customer service staffer, he added.

The Netscape experiment is still early, but I am skeptical that its hybrid model will add any value to the core idea behind Digg -- exploiting the Internet's ability to give readers input on the journalism they consume.

Netscape would need high-powered reporters to add first-rate commentary and fact-checking. So far, its commentary strikes me as so anemic and wordy that it interferes with the site's real goal -- letting readers see what others find interesting.

This idea of peering over the shoulder of others is powerful. Digg offers a feature called "Digg Spy" that presents random lists of user actions in real time. It shows random activity occurring at any moment, such as who is voting on or submitting which stories. Digg has another social feature that lets users narrow their spying to stories submitted by or commented on by friends -- or any stranger they may choose.

Digg also is at the vanguard of a growing movement to build profiles of what people are doing online to help determine what they see. For example, Digg automatically creates profiles of registered users' interests by storing a record of the articles they've commented on or voted for.

"So down the road, Digg will become smarter and be able to recommend stories, based on your past Digging activities and those of your friends," said Digg co-founder Kevin Rose.

Adelson said Digg and its rivals eventually will give mainstream news sites valuable insights into what the public considers newsworthy.

"If you want to know what a particular group of people or the mass public care about today, I can know within seconds, versus waiting for the publication cycle to happen so you can look at your subscription data or Nielsen ratings," Adelson said.

Whether you buy into his optimism or not, Digg is experimenting with something important. And as news consumption becomes more personalized online, I believe this concept of letting readership patterns shape story presentation will offer valuable ways to preserve the shared news experience of the mass-media era.

Already, it is giving us intriguing new glimpses of what the masses are actually reading.

Leslie Walker welcomes e-mail atleslie@lesliewalker.com.