During a quick read of the Financial Times one morning last week, my eye was engaged by this headline:
“Demand Media enlists Goldman Sachs in preparation for IPO”
Fair enough and not unusual. Reading further, “Demand has created a system through which writers and programmers are assigned stories or projects based on a software algorithm, which determines the interest of web visitors and calculates potential revenues from the content.” “Assigned” is the word that piqued my interest. Later, “The company has struck deals to supply content to mainstream news organizations such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Gannett’s USA Today.”
When I was editor of my high school paper, events were said to happen. If deemed significant or affecting a significant number of readers, those events were news. After subjection to the who, what, where, when, how test, a description of the events appeared as news in the paper. The events were primary in the process.*
It struck me that Demand Media will now provide a feedback function. They will determine what the public is interested in, then seek out and report what the readership wants to read about, if not how the readership wants to hear about it, i.e., those topics that pass the interest test. The editorial function becomes a selection of events to present that will be interesting. The aggregate quantity and quality of the information fed back to the public will continually be multiplied by a fraction having a value of less than one, ad infinitum. That news sources will spend less for news goes without saying.
That might be an improvement over what news sources often provide today, namely, stories that the editors present to influence what the public will be interested in – the primacy of the thought that events themselves have some neutral, intrinsic interest having long ago subsided.
Nonetheless, the echo-chamber news reports will be interesting to track.
*In the interest of full disclosure, the readership of my high school paper were all of a unified culture.
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