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Spreading good ideas with someone you know is one of the simplest things we can do to improve the conversation.

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  Nathan Zeke replied on 09:56 AM on September 09, 2008
  This is gospel for media consumption in the 21st Century - Its all about finding the right filters. For a great exercise in learning to do this choose a single news story, then find sources that devote themselves to following it, then follow them. Natural disasters are particularly instructive (i.e. Katrina, California Wildfires, etc) as they usually yield a diverse medley of national, local and individual sources to follow - Breaking news from the AP and local newspapers' websites, updated satellite imagery and analysis provided on a weather-related community site by an NOAA employee, at-the-scene photos and narratives from local bloggers. Learn to find the right filters and you will vastly increase both the breadth and depth of your information consumption.
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  Nathan Zeke replied on 01:56 PM on September 09, 2008
  This is gospel for media consumption in the 21st Century - Its all about finding the right filters. For a great exercise in learning to do this choose a single news story, then find sources that devote themselves to following it, then follow them. Natural disasters are particularly instructive (i.e. Katrina, California Wildfires, etc) as they usually yield a diverse medley of national, local and individual sources to follow - Breaking news from the AP and local newspapers' websites, updated satellite imagery and analysis provided on a weather-related community site by an NOAA employee, at-the-scene photos and narratives from local bloggers. Learn to find the right filters and you will vastly increase both the breadth and depth of your information consumption.
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• Brad Strong replied on 11:10 PM on October 26, 2008
  The underlying importance here, is that of protecting the free access and exchange of information on the web. I call for a boycott of big media, they have abandoned their values and lost their integrity.
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Jay Rosen on How To Digest News

Jay Rosen Assoc. Professor, New York University

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Question: How is it possible to wade through so much news these days?

Jay Rosen: Well, this is a profound question because news today exists in a climate of abundant, whereas before it was sort of a scarcity model. And what I do is follow certain people and blogs and sites that are actually monitoring a much wider range of sources than I am. And so I delegate the work of finding the important news to expert filters, intelligent people who are doing just that, because this is a basic way of creating value on the net. So people who ask me all the time about information overload and isn’t it all too much and, oh, you know, this new age of information is turning to a disaster, and I meet with this kind of hysteria all the time, but actually, if you know who to follow and you know where to look, you can easily profit and benefit from this abundance because the tools for organizing information follow right behind the explosion of information that the net represents.

Question: Should online news aggregators take credit for breaking news?

Jay Rosen: Well, the example you gave was actually someone giving credit to an aggregator for something that appeared at that site, maybe they shouldn’t do that. But, let’s go back to what an aggregator is? What is [Matt Drudge]? What is the drudge report? It’s simply a guy in his apartment finding first new reports to have been posted on the web and collecting those that would be interesting to his audience in one place, that’s all his doing, scanning the web for what’s new and different and interesting. Now, this is something that if the major news media has decided to specialist in it, they could have been very good at from the beginning. They choose not to do that. Why? Because in order to be [Matt Drudge] or the [Huffington Post] or real clear politics or any number of bloggers who link constantly this stuff, you have to do exactly that, send people away from your site, transport them to another domain and the news industry which moans about aggregation didn’t want to develop that art and chose not to. And in fact to this day, most of the major news site don’t link out very often or very [willingly]. So don’t complaint about the drudge if you decided to turn down the art of aggregation and don’t bitch and moan about Google News if you don’t understand how it works and why it’s really a boon for you to be send all that traffic.

Recorded on: 08/19/2008

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Jay Rosen Assoc. Professor, New York University

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Jay Rosen teaches Journalism at New York University, where has been on the faculty since 1986. He is the author of PressThink, a weblog about journalism and its ordeals, which he introduced in September 2003. In June 2005, PressThink won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 Freedom Blog award for outstanding defense of free expression. In July 2006 he announced the debut NewAssignment.Net, his experimental site for pro-am, open source reporting projects. The first one was called Assignment Zero, a collaboration with Wired.com. A second project is OfftheBus.Net with the Huffington Post.

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