Social news refers specifically to the plethora of online tools that
people are using to share news online. More generally, it also refers to
the way the Internet is transforming news and making news social as it
disrupts the business models for mass communication and traditional
news.
You can think of social news as a subset of social
bookmarking--people are "marking" news articles they like and sharing
those links with friends.
Purpose of Social News Sharing Sites
They
are also commenting on them and rating the quality of individual
stories through online "voting" systems that help people quickly
identify the most popular news by category.
Many new
Internet-based services have launched to focus on helping people share
news, both in general and specific categories of news. They employ a
variety of user-voting and news submission technologies.
Some are
so elaborate they amount to full-fledged social networks in their own
right. Most social news services also plug in nicely to all the major
social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
Examples of popular social news systems for sharing news online are Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, and Mixx.
Pros and Cons of Social News
The big advantage of social news is how it offers new, automated ways of identifying news that interest people.
No
longer does everyone have to rely on large mainstream news
organizations like the New York times or the CBS Evening News to tell
them which stories are most important or interesting. Rather, these
systems create what amounts to automated newscasts of stories based on
what other people are reading, tagging, commenting and voting on.
Popularity-based
news display systems have one downside, though. That's the prospect
that they could become so widely used that too many people will come to
rely on them exclusively to determine which news stories they will read.
That
prospect troubles those who care about how public policies are shaped
and decided. When it comes to news, what's popular often is not what is
most important. Those who deride these system often refer this as the
problem of mob mentality or mob rule.
Stories about wars,
recessions, diseases and other negative social and political events, for
example, often are far less popular than stories about trivial comings
and goings of celebrity entertainers. Yet society needs a well informed
public to function effectively.
So far, however, social news
distribution systems with their popularity-driven algorithms have pretty
much been a supplement or complement to news display systems that are
determined by human editors using human judgment.
How Social News Works
Social news sites typically work this way: Users submit links to articles they like and others vote them "up" or "down."
Digg
started the trend in 2004 when it launched a Web-based news voting
system in which the articles that get the most positive votes or "diggs"
are displayed first or more prominently.
It soon spawned competitors such as Reddit and Newsvine. Digg itself declined in popularity and was sold to a company called Betaworks in 2012 but likely will be remembered as a social news pioneer.
Niche News Sharing Sites
A ton of special-purpose news sharing sites exist, such as Slashdot for technology news and NowPublic for citizen journalism, StyleHive for fashion, and I Am Bored and Fark
for offbeat news. Fark is one of the older social news sites and is
very community-driven, more like a forum than a modern-era social news
system.
Social Sections of Major News Sites
Most large
news organizations also have added social news sharing sections to their
websites. Some implement their own sharing and voting technologies.
Others just plug into Facebook and Twitter.
The Huffington Post, for example, plugs into Facebook and lets Facebook users see what their Facebook friends are reading and sharing on Huffington Post.
Social Networks Add Social News
Facebook,
LinkedIn and Twitter have all made major moves into the social news
category as they have observed how much informal news sharing has been
occurring on their networks.
LinkedIn launched a social news
product it calls "LinkedIn Today" in the spring of 2011. The goal is to
let LinkedIn members not only send short news updates about themselves
to their professional contacts, but also share news in their industries
and professions.
Facebook has offered news organizations the
ability to connect to its sharing platform through Facebook Connect, and
almost all the major news organizations have found ways to incorporate
Facebook Like buttons into their news distribution systems.
Twitter, of course, is very much about sharing news and commenting on it.
Social Magazines and the IPad
The
advent of the iPad and other tablet computers has spawned a fresh round
of innovation in social news. Social magazines like Flipboard basically
lay out news from your social networks (Twitter, Facebook and others)
in display systems that visually resemble printed magazines. Flipboard
has triggered a bunch of copycat social news aggregators, and the amount
of innovation around social news is staggering.
Blogs About Social News
The social news category is so popular that a ton of blogs exist to review all the social news tools and trends. Social News Watch is an example.
The
Economist magazine wrote a special series of articles about social news
in the summer of 2011, in which the magazine explained in depth how
these modern social news sharing tools are replacing the mass
communication news distribution systems that dominated the 20th century
and returning news to its roots as a social medium.
RSS News Reading Tools
News reader tools have evolved a lot, and many of the early RSS reader programs have incorporated newer social news tools, too. Read more about the RSS syndication format in this RSS definition.
