From “Trust In News” to “News Profiling”
Year after year, every survey confirms the trend. A recent one, released ten days ago at the Davos Economic Forum by the global PR firm Edelman confirms the picture. For the first time, according to the 2014 version of Edelman’s Trust Barometer, public trust in search engines surpasses trust in media organizations (64% vs 62%). The gap is even wider for Millennials who trust search engines by 72% vs 62% for old medias.
Frédéric Filloux writing about a topic I have spent an increasing amount of time thinking about lately. Having read about it over the holidays, I realize more and more what a dysfunctional monster the media industry is turning itself into. As an economist by education I am a true believer in “you get what you measure”, and both blogs and news sites are currently only measuring traffic. And except people like Ev Williams, most even measure their traffic poorly.
And optimizing exclusively for traffic has its cost, as the quote above is a clear example of. It’s widely acknowledged that the constant pressure to publish new stuff compromise quality, and thus also readers’ trust. Journalists and bloggers are currently not incentivized to be thorough, and that is a major issue. Furthermore, it appears that most news sites and blogs don’t have the resources to allow their staff to be thorough – even if they’d prefer to be.
Money of course plays a vital role, and I think that advertising revenues currently are spread amongst too many different sites. Look at this post on Techmeme, there’s 25 news sites covering the same story from almost the same angle in the same language. This is not necessary, and you could have much more thorough reporting if 2-3 news sites received the advertising revenue currently shared among 25 sites.
This is however almost impossible to solve in practice, and I think the problem has to be attacked from a different angle. Still, I haven’t found that angle yet.