What is news?

The nature of news is changing. And the change is at a fundamental level. What does this mean to you, and me?

At a fundamental level a tool such as the internet and a PC (or simply a cellphone) provides users with the capability to now decide what is news. That decision used to belong to someone else. If each individual determines what news is for them, they can attract more and more of the content THEY want. We are part of the process that decides what news is. In fact, we are the news.

Do you want to know?

The fundamental shift is essentially from news being a vital public service (servicing a real need for information) to a money making stream of information servicing what people want to know. There are a few ethical problems with this, but the fact remains, it has happened and is accelerating.

So is news something we want, or need? Well, that depends on you. Once upon a time editors decided what was news. Now aggregators make those decisions (online anyway) and so in a very real sense, the news is 'whatever is the most popular' or put in an even simpler way: 'what people want'.

Moral?

Once again, many are concerned about the ethical implications, but the fact remains that the internet is where the future lies, and to bet against the internet, and the rise of blogs, citizen journalism, user generated content, social media etc. is not going to be good for business.

The nature of journalism is also changing, but reporting in some sense will always stay the same. Can you find a good story and how well can you write it? Your ability to tell a good story determines your capacity to influence news (yes, as a private citizen). That's tremendously exciting. Reporting is becoming less a specialisation than it once was.

Community Cloud

As alluded to above, the role of editors in the online space is somewhat different to the traditional role. Online there is almost immediate feedback on which stories are doing well, and even this is news. People's responses to news is newsworthy, and the internet can also quickly aggregate the communities response.

The internet provides an alternative to the sort of information that has traditionally been put out there. Instead of talking at, or talking to, online merchants now have the option to talk 'with'. The question is: are we using this opportunity?

The News at the level of Citizen Journalism

How is this relevant to UGC? Well, of course it is very relevant. Users are now the creators of their own news. So whoever you are, wherever you are, you can look at a situation and provide your insight, your impression, your response. It might be your experience of drugs, teen pregnancy, higher petrol prices, your experience of racism at university, or how you're solving the dilemma of higher food prices.

To the extent that you can accurately draw a picture representing your life in your community, that's a valuable contribution. We need to know how healthy our communities are, and what is happening in them.

Bloggers - some of them - want to create our OWN news. This means not recycling what is already on the internet. It means something YOU saw or experienced, or something that happened to a friend or neighbour. It also means adding something of value - not merely posting something for the sake of it, but because your information helps someone else, it fulfills a PURPOSE.

YOU are the news, and so the responsibility is yours, mine (ours) for creating newsworthy content; a prudent mixture of news that we want and news that we need.

Now each of us gets to be part of that decision. When we realise how important that role can be, the news begins to belong to everyone, and becomes more meaningful and useful than ever before.