The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [25]
In many ways, Google News is still a hybrid model, driven in part by the judgment of a professional editorial class. When a Finnish editor asked Bharat what determines the priority of stories, he emphasized that newspaper editors themselves still have disproportionate control: “We pay attention,” he said, “to the editorial decisions that different editors have made: what your paper chose to cover, when you published it, and where you placed it on your front page.” New York Times editor Bill Keller, in other words, still has a disproportionate ability to affect a story’s prominence on Google News.
It’s a tricky balance: On the one hand, Bharat tells an interviewer, Google should promote what the reader enjoys reading. But at the same time, overpersonalization that, for example, excludes important news from the picture would be a disaster. Bharat doesn’t seem to have fully resolved the dilemma, even for himself. “I think people care about what other people care about, what other people are interested in—most important, their social circle,” he says.
Bharat’s vision is to move Google News off Google’s site and onto the sites of other content producers. “Once we get personalization working for news,” Bharat tells the conference, “we can take that technology and make it available to publishers, so they can [transform] their website appropriately” to suit the interests of each visitor.
Krishna Bharat is in the hot seat for a good reason. While he’s respectful to the front page editors who pepper him with questions, and his algorithm depends on their expertise, Google News, if it’s successful, may ultimately put a lot of front-page editors out of work. Why visit your local paper’s Web site, after all, if Google’s personalized site has already pulled the best pieces?
The Internet’s impact on news was explosive in more ways than one. It expanded the news space by force, sweeping older enterprises out of its path. It dismantled the trust that news organizations had built. In its wake lies a more fragmented and shattered public space than the one that came before.
It’s no secret that trust in journalists and news providers has plummeted in recent years. But the shape of the curve is mysterious : According to a Pew poll, Americans lost more faith in news agencies between 2007 and 2010 than they did in the prior twelve years. Even the debacle over Iraq’s WMDs didn’t make much of a dent in the numbers—but whatever happened in 2007 did.
While we still don’t have conclusive proof, it appears that this, too, is an effect of the Internet. When you’re getting news from one source, the source doesn’t draw your attention much to its own errors and omissions. Corrections, after all, are buried in tiny type on an inside page. But as masses of news readers went online and began to hear from multiple sources, the differences in coverage were drawn out and amplified. You don’t hear about the New York Times’s problems much from the New York Times—but you do hear about them from political blogs, like the Daily Kos or Little Green Footballs, and from groups on both sides of the spectrum, like MoveOn or RightMarch. More voices, in other words, means less trust in any given voice.
As Internet thinker Clay Shirky has pointed out, the new, low trust levels may not be inappropriate. It may be that the broadcast era kept trust artificially high. But as a consequence, for most of us now, the difference in authority between a blog post and an article in the New Yorker is much smaller than one would think.
Editors at Yahoo News, the biggest news site on the Internet, can see this trend in action. With over 85 million daily visitors, when Yahoo links to articles on other servers—even those of nationally known papers—it has to give technicians