Fail: Social News on World Events, Like Cuba
Here's a test for Web 2.0. Cuba's Fidel Castro announced yesterday morning that he is resigning from his post as ruler of that communist country. What better way to celebrate the departure of an authoritarian dictator than to look at how the free flow of information in online social media provided coverage of the event? Or, depending on your take on Castro, what better way to celebrate a populist leader in the international fight for social justice and against imperialism than to look at the people-powered social media reaction?
Unfortunately, we could use some better results.
Either way, let's look at how the internet reacted. Did Web 2.0's social news deliver? What social news site can break the news, offer quality background resources and stay relevant for a global 24 hours news cycle? So far, no one but mainstream media has proven able to do that.
Most of the world isn't looking to official state agencies for their news anymore and even that paradigm's successor, big corporate controlled media, is losing its grip on the public mind. A new class of news organization is emerging, perhaps to replace and perhaps to augment old models. Social news sites on the web use voting and/or mathematical algorithms to determine what's news and whose coverage to highlight.
How are those sites doing, though? I think that an event as central to the last half of the 20th century as Castro stepping down, 50 years after the Cuban revolution, provides an opportunity to evaluate the leading social news sites in the quality of coverage or aggregation they provide.
Below are some notes on seven of those sites, chosen for their market leadership or representation of a larger sub-paradigm within the social news milieu. I looked at their coverage of Castro's resignation at first in the early morning (West Coast, US time) and then again at the end of the work day (again old paradigm, that means 5 pm.) It's important to recognize that not only is the whole world not reading on the US schedule - people deserve quality coverage of epochal news events later in the day than just the first few hours after said news breaks.
Conclusions
To summarize conclusions from the notes below: Twitter is the best place to learn about news first but is an awful place to look for in-depth coverage. Mahalo would be a great place to look for early or mid-day coverage if there is meaningful participation by users and editors. Wikipedia is the best place to see detailed, in-depth reporting evolve over the day.
Over all, Web 2.0 fails in this case study. See the sites below, see populist web 1.5 site IndyMedia.org where leftist psuedo technologists have failed to post more than two feature stories in 48 hours. Go to CNN.com or the mainstream's news.google.com for your news, they are doing a better job.
Incidentally, none of these sources provided or pointed to coverage as good as what was available from one source, Amy Goodman's DemocracyNow. See that site's ten minute interview with Latin American analyst Peter Kornbluh from the National Security Archives at George Washington University if you want detailed and up to date perspective from someone who has been paying attention for a long time. As commenters allege, Democracy Now seems decidedly leftist - but listen hard to their show and you'll see that for much of their coverage they work hard at sticking to the facts. Like it or not, it's award-winning journalism that anyone ought to have respect for and which no one will be injured by. Presumably more mainstream media outlets will also provide lengthy analysis of the Castro resignation over the weekend.
Note also that I take the fail meme from Uncov, a site that creates legacy analysis without a link to the founders' current startup project. Failure (10% technical?) aside, here's a review of some social news sites that have traction and their coverage of the Castro announcement.
Social News Survey
The poster-child of the social news revolution, Digg isn't a place you'd want to visit for coverage if you already know the basic premise of the news. One mainstream outlet's coverage of the event appeared quickly on the front page but there is no collection of high-quality supporting coverage, few intelligent comments on the story and nothing but a handful of usernames of people who "have blogged about this story." Even that much is very unusual for Digg.
Ten hours later, the story is not visible at all on the front page, though it is at the top of the stories in the World News section with the most votes. No more value is available at that time than was the case initially, probably less in fact since it's not on the front page.
Mahalo has the decency to put a link to its Castro coverage at the top left hand of the site's front page - higher billing even than Lindsay Lohan's topless photos from yesterday. (Note to readers in the distant future, if you are here, do you know who Linday Lohan was? She was a bit like Britney.)
Inside Mahalo coverage you'll find a handful of links, mostly to big, mainstream news coverage and a nice collection of embedded video clips from LiveLeak.
There's a lot of potential here, but even ten hours later there's only a few more links and nothing in the user submitted column. When your top story is still a "stub" what does that mean? Minimal participation - despite (incidental) growing traffic.
The only comment on the page is one left by the page moderator as bait. Could we get a link to the Memeorandum anchor for the discussion perhaps? Admitedly, I didn't suggest this either. There is no OpenID login and I, like other users, don't care enough to log in otherwise in order to contribute. 20 hours later, there is one suggested link from a user. Fail.
Memeorandum
Memeorandum, the political sister site of Techmeme, is a great place to find out what's hot in the political blogosphere. If you know already, though, it's not so good. Castro coverage was easy to find at first, at the top of the site, but ten hours later it's gone. Twenty hours later there's some conversation on the site around a CNN story but is that a reliable way to discover coverage of an important event? Sorry, Europe, it's not.
There's not any advertisers on Memeorandum this month, so maybe it doesn't matter to Gabe Rivera, founder of the site. He admits he doesn't check this property often but what's of more signifigance, long term, this or Techmeme?
Perhaps the point is, as far as the US is concerned, Gabe's sites are best for short term and tech. See also Memeorandum River/ if you're real serious about it.
The grand dady of social news, Slashdot is only worth so much once the site's moderators finally recognize this as news. Luckily this was news that broke 50 years ago - Cuba is communist - so Slashdot isn't late on this news. That said, comments here are better than Digg, but related stories delivers nothing.
Ten hours later, it's still on the front page - but I don't know if that's anthing to brag about. On the up-side, comments have been replied to and moderated. Slashdot remains good for tech savvy, smart comments. That's about it, though.
The site that put blog search on the map says it gets 9 million visitors a month, but when the Castro news broke it wasn't on the front page of Technorati. This site isn't clearly organized, it doesn't make direct links intuitive to find and the whole place is difficult to navigate.
It is organized around blogs, which is nice, though those are anchored around the mainstream sites they link to. You can discern the relative "authority" of the blogs participating in the conversation, another plus.
Ten, twenty hours later there is nothing. Sorry, Europe, Africa, Asia.
Let me pick on one of my favorite web apps for a moment. There is nothing on the front page if you're not logged in, you can't search if not logged in for example. Search, back after a week of near 404, is only for profiles, is never mentioned in the Explore! (!) section of the site. Go search twitter at Terraminds if you can remember that more easily than TweetScan.
If you use Twitter you probably learned about this and other news first on Twitter. That said, it sucks past discovery. Links are obscured by TinyURL or similar stupid-service. (Invaluable if they worked 100% - dangerous since they don't. Maybe we should wait to do business until there is an enterprise SLA on web apps - as if!.)
Twitter is all about speed, perhaps a glance at emotional reaction, but it's not good for analysis.
Castro news is on the front page of Wikipedia - even 20 hours after the news broke. That's good.
Succinct it is not. There is a nice selection of links in the relevant section, the 6th of 7. It would be nice if current events were better highlighted in a legacy article on the site.
That said, the Wikipedia article on the issue keeps getting better over time. Ten, twenty hours later - even in the first few hours there are enough people on the site, the community is active enough that the coverage is well developed. I'd call it the best combination of historical and real-time coverage available in fact. It is certainly better than coverage at WikiNews, because for some reason no one cares about WikiNews.
Conclusion Upon Conclusion
"Web Two Point Oh" has a whole lot of potential, and when it comes to niches or your life in particular it can do a good job. If you want to learn about the world at large, though, this case study says that no single social news site has done it all. Put a couple together and you're in business if you want summarize for your friends and family but otherwise, go to the oldschool corporate media. For a combination of reasons, they appear to be doing a better job.
Comments
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A few counterpoints:
- while to a degree an important story, this is also the culmination of nearly 2 years of Castro in effect already having been out of office in all but name
- sure, there are some immediate reactions across the blogosphere, social media sites and "old media" sites (and given that the lines between the two keep blurring to non-existence it gets harder and harder each day to separate out the "old" from the "new" (NYTimes has many blogs, provides liveblogging of some things such as election returns/voting, CNN streams video to the web and has clips that might not make it on air) I go to a site such at The Atlantic mostly for their diverse group of bloggers & the active comments on many of those blogs (the occasional long form article being a pleasant bonus). They covered Castro on most of their blogs and in longer form.
- again I'd come back to the point that this is not a story that has to be covered and "done with" quickly - it's not a disaster, or even all that "breaking" of news - it is a transition that though the timing of it was unknown had been predicted for a long while (though many people did assume that Castro would die in office)
One further point - most of the sites you checked were, I suspect, in English. Have you looked at Spanish language sites? Just guessing randomly - but I'd predict that there was more and more active coverage in Spanish language social media sites - whether the Spanish part of wikipedia or Spanish language blogs (especially by Cuban ex-pats). I'd also suspect that many sites across Latin & Central America have a great deal more coverage than here in the US (or for that matter sites across the rest of the world which don't have the same embargoes that the US has with Cuba)
That said I think your points about testing whether social media is living up to the potential are worth exploring. I have seen some pretty interesting discussions via Twitter - in that case I think who you follow has a major impact (but your point about Twitter itself not having a good search or logged out page is a good one).
Shannon, awesome comment. Except where you mention Cuban expats, whom I believe to be so close minded that mention of their narratives beyond parody or related trope closes my mind. I say that in jest, kind of.
Shannon said it so well. Marshall, I'm sorry you spent so much time on this post! I felt that "social media"'s relative silent response to Castro's letter was exactly the non-response this non-story deserved.
the man has been on and off his death bed for nearly two years after nearly 50 years in command! I'd imagine an announcement by Bush that he won't accept or seek a third term as president would elicit the same hush across the organic, propaganda-filtering social web.
Andy, thanks for your comment but speaking of sorry - I'm sorry you have right-wing political views. (Ha! I kid, sort of but not really.) Castro making it official is BIG NEWS for the world in the context of the last 50 years and the social media space's failure to nail the story is a big miss. imho ;)
Really appreciated the thoroughness of the article, but I agree with Shannon on the lack of Spanish language sources. A Latin American native, I now live in a time zone at least 8 hrs ahead of most of Latin America, so I wasn’t able to follow it live in social media when the story broke.
Howevre I’m surely catching up this morning thanks to a Spanish-language search in Google Blogsearch and a similar blog search in Ask.com
Agreed, I need a Spanish reading super-buddy who can be right there with me for not just this but all the news. Friend me on Twitter at @marshallk and have pity on my inability to communicate meaningfully in more than one language.
whoops, I'm sorry, pasted only text without actual links:
Ask.com Spanish-language search for Castro Feb 18-19
and Google Blogsearch
Hmm... not to sound too political in this space (right wing -- HA!) but it seems to me that historically the fact that Castro announced his resignation won't play much a role in the historical fact that it was ill health (dude is 81) that inevitably brought him down.
I wonder if it might be more effective to focus on, say, Perv Musharraf's refusal to step down despite a massive popular vote of no confidence in this week's elections. The U.S. government must love the Castro distraction at a time when it's supporting a ruler like Musharraf so blatantly in the face of all things democracy.
That's just one example. Seems to me that the social media we know and love is an engine to propel progressive thought and reporting outside the 24-hour news bubble, be it from the right-, left- or rainbow-flavored perspective.
I'm sure Castro's legacy and the impact of his passing will be well-covered when he dies ;-) Meanwhile I'd like to see the media push the U.S. gov't to comment and take action on matters of immediate significance, especially when it involves nations that we are carelessly bombing (like Pakistan).
OK -- sorry to wax all political. It was fun to follow the links in this post and I too love watching how the social web covers such events. I just think it's off-base to conclude that non-coverage of the Castro announcement would indicate a certain blog/site/community's politics or that of the advertisers. just my humble 2 cents, natch.
Marshall -- We don't do much to promote the site (and I guess it shows) but you may want to check out Blogrunner where the story has been front page news since it broke. See here
http://www.blogrunner.com/snapshot/news/8/4/castro_resigns/
You'll find essential sources on blogrunner that are not included in other aggregators that rely on rss, and you'll find that algorithms can sort the content (blogs / media / op/ed etc) and rank it as well (see most influential box on right)
You're right, Castro's resignation is a huge story. Its being widely discussed on the web.
Thanks
I must be missing something about Twitter but whenever I go on there, it's a load of seemingly random statements that fair no better as a collection of news headlines than frivolous Facebook status updates.
Marsh, you failed to mention websites like RealClearPolitics.com.
You also failed to inform your readers of the extreme leftwing perspective that Amy Goodman and her "Democracy Now" group advocates.
Nice try. Hopefully your readers aren't as gullible as you seem to think they are.
For openness and transparency, you also fail, Marsh.
Castro is so famous that he doesnt need to make publicity in Internet. However, so the blogs sites needs to announce articles about Fidel to promote their sites, thats another thing.
And if Fidel renounce, will be his successor equal or worse than he... interesting question...
Barry, I'm sorry if the Democracy Now coverage made your ears burn. What was it about that coverage that slanted to the left? The people on the show presumably are on the left politically but the day to day coverage of international news events is almost painfully objective, as far as I can tell. I rarely listen to the show but happened to last night and I listened close to the details of their coverage. Kornbluh seems like a closet Commie but he sticks to the facts here.
Over at Propeller.com, we read your post with real interest. There's no doubt that social news has a long way to go when it comes to disseminating reliable information—nor is that surprising, given that Web 2.0 as a whole is barely out of its diapers. But we did want to note a lively, sometimes contentious discussion about Castro's resignation at Propeller.
A CNN dispatch, "Castro resigns as president, state-run paper reports," was posted at the top of our page at 3:07 AM EST yesterday, right after the story broke. Our community waded right in. For loverman, Castro's exit was a cause for celebration, and he wasn't brooking any favorable comparisons to Batista: "Comparing Batista with Fidel is like comparing a high school JV to the NY Giants. Batista was certainly cruel for the short time he was in power (9 years), but Fidel outdid him tenfold." Another member, jmopinion, countered this argument with some statistics about Batista-era Cuba. (Example: "In 1958 Cuba had a higher per-capita income than Austria and Japan.")
According to tkyrchncs, the United States should have invaded the place a long time ago: "It is a very dangerous thing to keep a scorpion in your pocket, and that is what has happened with Cuba." GregD had a more pragmatic question: "You think this might mean the end of the
embargo?" And he got a pragmatic answer from BronxBomber: "I can only hope so! I'm dying for those Cuban stogies!"
That's just a sampling of the 219 comments. The Encyclopedia Britannica it ain't—but that's the not idea in the first place. We're interested in lively (and reasonably civilized) conversations, and the fact that they actually materialize shows that Web 2.0 is working on some level. By the way, we post a similar round-up of comments, called the Propeller Week In Review, every Friday. If the exchange quoted above sounds like fun to you, stop by and check out the feature later this week.
Marshall, you shit stirrer! ;) This is a great post that highlights a disparity between desire and objectivity. It highlights, as a few have mentioned, that it wasn't socially covered because socially we don't care. Now, I'm not saying that is good. In fact, I suspect that it isn't. To me, it doesn't say anything good or bad about either source, rather this is an astute observation that proves both are relevant. Nice work on this!
I have to agree with Shannon's comment; it's a snooze of a story for the typical demographic that uses social news sites, so the fact that it wasn't more widely covered on them seems accurate.
We had a lot of conversation (more important than the story itself) on Current - both on TV and on the site as soon as the story "broke."
http://current.com/topics/76914122_fidel_castro
Wait - are you talking about social media or *socialist* media? ;-)
I can't really add much more, as most of the above comments really capture the essence. Interesting analysis, anyway.
As someone with a modicum of interest in world news (which is why I start my day with the Beeb's world edition), I'm with the crowd that says the news wasn't that big a deal. Most people perusing social news sites were not born when the Cuban missile crisis happened, so don't quite relate to Castro's historical importance, but I'll go one step further and say that in 2008, Castro is irrelevant, a relic of a different era. In a world dominated by Middle Eastern politics, and global economies I doubt that outside Florida there is really that much interest in Cuba or Castro.
The good news: The web still provides those interested, however small with a venue to have a, hopefully civilized, discussion about Castro or anyone else for that matter
Posted by: mndoci.myopenid.com
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February 20, 2008 11:10 AM
I uh fail to see the point. Comparing traditional news outlet sites with 2.0 user-rating-driven sites is like comparing neural networks to punched cards. No, it's even worse; because 2.0 media does not replace 1.0 media, rather it's a complementary relationship.
We users look to 2.0 sites to find long-tail non-mainstream news which interests us for specific reasons like our careers, communities, hobbies and so on.
Besides, Castro was going to die sooner or later, it is not unexpected, knowing about it doesn't give us an edge on things... just because 1.0 media has an outdated advertiser-driven editorial policy which thinks we care about Castro's death doesn't mean we really do care. A deeper analysis would include information about how well or bad Castro's death did in terms of page views compared to other similarly above-the-fold stories on the same sites.
I offer this hypothesis: Castro's death was not important to readers, and the failure was not with 2.0 sites not covering, but with 1.0 sites making a big deal out of it.
Sorry I got so carried away, I said died instead of resigned. Of course he did not die... as far as I know. There are rumors that he actually died... but there are always rumors like that about him so it is not the point.
Well perhaps I was thinking so fast, this was actually my post for when he actually does die :-)
I think I need some sleep. Good night.
Paces para todo con saludos(recuerdos) hermosos! http://www.spymac.com/details/?2345831
For those interested, Brent Bozell just published a funny and passionate column about Castro and US media coverage. The link is Here.
Castro Endorses Windows Vista!
"Hola' mis amigos, El Comandante en Jefe, Fidel Castro dice que él ama panorama y que pedirá la nación entera para utilizarla!!"
Many people didn't pick it up when Fidel endorsed Vista because during the same rambling speech he also endorsed Hillary Clinton. The Clinton stuff is all over the news, but the Vista endorsement was the real news to me.
I have noticed in the past that Communist states have more of an affinity for Microsoft products, I can't say exactly why but it is true. I have been to Vietnam, North Korea, China ... I guess I need to make plans for a trip to see El Comandante before he kicks off.
Oh yeah, the NK's are nothing like the media here presents them, they really crack me up, I mean, a whole country of armed Elvis impersonators! ... and boy, can they party.
We let Korea & Vietnam go through their ways and now they are democratic compare not communist... All we can do is start them going the right way... Iraq is the same thing now... As long as we are there... There will be fighting... But if we leave... Thing will go either the way we want it our not!!! But it will go the other way even if we stay there are not... That is up to the people!!! What do you think would have happen... If England would have stayed in the United States instead of leaving when they did??? I think we turned out alright... Although I wounder by how the last few elections have gone!!! This is the 3rd time that Florida is being left out of the vote... Can you say fixed election???