In the young but growing world of user-generated news, sites like
digg and slashdot dominate in the tech sphere. In the political arena, it is mostly
editorial-driven sites that do well - such as DrudgeReport, HuffingtonPost and RawStory.
Those sites get a lot of attention, but there are also a lot of so-called "Citizen
Journalism" sites out there trying very hard to break through to the mainstream. We're
going to run a series here on Read/WriteWeb exploring some of those sites. In this first
post we'll provide a brief intro to Citizen Journalism (but with a product focus, not
theory), and profile a leading practitioner: Newsvine.
Citizen Journalism (henceforth CJ) is a classic example of the
read/write web in action. In a product sense, it is a news publication built
using the voices and recommendations of ordinary citizens, or 'users' in Web-speak. The readers are the
writers and editors, unlike traditional journalism which is written/edited by the 'few' (professional
journalists) for the 'many' (consumers). The biggest success story in CJ so far has been
OhMyNews, out of South Korea.
As yet there's been no successful Western equivalent to OhMyNews, although there have been a lot of attempts at it. Some have crashed and burned, such as the recently closed Backfence. But many other entrepreneurs are actively pursuing the idea - e.g. Australian-based PerthNorg, Buffalo Rising and Assignment Zero - to name but a few. And there have been controversial attempts too, such as Associated Content - recently in the news themselves due to claims they're gaming Google. But no single CJ site has hit it big in mainstream news, yet, in the english speaking world.
Current mainstream news organizations are also experimenting with user-generated news. CNN has I-Report and Yahoo and Reuters have You Witness (see also http://www.reuters.com/youwitness). We'll profile these in a later post.
Newsvine is a good example of a startup CJ site aiming to be a mainstream news destination. Along with most of the other current CJ sites, Newsvine uses many of the tenets of 'web 2.0' in its design - such as user-generated content, reputation, voting, comments, friends lists, tags, and more. It allows users to 'seed' stories, by adding a link and short description. Or users can write a full article. Newsvine is probably more advanced in its design than other CJ sites, often trying new things and design techniques - e.g. the Newsvis, a color-coded visual representation of a user's impact on the site.
The site opened as a private beta in December 2005 and was officially launched on March 1, 2006. For a full feature run-down, see Read/WriteWeb's Social News Faceoff last October - which has a chart of features for Newsvine and three other sites (digg, reddit, netscape). As Alex Iskold noted in that post, Newsvine has an outstanding user interface - it illustrates that a lot of features and a lot of information can be presented in a simple and digestible way.
Let's focus now on current stats and trends....
According to founder Mike Davidson, who I contacted today, Newsvine currently gets about 1.2 million unique visitors per month and it has grown at an average rate of 46% per quarter. Newsvine community members view an average of 21 pages per day and spend an average of 143 minutes per month on the site. The site gets about 80,000 comments a month and 250,000 votes a month.
These stats seem to be borne out in the following Compete graph showing Newsvine's "velocity", which basically means the growth in user engagement:
The top topics in Newsvine are Politics and Technology, echoing the popular topics in the blogosphere. Other topics on Newsvine include World News, U.S. News, Local News, and Entertainment.
I asked Mike what are the big trends he's noticed in citizen journalism - i.e. what has Newsvine learned so far, after 15 or so months of operation? Mike noted 3 main trends:
1. Explicit actions like "votes" are not a sufficient enough indicator of what's important and/or good on a news site. Mike said they also look at things like vote-to-comment ratio, average number of seconds spent reading a article, user reputation, and more.
2. Communities, by definition, do not scale - and Mike says "nor should they". They're looking for "truly intimate and meaningful interactions" and Mike thinks this can't happen in large networks.
3. Reputation building is the big separator in quality news
communities. Mike says that "it is much more useful to sacrifice quantity [of comments]
for quality and encourage community members to really take ownership of their words." To
this end, Newsvine has a reputation system called "Vineacity", which serves as a visual
indicator of what sort of contributor any given community member is.
I was also curious about the type of person who contributes content to Newsvine. Mike told me that the profile of a contributor "varies wildly" - some of the best writers include a college student from Ohio State, a political writer of Korean descent from Denmark, and "a 70 year old gentleman who ended up getting his name on the ballot for U.S. Congress last year and documenting the whole thing on Newsvine."
So what, if anything, do Newsvine's contributers have in common? Mike says that they all share "a desire not to soapbox but to play a legitimate role in the news ecosystem." In other words, they take an active interest in the news.
Newsvine appears to be ramping up nicely and from my own browsing round the site, there was a reasonable amount of seeding, writing, voting and commenting going on. In the Politics section, one of the top stories as of writing is President Bush Makes A Little Girl Cry, which had 56 votes and 125 comments when I checked (does the title reflect a liberal bias on the site?).
The topic I'm most familiar with, Tech, didn't have as many comments or votes - the most comments on a story was 17, and 23 votes was the top. However the content in the Tech section seemed up-to-date and relevant, mostly filled with AP wire stories. Personally I'd still choose Techmeme or Topix over Newsvine Tech, but overall not a bad selection of stories. If you're looking for a tech community to join and actively participate in, other than Read/WriteWeb of course, then Newsvine Tech could be your cup of tea.
Next up in this series, we explore localized Citizen Journalism sites.
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Newsvine has one huge annoyance for me. Instead of something simple like uk.newsvine.com or newsvine.co.uk, I have to type unitedkingdom.newsvine.com -- catchy or what? Consequently, the site's about as busy as Stoke-on-Trent on a wet Wednesday evening. I wish there were a credible user-generated news site that didn't focus entirely on the USA...
Posted by: Andy | July 13, 2007 4:16 AM
Thanks for small analisys, waiting for some other cases.
Posted by: Maksim | July 13, 2007 4:16 AM
Hi Richard.
Citizen journalism is very healthy because of its participative nature, and with almost all news publications and TV channels reporting biased news all the time, you can get the real sense of the world from citizen journalists. This is definitely a good trend, and if handled properly, it is going to grow.
Posted by: Amrit Hallan - Content Blog | July 13, 2007 6:40 AM
hey - nice article about newsvine. i guess you will make an article about nowpublic?
they are a truly cj startup (no newswire from AP/AFP/Reuters, everything is written by users)
Posted by: heri | July 13, 2007 9:35 AM
Heri beat me to it!
I can't believe I am feeling the need to tell YOU, of all guru tech writers out there, but, I wouldn't be a go-canada-staunch-support-of-local-greatness if I didn't.... would love to see your spin on NowPublic, Vancouver-based CJ site, AP associate, Time's 50 Best Websites of 2007, and on and on....
cheers.
Posted by: Megan Cole | July 13, 2007 10:10 AM
Hmmm, I guess I better write about NowPublic huh ;-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | July 13, 2007 12:35 PM
And NewsCloud.com is an open source platform available to anyone wishing to launch a grassroots media site. It's an exciting time of change ...
Posted by: Jeff | July 13, 2007 3:22 PM
Andy: I feel your pain, so I set up the uk-news group on Newsvine. I was annoyed about the tagging, so uk-news (as opposed to us-news) has become the dominant tag used now by many users, and most, if not all UK related news goes through the group now. Check it out if you have the time and wish to return to Newsvine.
Posted by: Mike B | July 13, 2007 7:47 PM
I am huge fan of newsvine and citizen journalism...
I thing the growing influence of blogs is an example of the power of citizen journalism.
Posted by: Jitendra | July 14, 2007 1:12 AM
Pretty much every social news site (or any other social networking site) gets the same complaint about it being "too US-centric", and the solution to that is NOT to leave the site but to encourage other non-US users to join the site and make it less US-centric.
If people think that isn't going to work, take a long hard look at what's happened to Orkut... it used to be US-centric, but it's not anymore. :)
Posted by: Aine | July 14, 2007 1:19 AM
I like Digg a lot although there can be too much focus on popular things in liew of detailed analysis...
Posted by: Preeti | July 14, 2007 2:18 AM
Richard - As you mentioned in your article- "Newsvine currently gets about 1.2 million unique visitors per month and it has grown at an average rate of 46% per quarter. Newsvine community members view an average of 21 pages per day and spend an average of 143 minutes per month on the site. The site gets about 80,000 comments a month and 250,000 votes a month". Don't we wish we all had that much traffic. Regardless of what anyone else says - Good job!
Posted by: MorganLighter | July 15, 2007 12:33 PM
Blog cultures is great. Especially when it comes to editorial. We shouldn't confuse it for anything even remotely resembling journalism though...
The history of indymedia is worth looking in to for anyone curious of citizen journalism as activism.
Posted by: Greg J. Smith | July 15, 2007 6:39 PM
Richard - thanks for your indication that you'll check out NowPublic, as Megan and Heri suggested.
I'm pretty sure if you do you'll see why Time Magazine raved about NowPublic in fairly unambiguous terms:
"...Nowhere are the merits of citizen journalism more apparent than at NowPublic."
Mark Schneider
Actual News Guy
NowPublic.com
Posted by: Mark Schneider | July 15, 2007 11:36 PM
Good summary. As some commenters have said, if one scratches below the surface, you can find non-US centric stuff. Clearly, with the vast majority of subscribers being US-based, it is inevitable that the FP will reflect that. The net is widening.
Posted by: Raat | July 16, 2007 5:07 PM
Newsvine is growing by leaps and bounds. It's less like a baby and more like a puppy--one day it's cute and naive, and the next it's taking a chunk out of your leg.
There are a lot of exciting things going on, much pushing for more Citizen Journalism (which inspired me to attempt to get a press pass for Lollapalooza, which I received, and will be reporting in depth on Newsvine), and a tremendous amount of support within the community to help foster new and less experienced writers.
We don't just talk about the news, but we also talk about how to report it, how Newsvine can best be used to report and discuss the news, and what the community vision is for the site.
Thanks for taking a look at Newsvine!
Posted by: Viki | July 16, 2007 5:27 PM
Take another look at Newsvine, past their PR hype and the comments left by users. Alexa says it loads slower than 80% of other sites. I've waited almost a full minute to click from the front page to an article, more than once. Newsvine is overloaded with useless stuff like "what's your favorite band", plus a very high amount flamefests, which staffers join in with, too. The concept showed promise, but the management just isn't there, and the investment numbers show it: NowPublic earns $10.6 million, Newsvine gets $1.5 million. I tag this one as a start-up venture that owners hoped to hype, sell for a profit to them, and then move on to the next build-hype-sell cycle with something else.
Posted by: Investorguru | July 31, 2007 7:22 AM