Drowning in Social Media: Filtering the Social Web to get the News You Need

In today's world of new media, where a person can get news from the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook, etc. people can easily feel as though they're drowning in too much information. The New York Times published an article explaining that as a result of that feeling, there is now a need to filter all of this information to make it easier for people to get their daily dose of news.

The article cites the commercial jet landing in the Hudson River and the uprisings in Egypt as examples of regular people--not reporters--who are breaking news by uploading Twitter posts, photos, and videos to the Web. As a result, there is now a huge surplus of information coming in from all directions. How are people supposed to sift through the noise? One of the senior strategists at NPR explains, “There’s a big need for tools that allow people to collect bits of social media context and organize them in some fashion.”

A Web start-up called Storify aims to help journalists and others collect and filter all of this information. "Using the Storify Web site, people can find and piece together publicly available content from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and other sites. They can also add text and embed the resulting collages of content on their own sites." Storify is one of many Web start-ups working towards this goal so that journalists can sift through all of the information and publish the most relevant items.

One of the founders of Storify explains, "Even though journalists may not be the first on the scene, they select the most reliable sources, digest loads of information and provide context for events. We have so many real-time streams now, we’re all drowning. So the idea of Storify is to pick out the most important pieces, amplify them and give them context."

Furthermore, it is interesting to consider the fact that the news media no longer has exclusivity on sharing and publishing information. If the average Joe breaks a story on his Twitter and then immediately posts videos of the event on his YouTube, will the New York Times' coverage really be breaking news anymore? What is the difference between a traditional news source, like the New York Times, covering a story and a well-informed citizen covering the story through his own social media?

Does the influence of technology mean that the 21st-century role of the news media will be based less on investigating and reporting, and more on sifting and organizing? Will reporters now rely more on average people to provide information, and on their own professional judgment to choose which stories are newsworthy? Or can traditional news media still exist with new social media providing a complementary set of news? Will the increased power of the people exacerbate the 24-hour news cycle, or will the laypeople's influence force the news media to dig deeper into the issues that people truly care about?