Social News Services: an Innovative Way to Read Your News

The New York Times reported on the long-awaited social news service, entitled News.me, developed by a collaboration between Betaworks and the New York Times Company. This fascinating news service uses artificial intelligence to monitor what people are reading in order to learn what they like to read. Thus, the service can provide other articles and links that will most likely be of interest to the reader. This service also has an important social media aspect -- it will display popular articles that are being posted via sites like Twitter around the Web. Users can also save interesting articles to read them later or share the articles through Facebook, Twitter, and email. News.me is first being featured on iPads by Apple.

The article goes on to say, "News.me's most interesting feature may be that it allows people to follow the articles being read and discussed on Twitter among friends, noted technologists and early-adopters from the Web." The CEO of Betaworks explains, "Instead of only seeing what you're Tweeting, I get to see what you're reading. We're taking the social stream and flipping it on its head."

There is another important feature of News.me: the company receives a weekly fee from readers, out of which it pays publishers (such as The New York Times) according to how many times users read a particular article from that publisher on News.me's site. "On one level, it's very simple. If people read your content, we send you a check at the end of the month. But on a deeper level ... the service is trying to build a sustainable business model for an application built by pulling in content from dozens of other sources ... the application doesn't do away with any pay model put in place by a news organization." News.me is trying to create a social reading experience, and in return, make sure that publishers are getting their cut whenever people read their stuff.

This new market of transforming the way people read news from the Web is expanding: another tech company called Flipboard takes social feeds from Facebook and Twitter and changes the reading experience by formatting it so that it looks like a magazine. The Washington Post Company also developed something similar to News.me, called Trove, that analyzes likes and other personal information from its readers' Facebooks so that it can select articles of interest for its readers.

All of a sudden, social media is shaping the way that traditional media sources are presenting their news. By tracking what readers are liking on Facebook or tweeting on Twitter, the New York Times and the Washington Post have a more concrete idea than ever before of what readers want. Are publications therefore losing some of their control over their content? Are readers now unduly influencing -- via their personal preferences displayed on social media -- what types of stories are getting published?

In addition, there is added pressure for The New York Times because it only makes money from the News.me partnership if people are reading NYT articles. Technology and social media have created a new sense of accountability for publications and (more significantly) for journalists. Now, it's not just how many newspapers you sell, but how many times a person reads each specific article in your publication. Does this pose a threat for some journalists? If people are reading on News.me and then posting articles about Charlie Sheen on Twitter ten times more than articles about the turmoil in Egypt, and the New York Times can now know and track this behavior, will there be a shift in how many writers are hired for certain content areas and which articles get the front page spot?