Microsoft's Ad And Tomorrow's Journalism
from the the-times,-they-are-a-changing dept
Yesterday I saw the story on Slashdot about the weak Microsoft attempt to create their own version of a "switch" ad having someone talk about how they switched from a Mac to a PC. I didn't think it was that big of a story and was kind of surprised to see a bunch of news sources pick it up. However, the much more interesting story (as Dan Gillmor points out) is how this story developed. It first showed up as a Slashdot post, and then the Associated Press picked up the story and found out the truth behind the deal. At least the AP version credits Slashdot for bringing the story out. If you only read the News.com version, you would think they discovered the whole thing on their own. In fact, News.com makes it sound as though Microsoft removed the page only after someone at News.com called them on it - as opposed to when they discovered that page was suddenly being Slashdotted. However, we're moving more and more into participatory journalism. While journalists are still important in tracking down information and writing a detailed article, this story became a story (even if I didn't think it was an interesting one) because of the crowd over at Slashdot.
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Now, with this huge flat universal agency which is the web, we ll find more and more of this ad readers and agencies use same sources.
I keep finding stories about "who cut&paste whose story" everywhere, editors and writers shouild just convince themselves that the source is part of the story and quoting other people, websites or sources just makes it more interesting. Internet is about linking and tracking
but also this partecipatory style is a problem. Have you realized that relevant news on googlenews are first of all what AP spread over dozens of affiliated websites, pretty much what slashdot does for the thousands of blogs.
sites just quoting other sites just because they don t know better swamp the web with average stories that just conceal what interesting and original might be coming up
The web is entropic
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