News moves so quickly that your Facebook ‘friends’ just can’t keep up.
In a guest post for OJB, Neil Thurman highlights a new research report that suggests the increased availability of news on mobile platforms, and its harnessing of social networks—like Facebook—to power recommendations, comes at a price: stories that are less relevant to readers’ interests than those recommended by editors and found on news providers’ traditional websites.

Given the modern software platforms that mobile devices offer and their ability to be location-aware, when my co-author, Prof Steve Schifferes, and I started work on this report we were expecting news providers’ mobile editions and ‘apps’ to be highly personalizable. In fact we found they offered, on average, 13 times fewer forms of personalization than news providers’ full web editions.

We think this might be a result of the relatively early stage of development of mobile news apps but also because mobile devices—like the iPad—are often used for passive rather than active consumption. We reached the conclusion that if you like to get your news filtered to your preferences you’re better sticking to news providers’ main websites.

We also found that social filters performed poorly against editors in their choice of stories readers wanted to see. Specifically the Facebook plug-in some news sites have used hasn’t done a good job of predicting readers’ interests.

News moves so quickly that your Facebook ‘friends’ just can’t keep up, and we have fewer overlapping interests with those ‘friends’ than we think. Professional editors can still better predict the stories you’ll want to read than the social filters currently available on some news sites.

Although journalists have thus-far retained their gate keeping role, we do believe that social media is going to be increasingly crucial to the future of news. Our evidence suggests that there still is a gap in the market for effective social news filters, which research projects and commercial companies have not yet filled.

Our report surveyed eleven national news websites in the UK and US over a three and a half year period.

PHP Freelancer

Lots of people go through periods of doubt and flux about their gender—not everyone, and you’re not broken if you’ve always been very, very sure of your gender—and pretending that we don’t harms pretty much everyone.

Guardian's first live news desk experiment. An evolution of the open news project.

Newsdesk live - Monday 30 January
Each day on the Newsdesk live blog, the Guardian's national news team will bring you the news as we break it, explain how we choose what we report and why – and ask you to get involved. Send us your ideas, evidence and experiences to help shape our coverage. Get in touch below the line, tweet @RobertsDan or @PollyCurtis, or email us at newsdesklive@guardian.co.uk.

Today we're leading on:

• Stephen Hester waives bonus
• Occupy evictions
• David Cameron in Brussels
• University application figures

I’ve written a couple of guest posts for Nieman Journalism Lab and the tech news site Memeburn. The Nieman post is part of a series looking forward to 2012. I’m never a fan of futurology so I’ve cheated a little and talked about developments already in progress: new interface conventions in news websites; the rise of collaboration; and the skilling up of journalists in data.

Memeburn asked me a few months ago to write about social media’s impact on journalism’s role as the Fourth Estate, and it took me until this month to find the time to do so. Here’s the salient passage:

“But the power of the former audience is a power that needs to be held to account too, and the rise of liveblogging is teaching reporters how to do that: reacting not just to events on the ground, but the reporting of those events by the people taking part: demonstrators and police, parents and politicians all publishing their own version of events — leaving journalists to go beyond documenting what is happening, and instead confirming or debunking the rumours surrounding that.

“So the role of journalist is moving away from that of gatekeeper and — as Axel Bruns argues — towards that of gatewatcher: amplifying the voices that need to be heard, factchecking the MPs whose blogs are 70% fiction or the Facebook users scaremongering about paedophiles.

“But while we are still adapting to this power shift, we should also recognise that that power is still being fiercely fought-over. Old laws are being used in new ways; new laws are being proposed to reaffirm previous relationships. Some of these may benefit journalists — but ultimately not journalism, nor its fourth estate role. The journalists most keenly aware of this — Heather Brooke in her pursuit of freedom of information; Charles Arthur in his campaign to ‘Free Our Data’ — recognise that journalists’ biggest role as part of the fourth estate may well be to ensure that everyone has access to information that is of public interest, that we are free to discuss it and what it means, and that — in the words of Eric S. Raymond — “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow“.”

Comments, as always, very welcome.

As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

"This is just to say that if we think keeping our scholarly work primarily out of public sight [except for the occasional conference presentation] until its penultimate moment of publication in a conventional venue such as the academic journal or book, at which point quite a few years of our lives [mainly spent in the solitude of studies and libraries or other semi-private spaces where we could manage a foothold] may have been devoted to that work whose “arrival” in print may even occur long after we have moved on to other projects, then we risk working too much in the dark, apart from the world which has bequeathed to us our objects and methods of study and reflection [I might also add here that this traditional way of doing things also keeps our work sequestered within the academy, and does not allow us to reach a more broadly public audience, which, in my mind, is a real perversion of the term "humanities"]. We also do our work largely apart from the very peers whom we hope will welcome and even love it when it is “finished.” Yes, for the kind of work we do, quiet is required, even long stretches of solitude [because this is when ideas often arrive to us that could never have arrived any other way and also because it's hard to translate medieval Latin when people are milling all around you], but you’ve got to get outside every now then. And maybe also reflect on the fact that even the supposed inside/outside divide is primarily an illusion."

A.O. Scott responds to Neal Gabler

by Neal Gabler

What 'gatekeeping' has become in the 21st Century.

The challenge for editors goes beyond their participation and exhorting their charges to do the same. Return, for a moment, to consider the editor’s customary role as gatekeeper—and think about the most valued attribute of the job. It went by various names and phrases—judgment, news sense, news judgment—but at its core, the job was about these things (and more): What makes a good story? When and how to push a reporter to take a story deeper? When to publish it? When to wait? Where to place it?

Ken Doctor: "In this hybrid era of straddling print and digital publishing, the role of the gatekeeper has markedly morphed. It’s shifted from 'us' to 'them,' but 'them' includes a lowercase version of 'us,' too. Gatekeeping is now a collective pursuit; we’ve become our own and each other’s editors. ... The attitude—as well as the mechanics—for attracting readers has to change. It’s no longer 'take my judgment on the day’s news or good luck finding another local daily.' And even though readers are no longer captive to what an editor decides, people still want some help when it comes to deciding how and where to look for the news they value."

Charles Miller has had his media diet reshaped by social networks.

A long time ago I discovered this fundamental rule of the net -- People come back to places that send them away. Places like Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Youtube, even Twitter. These are the mainstays. You go there to get somewhere else. Sites that try to suck you in and hold you there, no matter how cleverly, go away. While it may seem like a good approach at first, long-term it's a losing strategy.

(IR Web Report)

Dan Gillmor: "[The] statistics about Web 2.0 participation have implications for citizen media, too. Are we truly erasing the barriers between citizen and media, or are we just replacing one set of gatekeepers with another?"

Tim Luckhurst on the Saddam Hussein video: "From the moment the explicit footage appeared on Anwarweb.net, traditional editorial processes were redundant. No editor decided who could witness this tawdry spectacle."

"As expected, there’s already video of Saddam’s hanging — I mean the actual death — online. ... [M]mainstream news editors can no longer expect to be the sole arbiters of taste when it comes to what the public sees in events like this."