[LINK] the media vs. new media wars

[Tom Worthington]

Jan Whitaker wrote:
> ... skewed view of Uncle Rupert and his ilk re the thieving new media  ...

Appended is a spoof media release, in which I suggest Google point to 
the original press release or news wire article, rather than the news 
items written from them.

However, in looking at Goodle News today I noticed that this already 
seems to be happening, with Blogs, media releases and even Wikipedia 
entries appearing more prominently in the list of articles on an news 
topic alongside items from traditional print media.

Mr. Murdoch should be careful what he wishes for. ;-)

---

		LINKGRAM	

	   THE LINK INSTITUTE

Separating new media from old

Canberra, 3 December 2009: The Link Institute today announced a
breakthrough in helping new media untangle from the old: The Sourcer
Service. This new service will provide web users with access to original
sources online, allowing them to bypass old media redisintermediation.
This is in response to News Corporation Chair Rupert Murdoch's complaint
that web based news aggrigators, such as Google News, are unfairly
reusing content from his newspapers.

Research from the Link Institute shows that more than 94% of content in
traditional newspapers is not original news: it is material sourced from
media releases, the wikipedia and from news wire services already
published online. The other 6% of material in newspapers was found to
have no factual basis.

An examination of Google News shows this phenomenon, with hundreds of
news articles on the same topic, having almost identical content. Google
News will display a number of newspaper web site sources, including
those from Newscorp, and then later in the list a media release,
wikipedia entry or news wire posting which was the source of the story.

The Sourcer service carries out an analysis of the news and presents the
reader with an automatically edited summary of the original sources. In
this way it carries out a similar function to the editors and
journalists at newspapers: selecting what are credible sources and
editing the material from a media release, the wikipedia or a newswire.

A test of Sourcer showed that it was able in most cases find the
original source of a story online. Use of Sourcer is expected to
eliminate the need for online readers to access newspaper web sites, 
which should alleviate Mr. Murdoch's concern over plagiarism.

;-)

***


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/people.php?StaffID=140274