Newsvine launch heralds new level of news interactivity

The future of online news will be a hybrid of personalised, professional content and user contributions, according to the founders of Newsvine, a new Seattle-based news site that launched fully last week.

Newsvine was started by a small team of refugees from several big media companies including Disney and ESPN. It is a slick, sophisticated site that combines mainstream news and sports coverage from Associated Press and ESPN with reports and links 'seeded' by individual citizen reporters. Users can also respond and comment on news stories, ranking them according to importance or interest.

Calvin Tang, Newsvine's co-founder and chief operating officer, said the project was borne out of a need for change not yet exploited by traditional media. As a small, independent start-up company of just five people, the company is much more flexible and able to develop new initiatives quickly.

"With the many layers of corporate bureaucracy, it is incredibly hard for big media to move quickly on time-intensive initiatives," he told journalism.co.uk.

"We're capable of making decisions and implementing strategy in an unencumbered manner that would not be possible under a larger umbrella; Newsvine was created from scratch in six months, from the first line of code to the public launch."

An FAQ and regular links to user guides help explain how the site works, and how to contribute. Users need to be educated about how to use the site because it does not use something as familiar as a conventional blogging system, explained Mr Tang, but the emphasis is on the involvement of the readership itself.

"The community itself plays a central role in helping new users along, and this process ultimately results in benevolent users appearing around the vine while the bad apples are kept out," he said.

New users are 'evaluated' when they first join in an area called 'the Greenhouse'.

Content is entirely unedited, relying on users to vote and comment on stories and to report any abusive postings. The site does not expect the majority of users to contribute because most will just want to read the site, but the quality of contributions will increase as the audience develops.

"We only need a relatively small percentage of users to be actively voting and commenting or writing and seeding, for the entire user base to benefit from those interactions.

"As the number of active participants grows, the percentage of the entire user base that these users account for will likely shrink over time - as competition for prominence becomes tougher and quality increases. The threshold for being a featured contributor will always be raised higher in this scenario."

Sites like Newsvine exist because of the opportunities presented by new technologies, but also because of the shortcomings of traditional media. This is a complex issue, said Mr Tang.

"As traditional media organisations grew, they became entrenched by many factors over a long period of time," he explained.

"The constant need to maintain ratings, the short attention span of the television audience and the tremendous overhead these large companies have, all contribute to the current state of the media. Add to this the fact that an endeavour put forth by a traditional media company to embrace citizen journalists runs counter to the future of its own editorial and writing staff, and you've got a paralyzing conflict of interests as well."

The site has been in trial mode since 5 January, and launched fully last week.

Revenue is advertising-based, although there are plans to reward contributors with the earnings from all the adverts on their columns - a development that the founders feel is "in the spirit of citizen journalism".

"This is a rather new phenomenon in an industry that has long remained resistant to change and there are numerous turns in the road ahead," said Mr Tang.

"It will be interesting to see how it all plays out."

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