{"id":25,"date":"2008-02-23T08:28:36","date_gmt":"2008-02-23T13:28:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/2008\/02\/23\/the-rich-get-richer\/"},"modified":"2008-02-25T00:22:01","modified_gmt":"2008-02-25T05:22:01","slug":"the-rich-get-richer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/2008\/02\/23\/the-rich-get-richer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rich Get Richer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.computational-journalism.com\/symposium\/index.php\">conference<\/a> in rainy Atlanta, Krishna Bharat of Google News showed slides illustrating what I had previously <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/2008\/02\/07\/where-in-the-online-world-is-the-npr-story-on-va-hospital-scandal\/\">observed<\/a> : how news aggregators help bury original investigative reporting. The computer, he says, \u201cnotices that a story is hot\u201d due to \u201caggregate editorial interest,\u201d meaning the same story turns up in multiple sources. So, every newspaper, agency, website, TV and radio newscast, etc. mentions the Clinton\/Obama plagiarism story and correspondingly it comes up at the top of Google News. <\/p>\n<p>This is exactly what does not happen with a single investigative story, no matter how good the reporting, how reliable the source (the case I originally wrote about was NPR, but it could just as easily have been the San Jose Mercury News), or how potentially important the story. It&#8217;s not the fault of Google News of course, they&#8217;re only reflecting what happens in the media world that existed before them. Certain news items create a feeding frenzy, others float off into oblivion.<\/p>\n<p>Later in the day the phrase \u201cthe cream rises to the top\u201d was spoken at  least twice in an hour-long panel. How do we test whether that is really true? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At a conference in rainy Atlanta, Krishna Bharat of Google News showed slides illustrating what I had previously observed : how news aggregators help bury original investigative reporting. The computer, he says, \u201cnotices that a story is hot\u201d due to \u201caggregate editorial interest,\u201d meaning the same story turns up in multiple sources. So, every newspaper, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1659,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2221,2375,2376],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cappucino","category-conventional-wisdom","category-cream-rises-to-the-top"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1659"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}