News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (review)

It is often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and if that's the case, journalism in the digital age suffers from an over-abundance of flattery, at least that's the implication of a fascinating new book by journalism and media scholar Pablo J. Boczkowski, of Northwestern University. Boczkowski's book, News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance, offers an intriguing examination of three Argentine news case studies, Clarín, La Nación and Infobae.com. By critically studying the news gathering, production and content practices as well as audiences of these important South American news media, Boczkowski provides significant insights into the transformation of news in a period when the Internet and other digital technologies were spreading throughout not only global society but the news business as well. Through the evidence provided, a principal effect of this transformation was the homogenization of news production practices as well as content.

For many journalists, especially those in the core part of the craft, this is a troubling trend, where it is the scoop, or the unique story, that stands out and provides a unique Raison d'être. Yet, the growth of online news, especially news distributed freely and rapidly, has made it impossible for anything but the commoditization of news and the imitation of news. Every news organization knows exactly what every other news competitor has on its website in real time and can not ignore it. Therefore, they find it nearly irresistible to not publish those same stories. And there is a digital pack journalism akin to the analog pack journalism that has long plagued journalism.

The pack phenomenon is not limited to the reporting side of the business. The business side also reeks of imitation, Boczkowski correctly notes. If one news organization begins to develop a new business strategy for cultivating revenues in the online or digital space, others quickly follow. But this is not new to journalism, either. Since 1833 when New York publisher Benjamin H. Day introduced the Penny Press, inspired by the new rapid printing technology of the day which enabled the advent of mass circulation newspapers and the beginning of a new advertising-based business model for "mass media," newspaper publishers have followed the lead of many a successful media entrepreneur. What is needed in the 21st century media space, if Boczkowski is correct in his core thesis, is innovation. That is, news media leaders who make their products and techniques stand out from the pack, not follow it.

Boczkowski's imitation thesis suggests news media would find potentially great value in the application of natural language processing to journalism. Such an application might enable the tagging in digital online form of the sources and facts reported, the basic building blocks of news reporting. A basic system has already been developed for online news summarization by an interdisciplinary team lead by Professor Kathleen A. McKeown, the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Her NLP system, the Columbia Newsblaster, uses various algorithms to automatically sort and summarize news stories on related topics but from different news providers. Newsblaster also operates across multiple languages, which would be essential for such an application to Spanish or other language news environments such as Clarín or La Nación. For a discussion of the research behind Newsblaster see www.cs.columbia.edu/~devans/papers/mlNewsblaster.pdf or for a live demonstration http://newsblaster.cs.columbia.edu.

A system built on similar principles and algorithms is suggested here. By tagging such news elements as facts and sources, which according to Boczkowski's imitation thesis have been largely homogenous in the digital age, each news provider could be automatically measured and assessed in terms of their uniqueness in the marketplace. The number and diversity of sources and facts in each story covered, not to mention the diversity of stories reported, could be monitored and reported...