Something to Talk About

In response to the emergence of crowdsourced journalism, mainstream news outlets are developing socially driven broadcast platforms and apps to attract younger consumers. These innovative and interactive takes on conventional programming source their content from social networks, granting users a significant say in the stories of the day.

The Stream: An Al Jazeera broadcast, The Stream bridges the gap between mainstream and social media, drawing upon a vibrant online community to find and share “new perspectives from people on the ground.” The show, a social network first and a television program second, functions mainly as an amplifier for online conversation. On-air content is curated from a range of networks using storytelling platform Storify, and hosts respond to incoming tweets throughout their live discussions. Some have speculated that Al Jazeera’s persistent success with social media has the network poised to expand its cable reach, where it would likely find a broad audience among a generation of news-hungry, globally minded Gen Xers and Ys.

What’s Trending: CBSNews.com recently launched What’s Trending, a weekly webcast featuring news and cultural pieces culled exclusively from social networks. Billed as a “broadcast show for the Internet generation,” the program streams live to allow for on-the-spot audience feedback. Viewers are encouraged to tweet their questions and comments as the program unfolds, and hosts refer to a TweetRiver feed to gauge real-time reactions. Distinguishing itself from Al Jazeera’s version, which takes viral crazes off the table, What’s Trending considers any high-traffic item (see: pirates vs. ninjas) fair game for discussion, which has prompted some criticism about the diminished value of crowdsourced “news” that lacks standard editorial filters.

News.me: Developed by betaworks in collaboration with The New York Times, the News.me iPad app is essentially a personalized news aggregator. The News.me feed pulls content directly from users’ Twitter accounts, providing one-stop access to the articles and links that are being read, shared and discussed by their contacts. Expanding upon the standard model for social networking peer recommendation, which has seen success across genres (especially music sharing sites), News.me also draws data from bit.ly, the popular link-shortening service that processes billions of links for tweeting, and thus affords a more accurate representation of the day’s most widely trafficked content.