It's not just journalists - design plays key role in how we get news

This is interesting. Not only are news journalists and editors no longer in control of how news stories reach mass audiences, but it seems neither are traditional media companies.

To a degree news is now served up by companies like Google and Facebook who treat it almost like a sub-set of the entertainment industry.

Originally posted on Gigaom:

Among its other disruptive influences, the rise of the web has caused journalism to become detached from the physical objects it used to be embedded in, whether that was a newspaper, magazine or book.

Information flows over us like a river now, instead of being chopped up and frozen in time. And that means more than just an aesthetic change in how we consume the news — it means that the apps and devices and platforms we use play an increasingly large role in how we get our information, and therefore so does the design of those services.

Researchers Mike Ananny and Kate Crawford recently published a study looking at this phenomenon and they spent some time interviewing designers and developers of news and content-curation apps such as Storify, Zite, Google News and Scoopinion. As the two described in in a Nieman Lab post about their research, journalists definitely have…

Read the rest of the Gigaom post...

One key difference between having your news served up by Google and Facebook is that news is not their primary or even their secondary business. They are not in the news business at all. From their point of view it is all about attracting eyeballs which they can sell to advertisers.

While most traditional news publishers also depend on selling reader attention to advertisers, they view news as their product and treat it accordingly. They invest in journalism and news gathering.