Social News Websites

There are a number of Community-Edited News websites on the Internet now. These include:

* Netscape

* Newsvine

* Digg and

* Reddit

They can be seen as examples of what has been termed "crowdsourcing" ("The Rise of Crowdsourcing," Jeff HowePage, Wired, Issue 14.06, June 2006). That is, their content is contributed by a large cadre of people from the cybersphere, rather than by paid reporters and editors. These sites also involve their readers editorially, since they vote on the interest of each posting, and postings are displayed with measures of their popularity. Postings include not only news from the established media, but items found trolling the blogosphere.

Until recently, these social news sites were wholely dependent on volunteers, but that is now changing.

Jason Calacanis, who started the Silicon Alley Reporter magazine and blog publisher Weblogs Inc. (later sold to AOL), is now general manager of Netscape.com. Calacanis's Netscape is now paying bookmarkers with strong track records on other sites to come to work for at Netscape (the old home page for the old browser that’s trying on a new life as a group-edited news site.) This not surprisingly has turned out to be a controverial move among many (except of course for the dozen or so receiving $1000 per month for the services they were previously providing for free).

Read more about Social News:

* "An Eye for Cool, and Cash," Sara Kehaulani Goo, The Washington Post, August 26, 2006

* "Should Community-Edited News Sites Pay Top Editors?," Mark Glaser, Mediashift, July 25, 2006.