Information overload is not a new problem. As Clay Shirky said, receiving a high volume of information has become the norm. At the root of the problem is filter failure.
Since the introduction of the printing press, the publishing industry has held the duty to decide which information was important enough to print. However, once the Internet became mainstream, producing content was cheap and easy. Therefore, publishers were no longer needed to "print" a novel, and newspapers and traditional media outlets weren't the only ones reporting the news. A whole new wave of information broke through the filter of traditional publishers.
The expansion of the Internet coupled with the rise of blogging and social media allows the general public to become content producers, documenting everything from the mundane to the vital news with Facebook status updates, tweets, instagram photos and more. Our problem now is sifting through all of those mundane Facebook status updates to find that really important bit of information we might deem newsworthy.
As consumers of information, we once gathered news from the morning newspaper, perhaps the radio during our drives to and from work or school, the evening or late night newscast and of course the talk around the proverbial water cooler. Altogether, we received information from these four main avenues, and we understood the filters that governed the flow of information to us.
Now, those channels that flow information to us have doubled, maybe even tripled. News has never been more readily available than it is today, and it is available on many platforms, including but not limited to print publications, TV, radio, podcasts, streaming video, websites, email blasts, text message alerts, tweets, Facebook status updates and blogs. Like Shirky said, we have to assume we will continue to be targeted; the flow of information will not slow or stop, especially with so many vehicles of getting information to us.
Not only is there more information to spread and more channels for flowing that information to consumers, the standard for sharing information has also been lowered. Shirky pointed to livejournal, a blogging website that was popular about 10 years ago with teenagers who wrote about their angst-filled high school lives. Those blogs were public diaries often filled with information few people would care to know. Yet they were out there, in the blogosphere, for anyone to read.
Shirky says the filters we had are broken. When the filters fail, it is time to design new ones.
To ensure news stories are making it through the filters and standing out from the plethora of information available, especially online, journalists need to become better filters themselves.
A journalist's job is to gather information from multiple sources and to share that in a fair, accurate and succinct report. To do that with today's massive amount of information flowing our way, journalists need to be suspicious of the information we receive. Information published online or by another outlet, should not be taken as fact without scrutinization. We still need to fact check, investigate and be wary of sources that might steer us wrong. Only then can journalists remain relevant and preferred over the average content producer.
Sharing news stories with consumers relies on two filters: the publisher and the platform's parameters. As journalists, we are the publishers, and we still decide what information is important enough to share with our readers, viewers, listeners or users. The second filter, the platform parameters, deals with how we share our stories, especially in regard to the web and mobile devices.
As an industry, we know search engine optimization plays an important role in how we word headlines, subheads and cutlines. Using "picture" rather than "photo" may drive more web traffic to our site if it is a more commonly used search term. When sharing links to our news stories on Twitter, using hashtags as a way to sort and label information for consumers will help them to find which of our stories are relevant to their particular interests. These are examples of parameters we can control to ensure our stories reach our audience, despite the information overload.
As journalism forges onward into the digital age, coping with filter failure will make or break our industry. How journalists receive information and how we share it with consumers needs to adapt to work with new filters to ensure quality, rather than just quantity.
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