Who decides what’s newsworthy?
When MEP for South East England Daniel Hannan delivered his attack on Gordon Brown on Wednesday in the European Parliament, the press didn’t pay much attention. But the public did. So it came that the video he posted on Youtube got the most hits in less time – 1,270,568 views until now and 8,752 comments so far, not just from English people.
The video spread like a virus through the Internet, with support of first Twitter, followed by links to several blogs.
The media didn’t feel that this speech was newsworthy obviously, but the public did.
That’s an obvious example of how the media turns into pull media. The whole communication process becomes people powered by people actively searching for the information they want to.
But that means for Public Relations as well as for the politicians to give up some control, as Don Tapscott, the author of Wikinomics states. And I guess that’s something what still scares some people. Understandably to a certain extend.
But democracy shouldn’t be about control anyway, rather than being about participation. And if politicians use these new tools attentive they can get a much closer look on what the people think, need and want, as through new media the thoughts, needs and beliefs of people are exactly reflected.
And then the “risk” of giving up control can be very rewarding in the end.
As Daniel Hannan states on his blog, it was really surprising for him how his speech hit the web. He posted videos like that since seven weeks, but they never got that much attention. And honestly, there are more entertaining videos on Youtube.
Maybe he just said what many people actually thought. Because I suppose people just get active, whether it is online or offline, when they see the need for a change.
March 28th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
As you say, this really shows how the mainstream media’s idea of newsworthiness differs so much from a lot of web users.
As Hannan said on C4 news, the European parliament address isn’t something that the mainstream broadcast media would normally bother covering.
This is where the mechanics of virals come into it. The speech was remarkable and exciting in terms of its delivery (which is why it was spread), but not particularly noteable in terms of its content. What’s more Hannan was a relative unknown untill this video.
April 2nd, 2009 at 4:02 pm
This is such a good example of people going out there on the web and getting what they find as interesting and important, and it not just from the media who pick and chose what they want us to read and know about.
I agree with the idea that people are taking the risk more and more now because they believe it is worth it. Though giving up this control is hard for people because it never feels good to put your life/career in someone’s hands especially when its on such a large scale.
April 22nd, 2009 at 5:04 pm
The news used to be reflective of what the editors thought we wanted to know. Now however, we can find the news story ourselves, from the most abstract and unsuspected places, as in this case. This means that it enhances our democratic ability to find news and info using the web that best fits our beliefs and is not forcing a mianstream view upon us.
May 11th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
I guess this is an example of why many of choose to go to so many different sources for our news, because now we have the choice of reading what is important or significant to us.
Sometimes mainstream media seem to cover such irrelevant air-filler while other seemingly important stuff seems to go unnoticed. I think this is also down to media conglomerates and the concentration of media ownership. Journalists aren’t really free to follow thier own agenda these days.