WEEK 5. Meikle A.

What do you think constitutes ‘news’ on the Web?

I would agree with Burnett and Marshall’s suggestion that there has been a transformation of news in that the web allows greater involvement of users-produserism of news and a remediation of more traditional news (both written, audio and visual). While this has its benefits in allowing a greater variety of stories to be covered, it must also be noted that it may be less reliable. With this in mind, I think ‘news’ can be defined as the factual reporting of recent events. I would personally only class true ‘news’ on the web as that published by a reliable source (The Times/The Guardian online/even The Sun if I must..., or the BBC, Google or Yahoo news. While I may look at user generated news for vague information, I would never rely on this to any extent further than speculation with the likelihood that it may be inaccurate.
Could I go onto one of these websites and post about the crazy woman I just sat next to on the train? Would that be classed as news? It happened (really...she was mad...), but I would certainly not classify it as newsworthy, or ‘news’ at all. This is another problem of user generated news; what may be news for one person is irrelevant and uninteresting for another. With the www being so vast and often so niche, news should appeal to the audiences reading it but in reality very little news applies globally and is only really 'news' for very few.