Traditional News: News from professional journalists without a personal or political slant (in theory). They gather the facts, think things through thoroughly, pass through editing and get multiple stamps of approval before delivering the message to the masses. Oh, and they make a living doing it.
Bionic News: It’s content crowdsourcing or sometimes disparagingly called content farming — news from both pros and non-professionals (er, “freelancers”) and sometimes with a slant. They are regular folks who are in the throes of what they are reporting, by choice: Often, they don’t get paid or get paid a menial sum and have to pay their own way into the very events they are covering. Why? Well, it’s exciting and you get your name out there while chalking up a little bit of experience. Plus there’s the cred that comes with walking around at cool events looking like you are part of it. Okay, to be fair, some folks are simply passionate about reporting, whether it’s for a salary or for fun. But, with this so-called “bionic” news you get the grit of the story and LOTS of it quickly from all sorts of angles.
Take AOL’s Seed for example, introduced to the masses at 2010 SXSW. They recruited writers who “can follow directions … and that was the criteria.” The goal is to supply mountains of relevant content fast and cheap. Now, submissions do get passed through AOL’s managing editor before making the final cut. So, it’s not to be discounted as gibberish by any stretch. It’s the real deal, just different — kind of like blogging but with an assignment and probably a few rules. Plus, it has been known to lead to higher profile, paid assignments —so maybe a foot in the door at a major corporation.
Another major player is Demand Media, which produces on average about 5K pieces of content a day via its Demand Studios. Demand is a little different in that they also foster crowdsourcing for third-party organizations. Even so, basically Seed and Demand are to content what Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is to IT developers.
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum is a recent Reuters’ policy that prohibits their journalists from breaking news on Twitter, in an effort to avoid personal or political slants in the name of news. It must first be broken on the wire, and even then they should seek higher-up approval before tweeting — which btw, has to be on a professional account, separate from their personal account. While they recognize the inherent value of social media and immediate news, they also have a “hard-earned reputation” to maintain and understandably so.
Traditional and crowdsourced content are like night and day, really. I say there’s an absolute place for them both. For content providers, it's partly dependant on your objective, subject matter, audience and medium. And for the reader, well, do you want the bay full of oysters or just a pearl?