CONEWS: A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO ONLINE

NEWS STORIES

Daniel Schneider, Jano de Souza and Ercilia de Stefano

COPPE/UFRJ - Computer Science Department, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

Keywords: Social networks, Online News Stories, Collaboration.

Abstract: In this paper we present the CoNews framework, a hybrid approach to publish online news stories,

consisting of the combination of news entries extracted from authoritative sources - retrieved from news

search engines - with blog articles and user-submitted less-authoritative stories. Some of the goals of this

research include experimenting with new forms of mass communication and editorial control as well as

improving users' access to the ever-expanding news information available to them. By creating an

appropriate environment, we encourage users not only to become a more active audience for news stories

and other issues, but also to contribute with his/her own articles to the body of knowledge.

1 INTRODUCTION

In 1997, Molina reported that online newspapers

were embarking on the journey towards multimedia.

The vision for the end of the journey was “a

personalized interactive electronic news system

making fully-integrated use of text, audio, still-

image, animation and video”. Several problems

were identified as well as uncertainties facing media

companies experimenting with steps towards the

multimedia vision. They include profitability,

media (Molina, 1997).

Today, a large number of online newspapers

disseminate a variety of news reports to Internet

users through a Web Browser. At many news sites,

online readers can do more than merely select

information - they also can add comments, engage in

discussions, or even suggest a story or topic.

However, editors of major online newspapers may

be concerned of losing control or even their

credibility by allowing users to become a source of

communication messages. For this reason, and

because newspapers companies are business

oriented, they have failed to create an appropriate

environment to engage users in media

communication.

News search engines such as Google News have

been an answer to this, in that they integrate diverse

journalistic sources. They provide links to several

articles on the same story so that readers can choose

what subject interests them and consider a rich

variety of perspectives on any given story. Despite

offering a wider range of stories, personalized news

and other facilities, readers are still seen as passive

consumers.

In the recent years, open publishing initiatives

and journalism told by “common people” began to

emerge, enabled by new technologies such as blogs,

wikis, social networks and mobile computing.

Mobile blogging has also been transforming the way

people collaborate as they begin to use their cell

phones and other devices to send updates to their

blogs. Some authors consider these technologies part

of a social phenomenon embracing an approach to

generating and distributing Web content itself,

characterized by open communication,

decentralization of authority, freedom to share and

reuse (Web 2.0, 2006).

In this research, we are investigating new forms

of mass communication - open and multi-directional,

instead of one-way - where the goals of journalists

and readers may be optimally aligned. The main

target of this paper is presenting the CoNews

framework, a hybrid approach to publish online

news stories. By creating an appropriate

environment, we encourage users not only to

become a more active audience for news stories and

other issues, but also to contribute with his/her own

articles to the body of knowledge.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The

second section presents some key background

101

Schneider D., de Souza J. and de Stefano E. (2007).

CONEWS: A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO ONLINE NEWS STORIES.

In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - SAIC, pages 101-106

DOI: 10.5220/0002395701010106

 SciTePress

concepts and the most relevant work; the third

section presents the CoNews framework, its main

concepts and describes the prototype

implementation; and the fourth section the final

considerations and future work.

2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED

WORK

In this section, we begin addressing the main

problems related to online newspapers. Secondly,

we discuss news search engines and show that they

provide an answer to some of these problems. In the

following, we describe some rich technologies that

emerged in the recent years, including blogs, wikis

and social networks. And finally, we present the

most relevant work related to our research.

2.1 Online Newspapers

A long time before the dissemination of online

newspapers, Brown and Duguid (1994) claimed

several advantages of a printed newspaper over its

electronic news counterparts. The three advantages

for print included its uniformity of information -

because everybody got the "front-page news",

compared to everybody getting their own different

front-page - the juxtaposition of news through layout

in the paper, giving information about news value

and relatedness, and finally, the constrained physical

space of a printed paper, demanding a selection of

news.

On the other hand, the advantages to online

newspapers are many: their ability to be up-to-the-

minute, their flexibility, and their customizability.

But these same features are their downfall: readers

of online media don't all see the same news; stories

may change from time to time, so different readers

will see different versions of stories. According to

McElhearn (2006), while newspapers based on paper

offer a fixed, daily dose of news that everyone

shares, online newspapers tend to fragment the news

into only what catches the eye.

Pavlik (1997) claims that online content is

evolving through three stages. The first stage

involves repurposing print content for the online

edition. In stage two, content is augmented with

interactive features, such as hyperlinks and search

engines. Stage three is characterized by the creation

of original news content designed specifically for the

new medium.

However, stage three has not completely been

reached. Newspaper companies are businesses

oriented, and they are unable to understand the

autonomous nature of communication on the Net,

and to meet users’ needs and expectations. As a

matter of fact, the majority of online newspapers

remediate important features of their paper-based

counterparts. Their online services, layout and

communication patterns are largely influenced by

established practices in publishing the paper version.

In most cases, articles posted are exactly the same as

those printed in regular newspapers (Johnson, 1997),

but in the majority of cases, they are narrower

articles. Sometimes they are augmented with

multimedia features like hyperlinks and images, but

only a handful of sites include content designed

specifically for the Web as a new medium of

communication (Pavlik, 1997). For this reason,

except for major breaking news events, readers

spend a small portion of their time retrieving news

from online sources (Fidler, 1997).

It could be argued that a growing number of

online newspapers allow users to comment on news

articles, engage in discussions or even suggest a

story or topic. However, a major problem that rises

is that contributions are fragmented in many news

sites, and readers may feel uncomfortable with the

idea of having to comment in various sites that

publishes articles on the same story. In most cases,

readers may even give up the idea of collaborating

because they just cannot find the right place and the

right persons to collaborate with. Furthermore,

concerns about possible loss of credibility by editors

of major online newspapers may prevent users from

becoming a source of communication messages. By

not creating an environment that offers advantages

over traditional newspapers and that engages users

in a more participatory experience, online

newspapers fail to create significant audiences of

their own.

2.2 News Search Engines

With the goal of placing as much information as

possible on their main pages – to fit around the ads –

online newspapers tend to shut out their readers.

News search engines like Google News have

been a partial answer to this problem. Their stories

show introductions, the first few words of stories,

allowing readers to have more context. News search

engines extract news information from both the Web

and news feeds, group related articles together in

“news stories”, cluster the stories in categories, and

finally display results in personalized pages.

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In Google News portal, as advocated in

(McElhearn, 2006), stories are selected by computer

algorithms, without human intervention, which is

why Google News is considered the antithesis of any

newspaper. Google claims that "news sources are

selected without regard to political viewpoint or

ideology, enabling you to see how different

organizations are reporting the same story" (About

Google News, 2006). In fact, this site creates a space

for the presentation of diverse journalistic voices,

although its diversity and quality depends both on

the availability and reliability of its professional

sources (Ananny and Strohecker, 2002).

Although they offer a wider range of stories,

advanced search, recommendations and many others

value-added services such as news alerts and

searching in news archives, readers are still seen as

passive consumers, and the emphasis remains upon a

one-way flow of information.

2.3 Blogs and Wikis

Blogs represent online journals for a particular

person, where people periodically post news stories

on a certain subject - such as politics – and users are

invited to comment on the stories. They usually

combine text with images or even streamed video,

contain links to other related sites, and entries are

displayed in a reverse chronological order.

In the recent years, they have emerged as a

phenomenon of great impact, not just because of the

millions of blogs that exist but because of the large

numbers of people interested in what bloggers are

saying (Raynsford, 2003). They represent the

antithesis of the values articulated by objective

journalism: they are personal, passionate, subjective,

and not subject to editorial oversight (Gill, 2005).

Some authors consider blogs a useful supplement

to online newspapers in that it may give readers

greater insights into what's happening on the ground.

But others remain sceptical about considering

blogging as a new form of journalism. They state

that two things separate blogging from journalism:

the personalisation of the voice of the blogger and

the lack of a workflow for publication that one

expects for any publishing system. In fact, no editor

comes between the author and the reader.

However, as mentioned before, online

newspapers have failed to create audiences on their

own and, as a result, many online readers have

chosen to eschew traditional sources of news in

favour of blogs. As happens with news stories

indexed by news search engines, there are many

blog search engines available on the Web - such as

Google Blog Search - dedicated to retrieving,

indexing, clustering and delivering blog articles.

A wiki is a tool for collaborative authoring in the

Web that can also be used to publish news stories. It

allows visitors themselves to add, remove, and easily

change content available in a Web page. Wikinews,

for instance, is a free-content initiative that allows

anyone to report news on a wide variety of subjects.

2.4 Social Networks

Social networks have become an emergent subject

in the communications field. They allow people to

share relevant information and media with one

another, self-organize, and easily form alliances to

engage constructively with our neighbors. Readers

are linked to other readers directly, creating smaller

audiences who share much in common.

According to Kollock (1999), users that

contribute in online communities that implement

social networks are motivated by three factors:

anticipated reciprocity, increased recognition and

sense of efficacy. As will be discussed in Section 3,

CoNews is a social network specifically designed

for collaboration over news stories.

2.5 Related Work

Currently, we are aware of a few systems that

provide functionality similar to CoNews.

Digg is a framework for publishing news stories

submitted by users. The stories are ranked through a

user-based ranking system and then promoted to the

front page. Should the story not receive enough

“diggs”, or if enough users make use of the problem

report feature to point out issues with the

submission, the story will remain in the "digg all"

area, where it may eventually be removed. Articles

are categorized by topic - similar to topic categories

for major online newspapers - but not per region.

So, there are Digg versions in many countries

around the World.

Concerns have been raised over Digg's growing

influence as a news source. It has been criticized for

spotlighting false, misleading and poorly-written

information (Digg, 2006). Not offering a workflow

machine to support the collaborative creation and

publishing of news stories could be pointed as a

major lack of opportunity in Digg framework. In

fact, despite the recent wave of Digg-like services

provided by commercial companies, few scientific

publications are devoted to studying online

communities dedicated to news stories.

Indymedia is a good initiative that also relates to

our project. It consists of a global network of

independent journalists that was founded with the

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goal of facilitating the publishing of news media, as

directly as possible - by people themselves. By

January 2006, there were over 190 Independent

Media Center (IMC) outlets spread between many

countries around the world (Indymedia, 2006).

Although they produce both print and electronic

content, they are most well known for their blogs

where media is created and edited by its participants

- both the users who post content and members of

the local outlets who administer the site. Editing is

done by a system of layered contributors for each

site, by participating on open email lists and

attending meetings and real-time communication

done via the Indymedia IRC network. Policies for

removing undesired articles generally are chosen

locally by IMC collectives, which are also expected

to have an editorial policy for determining features

for the center column of the local site.

Another initiative that relates to our research is

SilverStringers: a community-centric approach to

news coverage and presentation intended to train

and equip its members to be reporters,

photographers, illustrators, editors, and designers of

a localized Web-based publication (Silver Stringers,

2006). Perhaps the most important contribution in

SilverStringers is that, in contrast to pyramid-like

organizational structures typically found in

corporate newspapers, SilverStringers operate

without any hierarchy. "A rotating coordinator runs

the meetings, and all decisions are made by the

group. Stories are essentially assigned with the

entire group being kept informed of who is doing

what. Within minutes after being cleared, stories

are published" (

Driscoll and Turpeinen, 1997).

The core of the system is a simple workflow

machine where stories are submitted, published and

archived. Articles are always in one of the four

possible states: reporter, editor, published, archived.

3 THE CONEWS FRAMEWORK

An appropriate environment to publish news stories

must exploit the Internet medium properties:

multimedia, speed for updating information,

horizontal distribution, decentralization,

accessibility, no hierarchy, no censorship and

interactivity (Lasica, 1996). We have envisioned a

system where users are active and questioning

audience for news events and issues, and are

involved in a collaborative experience. In this sense,

a central idea in our framework is that innovative

and well-written stories are created as people

collaborate and creatively experiment with

relationships among different opinions, and this

process might be supported by everyday news

stories published by authoritative and non-

authoritative sources. The main characteristics of our

framework are described below:

 Hybrid approach – As mentioned before, our

approach combines news information extracted from

online newspapers, blogs, and also submitted by

users of CoNews Portal – which acts as an active

and central repository that stores both news articles

and contributions over news information.

 Social networking – CoNews portal can be seen

as a social network. As such, users of the system can

find others with whom they share affinities, and

"add" those persons in the circle of collaborators.

Eventually, users of some of these "circles" may

self-organize and engage in communities that can be

created in the system, as will be discussed in the

following topic. They can also recommend news

stories to other users. Every user has a “newsbook”

in the system where stories are either suggested by

CoNews recommendation system or by users in the

circle of collaborators.

 Community-centric approach – In our

framework, users are encouraged to create

communities and define relevant roles in the

community for publishing news stories. For

instance, we may define an editor, a reporter and a

contributor role in a certain community. Every

community publishes its own articles – that are

published with the stamp of the community. Tools

for collaborative creation and edition of news stories

are provided, and everything is done through a Web

browser. Rules that manage the control of article

flow can also be created and are enforced by a

workflow machine. It is important to mention that a

user in the Portal is not forced to engage in any

community to publish a story, but it’s highly

recommended for increased recognition.

 Open publishing – Our framework supports the

open publishing approach. The main principles

advocated are non-hierarchy, public participation,

minimal editorial control, and transparency (Open

publishing, 2006). Users are encouraged to

contribute with his/her own stories. In addition,

articles are filtered as little as possible to help the

readers find the stories they want. Readers can also

see the editorial decisions being made by others.

Finally, news stories can be distributed in other open

publishing sites.

 Collaboration over news stories – For engaging

users in a collaborative experience, our framework

supports an annotation module that allows users to

contribute with comments over fine-grained

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elements of a news article. It is also possible to reply

to other user’s contributions, creating discussion

threads. In similar way to Digg comment system, we

allow users to rate comments, which ensures that,

much like what happens with news stories,

undesired comments can also be eliminated from the

Portal. The ideas behind the collaboration and

workflow of publishing components of CoNews

framework are mainly an extension of CEJ Project

proposals, targeted at offering an environment for

flexible definition and execution of scientific

publication processes (Schneider et al, 2005).

 Other collaboration features – There are many

opportunities for collaboration in CoNews system.

For instance, users can find new collaborators based

on their membership of groups of users with whom

they share commom interests. They are also

encouraged to invite others to collaboratively

publish a story or even to suggest a topic for a chat

based on the reading of a published story. To help

remove undesired articles – for instance, spam or

offensive stories – we allow users to report such

posts. In similar way to Digg framework, when an

article has been reported enough times, it is

automatically buried by the system.

 Recommendation – Our framework includes a

recommendation system based on collaborative

filtering techniques. The idea is to group users with

similar interests together, presenting the same news

stories to all the group members.

 Searching news stories – A major problem for

online newspapers is that users often have to read

stories that the newspaper has selected to him, or the

stories retrieved by searching in the newspaper

archives. In our system, we aim to provide the full

range of stories collected from diverse sources and

also submitted by the users themselves.

 User interfaces – User interfaces for creating

and editing content, and also for the delivering of

news articles, including "front-page news” and

customized pages, are still under investigation. We

aim to provide specific “news pages” per community

and per user, but some issues still need to be worked

out.

In CoNews portal, users play an active role in

argumentation. By encouraging a collaborative

dialogue with other users, we believe our framework

helps the delivering of news stories of interest to

their users.

3.1 System Description

A high-level perspective of CoNews System is

shown in the Figure 1. In the server side, CoNews

system provides specific components to

communicate with a news search engine (in order to

retrieve news entries from authoritative sources) and

also with a blog search engine (in order to retrieve

blog articles). Also, it provides a Web application

that handles the submission of news stories; the

searching function; the delivering of news stories;

the delivering of value-added services to CoNews

users; and all the collaboration of users of CoNews

social network.

Figure 1: CoNews System.

Our service collects news stories and blog articles

and stores them in a dedicated machine (News DB).

We are currently using Google engine for both the

news and blog search components, but we may soon

provide an interface that allows users to suggest

other news and blog sources. The server-side

application also interacts with a RDBMS that stores

all the relevant objects, including user profiles.

Finally, there’s also a notification agent that

periodically retrieves information from the System

RDBMS and notify users of new events.

3.2 Prototype Implementation

The software prototype environment is being

implemented by a group of graduate students and

this work will soon produce a final project for the

graduate level course. For the implementation of

CoNews social network and the Web application

services provided to users of CoNews portal, we are

extending the technology built in CEJ environment

(Schneider et al, 2005).

Java is the primary programming language for

system implementation - to provide platform

independence - and we are working with the same

frameworks for Web development used in CEJ,

including Resin (as the container), MVC-based

CONEWS: A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO ONLINE NEWS STORIES

105

Struts (for the application control) and Hibernate

(for the persistence). We are also reusing the

workflow machine of CEJ Environment for

implementing the publishing module of CoNews,

including the facilities to create, manage the

editorial control and publish the news stories.

Finally, the two server-side components

responsible for retrieving news and blog articles

from the respective search engines have been

implemented as Java-based agents that periodically

update the News DB component.

4 CONCLUSIONS

We are moving towards a multi-directional,

collaborative and democratic experience of mass

communication, currently represented by blogs,

diggs and social networks. As users assume a larger

role in news publishing, including collaboration on

the editing process, the power of journalists and

editors is significantly reduced and users become an

active voice.

In this paper we presented the CoNews

framework, an approach where users are encouraged

to collaborate with each other and publish online

news stories. As mentioned before, CoNews is a

social network specifically designed for

collaboration over news stories.

We are currently working on the implementation

of the system prototype and we aim to conduct some

experiments as soon as we finish a stable release of

the system. Future work will include investigating

new opportunities for collaboration and news

delivery that could be provided by mobile

computing. Given the success of wireless services

built on top of mobile networks, we also aim to

integrate applications such as mobile blogging into

the CoNews framework. The results of the

investigation of these topics will be reported in

follow-up papers.

The development of social networks aimed at

creation, sharing and distribution of news stories

electronically may be an opportunity for engaging

users in a more participatory and collaborative form

of mass communication. The analysis of the

CoNews framework presented here has shown that

the potentials of improvement are large, and that

established practices for online news publishing may

be transformed positively. However, it seems clear

that we have a long road to travel and it is still

unclear where this journey of change will take us.

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