New Media’s Trust Sources

Burt Herman

Burt Herman is co-founder and chief executive of Storify, a platform for telling stories with social media, and founder of Hacks/Hackers, an international organization of journalists and technologists.

Updated September 30, 2010, 7:38 PM

We all now have a megaphone to reach the entire world. For whatever cause or interest, one person alone has the ability to broadcast a message on the Internet that can potentially be heard by billions of people. The barrier to publishing is basically zero.

In the Internet roar, trusted 'curators' are filtering the most relevant information for their communities.

This wasn’t the case in the age of mass media. Just a few years ago, the power to reach mass audiences was confined to those who had access to a printing press, radio tower or television studio. Gatekeepers like journalists and broadcast executives controlled how messages spread. Now, anyone with a mobile phone can send a message to Twitter and instantly become a global publisher. Anyone with a YouTube account has their own TV station.


That means everyone is competing for attention in a media environment that now is flooded with information. The noise from all these personal megaphones has come together in one global roar, so overwhelming that we are struggling to hear the voices that matter.

Many people are now trying to find ways to solve this problem. Technology companies try to sift through this information flood algorithmically. But so far, technology only gets us part of the way there, helping tame this river of information into a stream.



And that’s where things come back to where we started. At its heart, social media is about being social and building genuine connections between people. The most authentic voices are what move people to act, something that will always be the case regardless of the technology used to transmit the message.

Topics: Internet, Politics, Technology, Twitter

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