• Article which peaks your interest appears on some big newspaper.
• You like it so you Tweet about it, or link to it on Facebook.
• Someone in your network of friends reads it and says a couple facts are wrong.
• You go to Wikipedia and read about the topic.
• You follow some links out of Wikipedia to some research papers and/or niche sites and skim these.
• Meanwhile a rather large comment thread has developed on the article, and you get a few more opinions and links out to supplemental information. You read them.
• One of the “experts” quoted in the article has a Twitter and/or Facebook account. This “expert” links to the interview and claims a couple of facts were a little bit off and he was quoted out of context or incomplete.

Final Verdict?

The original article that started you on this journey was mostly right, but due to about 20-30 minutes of your own research figured out the author’s bias (a few years ago he did some consulting in the industry he wrote the article about).You also learned the facts were a tad off, but generally accurate. You also learned more from the extra research of value that you can’t believe this information wasn’t included in the originating article. You click over to the original article to offer feedback and realize several others already found the same thing.

What did the newspaper provide?

This third person experience happened to me.

The newspaper started the discussion. Got it rolling. But ultimately that journalist was not the authority – to me.

That is the single biggest noticeable change for me personally.

Before Web 2.0 an author of a “researched” article was perceived by me as an authority on a subject.

Today, they are simply someone who gets the ball rolling.

Can newspapers change and adapt to this?