When ordinary citizens complain about the titans of media abusing their power to shape public opinion, the complaint often revolves around the placement of a news item, not the story’s content. There may be no journalistic judgment call more crucial than the simple one of location: what story gets front-page treatment and what gets demoted to a short in the back of the D section. Until recently these decisions have been made by professional news editors. Now, however, the power to declare what news is most important is being eroded by the Internet. Dozens of online services allow you to create your own personalized front page with headlines arranged according to your interests—what some have dubbed the Daily Me.
Critics worry that so narrowly tailoring news to an individual’s interests could ultimately create an ideological hall of mirrors, with right-wingers reading only about the latest abuses by the teachers union and the ACLU, the left-wingers seeing nothing but stories about corporate greed and John Ashcroft. Just in time, an alternative to the echo chamber of the Daily Me has emerged. Instead of personalizing headlines to an individual’s taste, a new generation of online services track the interests of hundreds of thousands of ordinary users, building a front page from their collective interests. Call it the Daily Us.
