Tis the season for Top 10 lists…

About now, the media and blogosphere start publishing lists of the most important things that happened during the course of the year.  I’ll be referencing here some of the Top 10 lists I find and think are most interesting.

Top 10 Biggest Social Media Stories of 2009 This post in Vator.tv by Ronny Kerr lists is interesting on a few levels.  I personally think #7 in his list is the most important as it references the growing role of Citizen Journalism.  As main stream media news continues to degrade, we will rely more on the notion of the citizen journalist.  The local concerned individual empowered with tools for publishing and distributing news will become a greater force as those platforms continue to evolve.  On top of this, the advent of real-time search exemplified by Twitter’s efforts in this area as well as Google’s year ending adding of real-time data to their SERPs will enable us all to stay informed through new channels of information and new forms of journalism.  Sifting through the growing pains involving insanely poor quality journalism will unfortunately be a condition we need to suffer through as this trend seeks maturity.  Jeff Jarvis refers to this as the “deprofessionalization” of journalism in a recent post.  (His post is not a list, but definitely worth reading on the subject of citizen journalism.)

Crunks 2009: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections OK, this post is not a Top 10 list, however, it’s an awesome line up of errors and corrections made by news media outlets during 2009.  I predict the issue of news reporting errors is going to trend in a devastating way in the coming years.  This will be due to two fundamental reasons.  First, fact checkers are getting laid off at all the major news organizations.  Second, the dissemination of any information (including erroneous) on the internet is like wildfire…which I guess shows reason number 2.5, which is, inflammatory erroneous information spreads faster than the boring stuff accurate stuff.  All business models are stoked by fast dissemination of information, so there is a clear incentive to spread total crap.  Total crap pays better on the internet.  Thankfully, we have the blog, Regret the Error, hopefully to stem the tide of this unfortunate trend by showing a possible crowd sourcing model for news fact checking.