Techmeme Gets it Right: Hire Human Editors

Although I usually try to avoid these internecine spats, yesterday's unwarranted TechCrunch attack on its competitor, Techmeme, simply demands a rejoinder.

TechCrunch's Arrington belittled Techmeme's Rivera's decision to hire a human editor to avoid disasters like the one Rivera had blogged about earlier: "Only an algorithm would feature news about Anna Nicole Smith's hospitalization after she's already been declared dead, as our automated celeb news site WeSmirch did last year."

Arrington opines: "I believe this is a slippery slope for TechMeme. Certainly a human editor can make the results better. But it also completely destroys the objective nature of TechMeme and turns it into something different. It's now subjective, and in many ways just another news site..."

Objective! An algorithm? Where do algorithms come from? From human engineers, that's where. And, any engineer worth her salt will tell you she is always iterating her algorithms, trying to help them perform better, as new weaknesses invariably come to light.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love the way algorithms help us sort and select content on websites. Much of what moves through our news channels these days can indeed be organized logically, although categorization remains a nightmare.

But there are also aspects of human judgment that no algorithm can come close to matching. These are precisely the values that reporters, editors, writers, and other storytellers have been perfecting for generations â€" long before the age of computers and software engineers.

When it comes to what's news, it's specifically these "subjective" factors â€" including intuition, a "news sense," or the ability to spot a non-predictable aberration for the Big Story it in fact is â€" that ensures websites employing professional editors systematically out-perform those that do not.

A clearer way to understand this process would be to imagine a continuum between the editor's human brain and the computer's programmed algorithm. The truth is that we complement each other nicely.

Alas, the extremist thinkers, who dismiss the human element from the equation, still hold too much sway in Web 2.0. Rather than dismissing Rivera over at Techmeme, they should recognize that he is an early adapter to the zeitgeist of the emerging Web 3.0, wherein the power of human thinking gets reintegrated with what are now mechanisms (such as Google News) essentially running amuck.