AOL and the dangers of democratising news

AOL has relaunched Netscape as a beta news site with a combination of citizen-powered news and news selected by "anchors" (editors). It's a familiar hybrid model similar to that applied by Newsvine and Inform, and initial reviews at Micropersuasion and TechCrunch are extremely positive.

As I've commented before and as recent reports (Cyberjournalist) show, whilst opening up news to citizen editing has a great number of things to recommend it, it also introduces a number of challenges.  For example, at the time of writing the very first story on the site was "AOL copies Digg" - somewhat faint praise for AOL's launch - and the third most popular story on the homepage was a blistering critique of the well-known difficulties (Wikipedia) many of AOL's ISP customers face when trying to cancel their subscriptions. On the first day of its launch, AOL's news aggregator is being used to promote an anti-AOL message (perhaps therefore answering Richard MacManus' question "will they not promote anti-AOL stories?").

Such are the unforeseen consequences of the news democracy.