Sometime this summer, Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh is expected to launch his new site, Circa. Circa is supposed to be a reimagining of news sites for the web. Of course, news has been reimagined for the web dozens of times now, and the most successful reimaginations to date involve aggregating un-reimagined news sources as a series of snappy headlines. Still, I’m very curious to see what Huh manages to do with news.

For a little peek at the thinking behind Circa, you should read this Neiman Journalism Lab interview with Huh about what he thinks the future of journalism looks like:

I think — among entrepreneurs, too — there’s an idealistic notion that there is a truth, a singular one truth. Among journalists, there is “the truth,” slightly liberal, slightly populist, but most of the time it’s “We’re the truth.” If you ask the people who watch Fox News who is credible, they’ll tell you Bill O’Reilly is credible. Maybe I disagree. Maybe I believe that he stretches truths a lot, but the fact of the matter is, it’s human biology to seek out shared perspective.

Creating a singular measure of credibility is a slippery slope to censorship. Like, “Oh, these people are not credible, so maybe we should all act in concert to not print their things,” or discard them. The world’s greatest ideas come from the crazies, the people on the fringe. For a while, they’re not credible, but then one day they are. So that’s a very, very dangerous idea. It smacks of centralized mind-control to me. And I’m probably extrapolating from what he’s saying really to the extreme, and I’m sure there are good ideas, but a universal credibility measure? Even if they could create such a thing, why would you? It’s very Orwellian. I don’t like that idea at all…Facts are very important. Facts are absolutely important. What society’s gotten really good at — we’re actually really good at the facts. What we’re really bad at is the dissemination of value-added interpretation of the facts.

You know what? He’s absolutely right about this. I would rather have my choice of ten thousand unique news sources that boldly trumpeted their ideology, so I could see events and newsmakers through a whole spectrum of perspectives. I think that’s a media that’s more in line with the internet than a dozen big, mediocre “objective” outlets. After reading this interview, I can’t wait to see what Huh comes up with.

5 replies on “What’s He Building in There?”

  2. Huh is just opposed to having a standard of credibility because such a thing would (or should) exclude trendy simpletons who made their name capitalizing on lolcats and other 4chan-type rubbish from shaping the way people consume news stories. News on the internet is already way too much like FAIL Blog already. I don’t need “reimagination” of news sources; I need more actual journalists who do actual reporting and bring back investigative journalism and informed, critical focus, rather than inventing memes and soundbites. And he’s wrong, “society” is actually not very good at the facts. “Value-added interpretation” of stories light on actual facts and context is what we get most of the time.

  5. You know Paul, if you simply backed your face away from the Democrat abdomen far enough, you could take a look around you and see that there really are 10,000 legitimate sources of news out there.

    They exist, internationally, and nationally, as “radical” “incredible” “biased” perspectives of news. You simply don’t need 10,000 – if you look towards international news agencies, you find a pretty similar narrative.

    The first thing you will learn: Your Lord and Savior, Obama, is in fact a mass murdering tyrant, far worse than President Bush.

    I think confronting facts like this – that challenge everything you’ve written in praise of Obama and the oh-so-evil Republicans – will get you to put your face right back where the Democrats want it, so you can again swallow whatever they ejaculate to pundits like you.

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