Singapore’s former Deputy Prime Minister Dr Tony Tan has been elected President for the next 6 years. He won 35.2% of the votes cast, beating lawmaker Dr Tan Cheng Bock by a mere 0.35 percentage point. A total of 2,156,389 votes were cast at the Singapore Presidential Election on 27 Aug 2011. Among them were 3,375 votes cast by overseas Singaporeans, who participated through nine overseas polling stations around the world. I did not vote because the nearest polling station was in Canberra.
Interestingly, Google News, which uses computer algorithms to generate search results, threw up an Online Citizen blog as one of the top three search results when I search for “Tony Tan voted President”. I was surprised that the news aggregator had given such prominence to a blog, which led me to wonder - which rule in the Google algorithm led to this blog? Could it be the number of comments posted by readers?
Online Citizen blog entry, "A four-horse race benefited Tan Cheng Bock" attracted over 100 comments from readers who debated on how the election result might be different if it was a two-corner fight. While the debate was pointless to me because the election was over, it provided interesting views on the possible reasons for Dr Tan Cheng Bock’s loss to Dr Tony Tan.
The blog was a more interesting read compared to the other two news reports; “Institution of elected president at crossroads” by Singapore TV station Channel News Asia (CNA) and “Tony Tan elected President of Singapore” by Indian daily The Hindu, partly because the traditional media did not allow readers to post comments on the reports and interact with the writer.
Besides having a more personal tone, the blog was more appealing because it used hypertext to link users to references made within the entry. These links gave the impression that the story was credible and trustworthy, despite it being written by an untrained journalist.
But how far would you go in trusting blogs as a news source? Hayes, Singer & Ceppos in their paper -'Shifting Roles, Enduring Values: The Credible Journalist in the Digital Age' - identified the following questions in helping consumers decide if their news source deserves to be believed:
1. Does it break news or merely aggregate?
2. Is the news source transparent?
3. Are unnamed sources used sparingly? If unnamed sources are used, is it clear why?
4. Are all sides asked to comment within an article?
5. Are errors corrected promptly and prominently?
Would these be enough for you to trust blogs as a credible news source?
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