News: Relevance

When I first introduced the subject of news I described how I rate each item by relevance, importance and timeliness. My aim is a repeatable method of measurement. A news item that is relevant, important and timely is the equivalent of news nirvana. Timeliness is objective, while importance and relevance are subjective; you and I would measure news against the subjective criteria from the perspective of our unique interests and needs.

Since that first article (and if this topic interests you, you may want to read it) I discussed timeliness in a two-part article. Now I would like to talk about relevance. I am discussing it before importance because I view relevance as a prerequisite to importance.

Achieving relevance is difficult because the producers, aggregators and distributors of news have a commercial need to reach a broad audience, yet each member of the audience has his or her own criteria for relevance. Every player has come up with numerous techniques to meet its needs, using a growing set of technological tools.

Producers:

• Tag each news item so that search engines and aggregators can help consumers find it;
• Choose a mix of content to be broadly appealling to a hypothetical average member of a selected demographic;
• Editorial selection for quality and best fit to demographic and tags;
• User feedback to help order items for popularity, as a proxy for relevance;
• Correlate news items with background material and with related news and data (e. g. stock charts).

Consumers:

• Bookmark sites or authors that have a high percentage of news items that meet a need or interest;
• Select sites that allow customization of news feeds by source, topic and tag;
• Subscribe to push delivery from relevant (filtered) and timely news feeds;
• Follow recommendations from trusted sources to locate other relevant news sources and items (e. g. blog roll).
  

The above is not a complete list. There is a tremendous amount of experimentation going on, mostly in the startup space, to create more sophisticated, and hopefully relevant, techniques to fit the news to every individual's specific needs.

Next I would like to discuss some of those techniques and what you need to consider as you attempt to locate timely and relevant news.

• Reputation Services: You see it in blogs and more traditional media, those icons from various reputation and sharing services like Digg, Reddit and many others where you, the reader, can recommend or vote on articles and authors. The broad intent is to help you find news that is highly rated. Other web sites use page views, time spent on a page, comment volume, and site-unique user feedback to rate articles. This is all fine, but do these services help you to find relevant news? I can only give a very qualified 'yes'. Most often highly-rated articles are more attuned to determining general interest and popularity, not relevance; lots of things are popular but of little value. Consider this article and this one recently published on Seeking Alpha. One makes extraordinary claims about oil prices and the other about bank stocks. Both attracted vociferous and negative comments from readers. That pushed them to the top of the popular articles list, which had the dual effect of wasting your time (they are, arguably, awful articles) and pushed potentially more relevant articles off the list. Do not trust popularity - it is not a measure of quality or relevance. Popularity is better for finding humour and for tracking celebrities, if that's your thing.
• Selection Bias: If you are like most people you will seek out articles, news sites and authors that you tend to agree with. If you stick with this strategy you are wasting time reading news that is not actionable since it will only confirm you in your already-chosen positions. I do tend to talk here about market-oriented news, but the same could be said for any topic. Perhaps you seek authors who always say nice things about the Sens, even when they're on a losing streak. Or you only read political articles that confirm your view that Stephen Harper is the perfect leader. Or you only read conspiracy articles that argue against evolution or the safety of the Large Hadron Collider. You might only read contrary articles because you (subconsciously) want to feel self-righteous anger, and may vent with a witty or abusive comment. If you do any of these things you are avoiding relevant news and analysis by practicing selection bias. You must seek out, read, and understand articles that challenge your deeply held beliefs. If you are convinced gold will go to $2,000 you need to read well-argued articles by professionals who conclude gold will first hit $400. You may continue to hold your original view, but you can feel more confident in your position if you can argue (rationally) against the contrary views. You might even change your mind, and perhaps thereby avoid a major loss. Seek out contrary views in all areas of news topics that are important to you - they are especially relevant. You aren't required to enjoy it, just do it.
• Thought Leaders: Do you think Jim Cramer is a buffoon? If you do, perhaps you ignore what he has to say about stocks, including ones you hold. This is a mistake. Regardless of what you think, people like him have a large and loyal audience. If Cramer says Sirius is a winner, you can bet the price will move, even if only for an hour. This is relevant to you if you hold or trade any stock or sector he opines about. Other market movers include Alan Greenspan, Barrons (trusted by many professionals), and even those discredited analysts who issue stock recommendations. There are more of these people and publications, and if you play the markets you need to listen to them if only to understand what others will do. Understanding that when they speak it is news and relevant, you can profit by playing with or against the crowd as you deem appropriate. First, however, you need to watch for timely news of these events.
• Popular Topics: If you follow a popular topic or stock you will be flooded with news articles. The latest Google or iPhone rumour? Expect to see hundreds of articles from reputable journals and bloggers. The same is true of celebrities, your favourite sports team, and popular politicians. You need to manually filter out the dross or ruthlessly prune your news feeds so that you don't waste valuable time reading uninformed or 'me too' articles. Stick to the experts with timely and insightful articles, whether the author or publication is top tier or a quirky blogger. That's how to stay with relevant news for popular topics.
• Aggregators: As mentioned above, there are many experimental news aggregator services appearing on the scene every week. Each has its own little innovation for helping you find relevant and timely news. Don't waste too much time searching them out, but do play with a new or recently improved one once a month or so. Try not to get stuck in a rut with any one aggregator. Some that I've looked at recently include Seeking Alpha, Newsflashr, Newscred and Streetread. I don't necessarily recommend any of these, but they are interesting in that they each take a different approach to finding and filtering news feeds to individual specifications. You should also never settle on any one aggregator or you will miss relevant news. Especially for stocks if you are in to it seriously, you should visit several aggregators each morning to find all the news relevant to stocks you hold or are watching. This is particularly true for Canadian stocks since most of these aggregators stick exclusively with US stocks and news feeds. Supplement these feeds with visits to Report on Business, the Financial Post and other Canadian sources of market news.
• Segregate: If you are like me you have many fields of interest. There are times when you do need to focus on one to the exclusion of others. Segregate your news feeds to avoid counter-productive distractions. You may have a deep personal interest in an ongoing debate in Parliament, but if you monitor and read news about it on the job it is irrelevant and potentially disruptive to your best interests. The same goes for market news. While it may be difficult to accomplish, you need to do some segregation of news that mirrors the compartmentalization of your time and your life. News can become addictive, and like many addictions can render you unproductive in every activity in which you participate, including the job that feeds your family. You can use several aggregators (or one aggregator, but multiple identities) to divide and direct news feeds to the appropriate time, place and appliance. Do this and you'll achieve greater relevance of news, and minimum distraction, as you proceed through your daily routine.

As you can see from these articles, I can pin down timeliness as a rigid technical requirement. This is not so of relevance and, as will be seen in my next article, it is even less so of importance. Despite a lack of rigidly objective criteria, relevance is a critical property of news. You determine the relevance, but you also have to understand how to select news appropriately so as to maximize the average relevance of the news you consume. It is even necessary to occasionally challenge yourself to dive into news that is unpleasant though entirely relevant; you don't have to like brussels sprouts to gain the benefit of eating them.

My next article in this series on news will be on importance, the final criterion in my list. No promise when I'll get to it considering how long it has been since I wrote on the first criterion, timeliness. This blog is my hobby.