In a world with hundreds of different news sources, how do you determine what is true, what is relevant, and what is important? If you live in a remote place or developing country where access to news sources is even more limited, how do you know what to think about events in the world around you?
Fourth-year Liberal Arts student Kwame Ansong traveled last summer to South Africa, Swaziland, and Mozambique, where he saw media presenting stories just as the politicians spun them. Returning to Waterloo, he realized that Canadians face similar challenges. “Traditional sources of news do not suffice for many viewers, especially young adults, who grew up with the sensationalism of cable news in the aftermath of September 11,” says Kwame, observing that audiences are moving away from traditional news sources to other sources with different perspectives.
Upon his return to Canada, Kwame moved into St. Paul’s GreenHouse, where he began exploring how he could respond to the challenge of so many perspectives on the news. Living and talking with like-minded students who are “looking to make real social change” has been a key to developing and staying on track with his project. “GreenHouse has also been helpful in connecting me to people with expertise – journalists, analysts, and other entrepreneurs in other hubs about creating a startup company.”
Like his GreenHouse peers, Kwame is a member of Generation Y – people who have grown up in the age of information dissemination and who believe that the path to long-lasting social change starts with the conversation initiated by media. Kwame also recognizes that “we think of news as objective, as a way of finding the truth, but often the news simply reaffirms our own perceptions.”
In an effort to get beyond this, Kwame proposes a new model of news aggregation: one that offers a statistical analysis of facts reported from a wide variety of news sources, analyzing the similarities and differences from an objective point of view in an attempt to get beyond perception bias. Civil News will be a platform where news stories from across the web can be aggregated together, and cross-referenced with each other to determine the discrepancies and similarities between different reports.
Unlike sites like Reddit, Civil News will not simply present various points of view, but will use the services of statisticians and mathematicians to distill the facts from the opinions and biases in media-written stories from around the world.
Kwame hopes that this service will be useful to other organizations to enhance their analytics, as well as for readers to contribute to a global conversation about pressing social issues. Kwame also plans to include a strong editorial focus, with contributors offering their opinions on the statistically analyzed facts.
Kwame asks, “What tools do users have to help them discern which points of view to accept and which ones to refute?” His Civil News seeks to address this issue.
- by Susan Fish
Read an interview with Kwame