Music Week, an influential title in the music business, will now begin publishing a chat based solely on the habits of Last.fm’s users. Three charts actually, based on most listened-to artist, most listened-to artist in Britain, and the “hype list,” tracking artists whose popularity has most increased in the past month.

So how is this relevant to newspapers?

“The magazine's adoption of the online chart is the latest sign of an "old media" publisher or broadcaster embracing new-media techniques and data,” sums up the Guardian.

Bingo. Although a recent article warns of the risks of eyeball obsession, Web 2.0 and the tools it provides can also be invaluable to a manager, marketer, but also editor.

"Our users are on street level and they pick up music as it happens," said Last.fm spokesman Christian Ward. “It's beyond our control what happens in these charts, and artists can't be artificially 'bumped up' the chart."

This can be done for news.

Most editors now understand how important Web 2.0 and new forms of media can be to newspapers, yet they don’t always seek out the benefits. It’s not enough to know which is the most popular story of the day on one’s own website: why not have a look at the most popular story on the Huffington Post or say, even gossip site Gawker?

This may not be the typical content deemed to fit the paper’s editorial policy, but there’s little to lose by linking back to the website (this doesn't mean turning into a tabloid). Or by using this information to launch your own professional journalistic investigation about a popular topic, and giving it the news twist it lacked until now.

Why not link back to Last.fm, in complement to your brilliant music critic’s column? Or strike a partnership agreement to carry blurbs of content from these Web 2.0 sources, perhaps even in the print edition – by the way, these are the sources that some still consider to be newspapers’ competitors.

While journalists still dig up the bulk of ‘big’ news, citizens are producing and selecting an increasing share of local news. Local and ‘small-time’ news, which they truly want to hear about!

Web 2.0 and user-choice doen’t mean that editors and journalists’ professional judgment should be forgotten. It simply means they now have other tools to help them choose.

Source: The Guardian