To this end, it might be instructive to turn our atention to the Schibsted-owned Swedish mobile news app Omni as an example of the algorithmic potential found in organizing the editorial workflow in new ways. Relying on a combination of developers, editors, and a news-ranking algorithm, Omni seeks to provide users with what editor-in-chief Markus Gustafsson describes as a “totally new way of experiencing news” (Interview 8, April 2014). Gustafsson, who came from the position as managing editor at Sweden’s leading tabloid newspaper Aftonbladet before cofounding Omni with Ian Vännman, says it all started with a mission to create something like the Swedish version of Hufington Post. But instead of copying an existing news service, Omni developed into a unique service of its own. Rather than creating original content, Omni aggregates news from other sites and provides manually writen summaries of the news while linking to the original sources. Readers may also follow certain topics and personalize the mix of news. At the time of my visit to the Omni headquarters in Stockholm in March 2015, about ten editors worked in shifts to handpick the news. I spent a week on site, observing the editors day-to-day work, conducting informal interviews with some of them, and also conducting more formal interviews with designers, developers, and editors connected to Omni and the Schibsted media house (Interviews 9–16). The editors, who all come from a background as reporters and journalists before starting at Omni, do not write their own stories or work like reporters in a traditional sense. Instead, the work involves picking interesting news items from a content delivery system in order to make it “algorithm-ready.” That is, editors summarize existing stories using a custom-built content management system—for example, by giving the story a new headline, providing a short writen summary, linking it up to the original sources, and finding a suitable image to go with it.
Programming the News
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