Is Social Media Making News Generation and Consumption Better?

The proliferation of social media is changing the ways news are produced and consumed. Recent events in the Arabic Spring showed the power of user-generated content such as amateur videos on YouTube, and Twitter posts, in instigating change. The question we ask in this panel is how technologies can be used to channel people's energy and enable the continuous generation of relevant, timely and trusted content. We span a wide range of questions covering reliable connection, social spam and centralized/decentralized news curation. On the consumption side, we contrast news dissemination from popular trusted sources and viral propagation from friends. We also explore event extraction and adapting existing techniques such as opinion mining to process large amounts of news in a way appealing to users. Those are some of the questions that will be raised by our panelits who have a wide range of expertise in using or developing social media technologies to enable news delivery today.