Are humans necessary for info "serendipity"

The Neiman Journalism Lab broke the story this week that Google was introducing an editor feature with some partner news sites that introduces "Editors' Picks" to the Google News aggregation site.

Google, which has been under fire for sucking readers from newspaper sites with its high-powered aggregation system, appears to be experimenting with putting humans back in story and information selection for readers.

What does this mean for librarians? I think it says information specialists may actually be either in demand as information navigators, using humanly intuition and reasoning functions, or they may still offer a gatekeeper role. Although the gatekeeper role would be optional. People still need shortcuts with all the information in the digital age (add all the info from the analog age, too) that will need sifting through.

Here is a blog post by Matthew Ingram "In defence of newspapers and serendipity" who argues that newspapers serve a legitimate function in serendipity and there is a method to the madness of myriad story selections and newspaper features.

Ingram was responding to digital age information thinker Clay Shirky's claim that the news editor rationale in story selections make no sense.

And third — deepest down — the coherence of newspapers is not intellectual, it’s industrial. Which is to say, if you’re running a website and somebody’s on your website and they just done a crossword puzzle and they seem to really like it, what’s the next thing you’re gonna show them? Is it news from Tegucigalpa? No. It’s another crossword puzzle, because that’s the only thing you can [inaudible]. The idea that someone who is doing a crossword puzzle may also want news about the coup in Honduras or how the Lakers are doing — it doesn’t make any sense. It’s never made any sense, in terms of what the user wants. It’s what — it’s what print is capable of as a bundle. What goes into a print newspaper is the content that, on the margins, produces commercial interest in the least interested user. So, in the language of my tribe, the aggregation of news sources has gone from being a server-side to a client-side operation — which is to say, the decision about what to bring together into a bundle is made by the consumer and not at the level — and not by the producer.