Mashable me

What's more natural then getting all your news from your friends and extended family, i. e. thought leaders in the worldspace you share. One caveat may be to make sure there is at least one traditionally minded friend about major events in the world.

(where you can find the story: http://mashable.com/2010/08/10/personalized-news-stream/)

Or read about it here:

The social network of a reader is quickly becoming their personalized news wire. That’s because in the last five years, a revolutionary shift has taken place in the way we consume news. We have gone from consuming news through traditional media and news websites to having the news broadcast to us by our social network of friends. In fact, 75% of news consumed online is through shared news from social networking sites or e-mail. Social news is finding us.

Readers who still actively seek out the news want, and almost expect, it to be personalized and customized to their tastes and interests. News organizations, social networks and technology companies are all attempting to respond with sites and tools that address this changing shift toward a personalized social news stream.

Personalization of News and the New Social Editors
The shift toward personalization of news is in many ways a response to the problem of noise, but also a shift from trust in news organizations to the individual people you know who now often act as curators. Jay Rosen, New York University journalism professor and media critic said, with credit to Clay Shirky, that “there’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.”

“The social stream is a means to filter success. Relying on friends and a personal network to filter the news and point out the best stuff solves that problem Shirky identified,” Rosen said.

Also, the trust that readers place in people they know isn’t the same as the trust they place in news organizations, Rosen said. But prior to the evolution of the web to its current social state, people who you know couldn’t be news sources the same way that big media companies could. But now in a sense they are able to, he said. That’s because people have an influential voice in the new and social distribution model, and are just as integrated into the conversation around the news as the news makers themselves (and many times they are the ones to make the news too).

“People can use the [Facebook] news feed and their Twitter streams as their editors,” Rosen said.

Friends as Your News Wire
News organizations that see this shift are hoping to enlist users as their “editors” by making it easier for them to engage their content on social platforms. Some companies, like National Public Radio, are starting to pay attention to their audiences in the social space and are investing resources to learn about their consumption habits.

After having a presence on Facebook for more than two years, NPR decided to take a closer look at its more than 1 million Facebook fans with a survey. Andy Carvin, senior strategist at NPR, said he had a certain hypotheses, including one that stemmed from his own reliance on his Twitter and Facebook friends for news: Do people really use their social network to get news? After more than 40,000 responses to the survey, 74.6% said that Facebook was a major way in which they received news and information from NPR, and 72.3% said they “expect” their friends to share links to interesting information and news stories with them online.

“It’s not that people have lost interest in the news, it’s that they have shifted platforms,” Carvin said.

Realizing the shifts in consumption behavior, Facebook is beginning to partner with, and provide resources for, news organizations and publishers to more effectively use the platform. Most noticeably, you can now see what your Facebook friends have “liked” or “recommended” on sites like CNN or Washington Post. Washington Post, for example, has prominently integrated Facebook’s Social Plugins into its site for a social news experience: