Field Notes: Information foraging
The question.
How do we, as publishers, adapt to information ecosystems as they are so that we can provide useful information and maximize people's information gain in a world full of alternatives?
Why this matters.
We are all "informavores,” constantly foraging for useful information in the way that animals seek food, as described in the October 1999 Psychological Review article entitled "Information Foraging" by Peter Pirolli and Stuart K. Card of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
In our search for useful information, we rely on certain cues, or “information scents,” to guide us.
The problem is that instead of a digital jungle with nutritious flora and fauna leaving conspicuous traces for us to follow to the feast, today's information environment is a supermarket of hyper-processed content and misinformation on which we easily binge, resulting in information fatigue and malnourishment.
To serve the information needs of our intended audiences, we must work to design an information ecosystem that makes useful data worth foraging for.
What we're exploring.
We're reframing our service-oriented journalism around three information foraging concepts:
- Information scent: We're designing stronger, clearer supporting evidence and explanations of our fact-checking process right in the reporting. These cues reduce the perceived cost of investigating the information.
- Information patches: Recognizing that people are systematically excluded from traditional news "patches" (like paywalled sites), we are proactively creating new, accessible information patches tailored to their specific needs.
- Information diet: We are exploring distributing information through non-traditional, low-effort channels in the offline world, meeting people where they are, when they are a captive audience and are not actively seeking news. This approach is designed to make knowledge part of an effortless, high-yield information diet.
More questions for you.
- How can we make "information scent" more effective, so that someone’s initial skepticism leads to trust in the source?
- Which "information patches" are most effective for preventing drop-off, especially for people in distorted information environments?
- When Al is an intermediary, how do we ensure it prioritizes the highest-value information in its diet, rather than the most popular or commercially profitable content?
We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Don't hesitate to get in touch at hello@gazzetta.xyz.