Today is definitely a big news day in the United States. So big that there have been several articles and blog posts about how to keep up on election news and specifically live election coverage. (Check out one of the blog posts on the topic at NewTeeVee.)

As I’ve been thinking about how to consume the news today, I’ve also been thinking about how teens find out about news and how librarians might help them to be more successful at news gathering.  What I’m realizing is that Social Median might be the perfect web 2.0 site to use for this purpose.

What is Social Median? It’s a social news site that gives users the chance to join networks on a particular topic, say election 2008, and read news stories (that members of the network post) on that topic.

Users can also create networks of their own. That means that you, or the teens with whom you work, can create a network about a topic that might not be of interest to a broad community, but could be of interest to a smaller local community. Maybe, there’s a current event that teens in your area are interested in either personally or as a part of a school project. Imagine if the teens created a news network on Social Median, had their friends and classmates join the network, and then every time they found a related story posted it so that everyone in the network could read and discuss it.  (Once a news story is posted others can comment on it.)

Social Median has an extremely full set of features. That means not only can you and teens join and start networks, but you can also use the site as a tool for initiating discussions about information quality, search techniques, tagging and keywords, and more.

There are also possibilities for the site as a one-stop/first-stop resource for finding out the news of the day.  Perhaps teens will log into Social Median every day to check out their news networks. That could mean that they no longer need to go from one site to another in order to gather all of the information of interest or need.

You can learn more about Social Median in an interview with the founder of the site included in a recent episode of Net @ Nite.

Check-out Social Median and consider how to use the site as a tool to learn about news and to help teens keep up with and evaluate news.