The Last Podcast

Here is an excerpt from an article on Journalism.org about a report, released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ):

In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three leading user-news sites—Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us—were more focused on stories like the release of Apple’s new iphone and that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth, according to the study.

The report also found subtle differences in three other forms of user-driven content within one site: Yahoo News’ Most Recommended, Most Viewed, and Most Emailed.

The question of whether citizens define the news differently than professionals is becoming increasingly relevant. It started with offering visitors a sense of what others found interesting: what news stories were most emailed and most viewed?

Wow - what a surprise. Websites mostly used by geeks mostly feature stories about computers and geeky stuff like that. Who would have thought. Or, in fancier terms:

The news agenda of the three user-sites that week was markedly different from that of the mainstream press. Many of the stories users selected did not appear anywhere among the top stories in the mainstream media coverage studied. And there was often little in the way of follow-up. Most stories on the user-news sites appeared only once, never to be repeated again in the week we studied.

The researchers failed to drill down into the sites a bit more. Reddit for example features a lot more political news than digg and features some pretty heavy discussions about the stories. On digg, one mostly gets the feeling that it is mostly haunted by teenage fanbois, who don’t care for politics much. Delicious really isn’t much of a social news site anyway, so I have no idea why it was included. Where is Newsvine in this study? Netscape? You can’t tell me that Newsvine mostly featured hard news.

When I go to digg, I don’t even want to see a story about Ron Paul or the war in Iraq. If I want to see those, I can go to reddit, but mostly I go to a mainstream news site like CNN and the NYTimes.

Oh, and you want to see why people don’t take blogs seriously, just look at the blogs that linked to the story on Techmeme. All of them just repeat what the study said, without providing any commentary.

Update: At least some people are now criticizing this study. See: Mathew Ingram, James Robertson, and Dan Gillmor. Nick Carr, however, should know better.