The “Mainstream Media” has had somewhat of an antagonistic relationship with “New Media”. Journalists have bemoaned blogging on several occasions, stating simply that “Journalism requires journalists”. Once again journalists are gracing us with another study linking the success of the social news sites to the downfall of society.
The study, conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), compared the mainstream media’s headlines for one week against those of a host of user-news sites. Specifically:
“PEJ took a snapshot of coverage from the week of June 24 to June 29, 2007, on three sites that offer user-driven news agendas: Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit. In addition, the Project studied Yahoo News, an outlet that offers an editor-based news page and three different lists of user-ranked news: Most Recommended, Most Viewed, and Most Emailed. These sites were then compared with the news agenda found in the 48 mainstream news outlets contained in PEJ’s News Coverage Index.”
The comparison looked at the top stories (by percentage) from their news index compared to the top headlines (by percentage) for the social sites.
The study found that while the mainstream media talked about important issues like immigration (10%) and Iraq (6%), the only story gaining traction on social news sites was the iPhone. No surprise there. The study does concede that these user generated newsfeeds may not mirror the important news of the day because they may serve has an auxiliary source. However, it ignores the sheer volume of news that passes across their front pages. While mainstream news sites have a limited staff of journalists and real estate to highlight the days news, Digg and its cohorts can link to these stories with plenty of room for LOL Cats photos. For example, Putin’s dissolution of the Russian government made the top 10 of Digg today. So did the iPhone unlock.
Moreover, the study of social sites reveals what users are actually reading, whereas the mainstream news statistics point only at what they’re writing. Much of that “hard-hitting” journalism may not be getting the readership the coverage suggests. Where PEJ sees this as a clean stream of news, I see an echo chamber.
Similar to when the music industry went online, users are no longer forced to buy in a bundle. Instead they can select the stories/tracks that appeal to them without subsidizing the content they don’t want.
Photo credit ChrisL_AK
Well isn’t that the idea of a social news site… powered by the people. If people wanted the same old same old, these sites never would have launched. People like me read TechCrunch because we like to hear about new startups and whatnot, rather than Britney Spears latest pop album. In my opinion, social news sites are a totally different market.
Uncov does the /b/ pics better. Please stop.
I don’t thing Digg and Reddit are necessarily ‘news’ sites, but are more advocacy sites. People do not in general just sit there sorting through all the stories and voting up what they see as important. They vote up editorials or blog pieces they agree with, they vote for news stories with an ironic headline that reflects their worldview, they vote up bad news about things and people they don’t like.
I don’t really think the ‘real’ news does all that much better, but I don’t see Digg or Reddit as a better alternative. Social news seems a lot closer to the subject matter of the annoying email news forwarder than of news in general.
“Main Stream Media” — hah, I’m totally stealing that.
@Textbook: Yeah, its more of entertainment niches, rather than world news, of course a little bit is thrown in together.
@Rex: huh?
Sorry to be boring, but quality journalism is vital in a democratic society.
Just like politics, journalism must be a combination of leading and following. We need journalists who do painstaking, tedious investigative reporting, as well as journalists who report on iPhone hacks and David Beckham’s hairstyle.
How is the omnipresent network, so individually empowering, going to serve our long-term collective interest to live in a free society? As a liberal and an optimist, I think it will. But I reckon the jury’s still out on how, exactly.
Regarding:
“Similar to when the music industry went online, users are no longer forced to buy in a bundle.”
Just curious – did you get this from a certain, err, “miscellaneous” book?
These sites attract the widest audience possible, and as such, brings out a rainbow of personalities.
Newsvine, with a much smaller (read: targeted) audience, seems to have a much more professional audience and news submission system.
Digg, with a much larger (read: diverse) audience, seems to have a much less professional audience.
I don’t think it’s making anyone stupider, but bringing stupidity to the limelight.
The world’s foremost social media / web 2.0 experts are the ones asking US if social media has made US dumber? Aren’t you guys the ones who review this shit all day :p
The difference between the two sources is really “me” news vs. “us” news.
Even the iPhone news reveals this, because the focus in the new media is usually on the feature and how to get it, while the focus in traditional media is more often what Apple did and the impact on the market (ie stockholders, etc).
Something that makes me uncomfortable is that this might be pointing to the existence of a large population which would rather read about the iPhone than the situation in Iraq or other issues. This leads into the very uncomfortable question of – what *should* people be reading?
Cheers Rollo, it’s refreshing to hear a thoughtful opinion here, rather than the normal silly chatter (I’m talking about the comments, not the posts).
The PEJ and its ilk like to create false dichotomies, mostly because they’re in a panic about the state of the newspaper industry and are looking to assign blame elsewhere. But checking out engadget (or whatever) every once in a while doesn’t mean a lot of us don’t still go to nytimes.com regularly. Different sites, different media, serving different purposes — they all can, and will, coexist. The details will get worked out pragmatically as we figure out what is still a very young medium.
I listen to NPR in the car on the way to work and back, but when I am reading online its all social news, blogs, and RSS feeds. So, you can consider them complementary for me.
@Rollo
Do you actually believe we live in a free society? What planet have you been living on?
New media technologies have historically created dramatic shifts in types of consumer facing media. The New York Times Company, Dow Jones & Company, NBC, and CNN were all successful “new media” companies in the past. Today’s “new media” companies will shake out with a few long term success stories. Members of the PEJ must adjust, or they too will be shaken out of the news industry.
This is simply capitalism at work, it applies to journalism as well.
@Sriram – I agree that this all points to a certain amount of paternalism about what we “should” be reading coming from “the media”.
@Alaska – sorry to disappoint.
Nick…sounds like you’ve been reading Terry Heaton with that mention of bundling/unbundling…
The thing is, almost everybody with the exception of PEJ (and probably some news orgs) has figured out that Digg, Reddit, et. al. are social news sites (what’s with that “user news” term?? more hothouse-ivory tower subterfuge?) and are not much of an indication of news habits of the world outside of their own communities. And, even at those sites, there’s no way to determine the totality of news consuming habits of community members. Perhaps we’re only seeing a fraction of what some of those community members read on a regular basis–because ranking those stories fits the parameters and social milieu of those sites.
The study serves only to make bleedingly obvious to a certain cadre of C-level journalism executives what most of us have either known or figured out since the launch of social news–that lots of people like to find obscure things and share them with one another. Gee, wasn’t that one of the reasons people started blogging in the first place?
Nothing new to see in this study, folks…move along….
Answer:
No more than television, radio, rap music, Macintosh computers, ….
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
What the study basically tries to say is that Digg is the new tabloid paper. Of course it incorporates reports about Putin firing his government – you’d find that in every other tabloid, too.
But you’ll also find reports about LOLcats or other stuff.
This isn’t necessarily bad, or anything. I could also imagine that niche-sites could compete with Digg, if they tried to _not_ become a tabloid paper, but that can only be guaranteed, if they manage to gather a certain meritocratic elite. It should be possible, though.
But you’re right, this doesn’t mean that people become dump because of the iPhone unlock-article or whatever. It just means that the vast majority of articles will on the long term be primarily entertaining (an article about Putin, who is considered “bad”, what is right in my opinion anyway, can definitely be entertaining) rather than “informative”.
I read newspapers which contain articles that would never find their way to the Digg front page. And this is the point. It’s not about high-profile media, it’s about the new tabloid paper.
And considering how successful tabloids are in “real life”, Digg (and others) has good chances of becoming exactly that and be very profitable with it.
Let the mainstream media wallow in its delusions. By the time they realize the folly of their prefiltered ways, it will be too late.
The iPhone might sound trivial, but technology has been the key to human development…
Wow, a study by journalists that finds we need journalists. The “LameStream” media has brought this on themselves. Technology is evening out the playing field. While we will always need good investigative journalism, many “ordinary” citizens do a fantastic job of news analysis and op-ed pieces.
This study only took a snapshot of three sites for five days. I don’t even know how you can call this a “study”. It’s a skewed observation in my opinion…
“Does Social Media Make You Dumb?”
No it doesn’t. Back in the late 90s I stopped using a commissioned travel agent to book my flights. It made me smarter, by forcing me to learn the ins and outs of the airline industry via Travelocity. Not travel agents are all but extinct. Zillow is allowing me to no longer need a commissioned real estate agent.
So, people powered news, which I always take with a grain of salt and research further if I think the subject warrants it, is making me smarter. I don’t need some arrogant pseudo- journalist telling me what is “news” anymore.
“mainstream” media is having just as difficult a time accepting their fate as travel and real estate agents – they have lost all their relevancy.
It could make you dumb if you follow the mainstream ideas. But at the same time it could provoke your innovative kind of thinking which is one of the trigger effects that every new idea or project needs for a good kickstart these days.
To a large degree, the MSM hasn’t done enough to distinguish its value in today’s environment. Most newspapers today are packed full of wire service and other syndicated content. Too many stories are rewrites of press releases or calling the same two “experts” and doing a “he said” then “she said”.
When it comes to tech coverage, a lot of it is a rehash (with added inaccuracies) from the blogosphere by reporters who don’t understand what they’re writing about.
They’ve abdicated coverage of key local issues. When Virgin America launched, the Chron didn’t have a reporter on the first flights. Engadget and WIRED both did. The airline is set to be a major employer in the San Francisco area. Not to mention of geeky interest to the Chron audience.
I wrote an analysis of this earlier:
http://blog.agr...s-chron-doesnt/
Politics coverage is mostly polls. The media continue to do national polls because they’re cheap, easy and provide lots of data that can be talked about endlessly. Never mind that given our system of government, national polls are meaningless. There is NOT ONE race that is decided in a national election.
Local TV news is a vapid pit of the crime of the day, packaged network content and straight-from-the-publicist video news releases (because they’re free). You will be more informed watching The Daily Show than watching local TV news.
The shoddy reporting leading up to the Iraq War, ignoring the mortgage bubble, Jayson Blair and Judith Miller don’t help either.
All that said, I worry about who is going to fund serious investigative reporting going forward. Part of the good of bundling is that it has allowed news outlets to fund longer projects that wouldn’t survive on their own. And by “serious investigative reporting,” I don’t mean To Catch A Predator.
Who is going to pay the next Woodward and Bernstein to investigate a “third rate burglary?”
Some of this may happen by inside sources with documents, pictures and videos leaking them on YouTube or to blogs. (Smoking Gun comes to mind.) But a lot of it will disappear. A lot of it already has.
As far MSM goes, there is a big difference between print and television. The decline of newspapers began not as a result of the Internet, but because of TV. Television news is the worst of all, in my opinion. There you have professionals who choose to put up a story about a house fire 5 states away all because it makes for better video. But the fire has absolutely no impact on me and showing it takes time away from stories I “should” be reading. The iPhone may not be the most important story in the world, but it IS more important the house fire. If Interent sites like Digg are taking time away from TV news, you could make a good argument that we are actually getting SMARTER because of Digg. Having said that, I don’t use Digg or the other sites mentioned. They are full of crap stories and I don’t want to spend my time wading through those to find something important. I get more by scanning the homepage of the NY Times. But my scanning the Times doesn’t make them any money. If everyone did that and stopped buying the paper we would soon be out of professional journalists. Then wouldn’t be important stories for people to Digg and bloggers to quote from. We will be left with press releases about the iPhone. Which will be great news for the next president who wants to start a resource war to extend the American empire. All he or she will have to do is seed the Internet with press releases manipulating the truth. You don’t even have to know anyone at the NY Times to do that. You just need a computer and a monkey.
…does the study have any merit considering it’s funded by an organization that feels threatened by user generated content and selection?
What you say is true, and online and social media do serve a vital need. But I wonder if the rapid fire pace and constant feedback of social media are creating a generation of social outcasts?
A generation who can’t unplug because their sense of self is so undeveloped that it depends entirely on constant, electronic feedback.
I think the biggest problem with social media sites is the number of people that mistake every person in the world as being an expert when really it could be a high school student just ranting about the way they feel with no research.
@29/Robyn. Consumers need to be critical of ALL media, not just social media.
There are plenty of high-profile examples of serious problems with MSM: Jayson Blair (NYT), Stephen Glass (New Republic), Jack Kelley (USA Today), Dan Rather (CBS), Janet Cooke (Washington Post) the psychics and profilers the TV news networks to bring in to fill 24 hours, the coverage of the lead up to the Iraq War.
Most newsrooms aren’t set up to fact check articles; the editing process is mostly focused around grammar, punctuation and style. It’s too often about the chase for the front page story.
Many MSM reporters know very little about the topics that they write about. They interview a few people and then string together a story with A said, then B said, then C said.
While there are certainly bloggers who are “high school student just ranting about the way they feel with no research,” there are also bloggers that are experts in their field. These are the people that the MSM go to when they’re seeking quotes and insights. Their day job revolves around the topics they write about.
On my blog, I put my credentials in the sidebar of every page. Most of the topics that I write about, I work on in my day job. If a story relies on external sources, I link to them so you can see if your conclusion agrees with mine. If you have a question about something I wrote or you disagree with me, you can say so.
It’s up to you to take those inputs and determine whether you trust me.