Missing the Point
Nick Carr completely misses the point on sites like Digg, Reddit (et. al.) - there's a reason "top stories" in traditional media tend not to hit big there: we already know where to find those stories. That simple thought apparently hasn't crossed his mind:
So what happens when "the people formally known as the audience," as the citizen journalism hypesters like to say , take charge of the dissemination of news? A study released today by the Project for Excellence in Journalism provides a hint, and it's not exactly encouraging.
The researchers examined the top stories appearing in the crowd-edited news sites Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us during a week in June and compared them to the top stories covered by the mainstream media. They found that the stories in the user-driven sites were "more diverse" but also "more fragmented and transitory." Hard news tended to be buried in a stream of soft news, gossip, product announcements and trivia.
Examining the front page of Digg in hopes of finding (say) coverage of a Supreme Court decision is like expecting to find coverage of that decision on the sports pages.
Comments
perhaps it's PEJ that's missing the point
[Tish Grier] September 12, 2007 17:20:04.345
I don't think it's Carr that's missing the point--rather that the PEJ study is missing the point of sites like Digg, Reddit, etc. PEJ is assuming that people go to those sites to find and follow the day's news, not to find off the beaten path stories, or stuff that might otherwise end up buried. PEJ and lots of journalists can't seem to understand that social news isn't about them and their product.
Missing point
[Seth Finkelstein] September 12, 2007 19:25:35.196
Actually, I think both of you are missing the point :-) The idea is not that popularity-polled news should replicate the editoral-judgment news exactly. It's that popularity-polled "news" is not finding those undercovered gems that editoral-judgment news is missing - it's only generating more fluff. Remember, the PR was that the wisdom-of-crowds WAS BETTER than supposedly ossified gatekeepers - not that it was merely more amusing! This is basically the "It's just chat" blog-evangelism defense.