A newsroom without news editors might be the dream of many a trod-upon reporter. But if that really were the case, and it was online users instead who set the news agenda, a new report from The Project for Excellence in Journalism suggests the stories they’d choose to lead the day, and the sources of news to which they’d pay attention, would put us in a very different world of news.
For the study, released last week, PEJ took a snapshot of news coverage for a week in June, then compared how news was handled on three sites with user-driven news agendas — Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit — versus news agendas at 48 mainstream sites.
PEJ found that user-driven news agendas bear remarkably little similarity to those of the mainstream media — especially in terms of story selection and their source. When mainstream media was focusing on Iraq and immigration, for instance, user-driven sites were talking about Apple’s iPhone. And while mainstream media got their news from original reports or wire services, user-driven sites were pulling overwhelmingly from blogs and non-news information sites.
Read the report’s findings.
