{"id":874,"date":"2007-09-12T12:14:31","date_gmt":"2007-09-12T18:14:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=874"},"modified":"2007-09-12T12:14:31","modified_gmt":"2007-09-12T18:14:31","slug":"the_people_form","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=874","title":{"rendered":"The people formerly known as informed"},"content":{"rendered":"

So what happens when “the people formally known as the audience,” as the citizen journalism hypesters like to say<\/a>, take charge of the dissemination of news? A study<\/a> released today by the Project for Excellence in Journalism provides a hint, and it’s not exactly encouraging.<\/p>\n

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. The researchers write:<\/p>\n

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During that week, the immigration debate led the coverage [in the mainstream media], accounting for 10% of all news stories … That was followed by coverage of a major fire near Lake Tahoe (6%), the failed bombings in the United Kingdom (6%), events on the ground in Iraq (6%), Supreme Court decisions (5%), the 2008 presidential election (4%), flooding in Texas (4%), the policy debate in the capitol over the war in Iraq (4%), U.S. domestic terrorism (3%), and the missing pregnant woman in Ohio (3%). In all, the top ten stories that week accounted for 51% of all the stories in the Index.<\/p>\n

In the user-generated sites, these stories were barely visible. Overall, just 5% of the stories captured on these three sites overlapped with the ten most widely-covered stories in the Index (13% for Reddit, 4% for Digg, and 0% for Del.icio.us).<\/p>\n

The immigration debate in Congress, the biggest single story of the week in the mainstream media, appeared just once as a top-ten story on Reddit, and not at all on Digg and Del.icio.us. Similarly, the war in Iraq accounted for 10% of all stories in the [mainstream media]. Across the three user-news sites, it amounted to about 1%.<\/p>\n

What were the favorite stories on the user-driven sites? For the most part, there were no dominant ones. The only story with any real traction was the release of the Apple iPhone, and that was just on one site (it accounted for 16% of the stories on Digg that week). Otherwise, users put forth a mix of diverse and unconnected news events from day to day. On the morning of June 26 on Digg, for example, a story about intelligent design topped the list followed by a story about a woman suing record labels for malicious prosecution. But by 5pm that day, both had vanished from the top ten.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not surprisingly, given their geeky audiences, technology stories were by far the most prevalent on the user-edited sites. What’s perhaps more revealing is that the second most popular category was “lifestyle”:<\/p>\n

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Coverage about everyday lifestyle activities and concerns was the second most popular topic area on user-driven sites. Roughly two-in-ten stories (20%) on Del.icio.us fit this bill, more than what was found on both Reddit (15%) and Digg (11%). In the mainstream media, by contrast, lifestyle stories amounted to about 3%.<\/p>\n

As an example, Del.icio.us and Reddit both linked to a story about fruit and vegetables eating each other told through Photo-Shopped pictures. And both Digg and Reddit both linked to an amateur Web site in which the author showed photos he took by attaching a camera to a kite.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s often assumed that the Net will improve our understanding of what’s happening elsewhere in the world. But the report indicates that rather than expanding coverage of foreign stories, citizen-edited sites only reduce it further:<\/p>\n

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Readers across the three user-news sites were also more inclined to focus on events within the U.S. borders. Looking at the geographic focus, coverage on the three user-news sites this week was even more U.S.-centric than the mainstream media as measured by the Index. Digg led the way, with 89% of stories falling in this category, with Reddit (83%) and Del.icio.us (81%) close behind. In the mainstream media, 71% of stories were focused on events from home.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The study is, as the researchers note, just a snapshot, but it’s a telling one. It certainly doesn’t tell us everything about how people collect news online, but it does show us what happens when you put a crowd in charge of selecting news. The techno-utopians would have use believe that citizen journalism will provide an antidote to the mainstream media’s long-run shift away from hard news and toward soft news, that it will counter the trend toward news-as-entertainment and entertainment-as-news. But the indication so far is that the precise opposite is true. When you replace professional editors with a crowd or a social network, you actually end up accelerating the dumbing-down of news. News becomes a stream of junk-food-like morsels. The people formerly known as the audience may turn out to be the people formerly known as informed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}