Changing Face of News?

By Dorai ThodlaInformation and Intelligence

User driven news seems to have a different flavor than the stuff being put out by news media. The Pew study for a week looked at news from aggregators like Digg, del.icio.us, reddit and compared it with traditional news media.

A news agenda formulated by citizens would be radically different from that put together by journalists.

One of the biggest differences noted by the researchers was the emphasis put on a single story. While the mainstream media tended to revisit the same story from a different angle each day, users were happier dipping in to a variety of topics.

Not so surprising that I found this story from Digg which referred to this article in BBC. You can read more about Project Excellence from this report on journalism.org.

I think this is the beginning of another trend that may transform production and consumption of news dramatically.

2 thoughts on “Changing Face of News?”

  1. The study is interesting, but treating Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit as proxies for “all readers” (or “all non-journalists” which is the contrast they seem to be attempting) is rather silly. The biggest difference in these sites vs. the MSM is the audience demographics. Attempting to correct for that isn’t trivial but is the only way to make a meaningful comparison.

  2. I agree. I think that is mentioned in the study somewhere. But being in the tech industry, I was only looking at a slice of the tech news. In my previous startups I had to hang around PR people and columnists to get coverage and some of them were not even aware of the technologies being talked about. The blogdom is different. There are many smart people who are looking for innovative products to cover. And there are many readers with profiles similar to us posting information on digg and del.icio.us. I bookmark a lot not necessarily to influence any one but to keep track of things.

    While the blogosphere is not perfect, it is better than a small cluster of journalists who may not be technologists. Peter Coffee, Jon Udell are rare breeds of people who overlap tech and media.

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