...and deserve to get it good and hard

Last week Nick Carr drew on the recent PEJ study (Your Vote Counts) to conclude that news audiences used to be informed but that social news sites like Digg are making them less so. This conclusion is not especially helpful since the study says nowhere that news audiences are reading Digg to the exclusion of sites with a wider news agenda. What is interesting about the PEJ study, however, is that it uncovers the scale of a news audience so dissatisfied with the news agenda chosen by highly-trained, often highly-paid editors at mainstream outlets that they prefer a news agenda chosen by an equally tiny, self-selecting coterie of amateurs.

Sure, the current crop of (should we say "experimental"? Probably) social news sites are niche are doubtless unrepresentative of how the news agenda will be selected in the longer term. Yes, they are not really all that social - as Seth Finkelstein put it back in April, "you're just replacing one set of gatekeepers with another. This is so obvious by now that it shouldn't even be a question." The 90/9/1 rule is no longer news, nor the realisation that the front page of Digg isn't controlled by a substantially greater number of people than the front page of the New York Times.

It would still be short-sighted to ignore what we can learn from the popularity of so-called "social news". Even if it is a myth that lots of people edit Digg and Reddit, lots of people read Digg and Reddit. These are people who want to read the news but find their requirements for content selection not met by mainstream media. Now, bearing in mind that Digg etc do not create news but merely filter it in a different way this means that mainstream news publishers already possess much or all of the content these audiences want to read - they are just failing, or refusing, to prioritise it in the way the Digg/Reddit/etc audience prefers. You think that by now we'd have understood the lesson of the wild popularity of the Drudge Report or Yahoo! News (and it is the same lesson) - that between us we have all the news that people want to read already lying around and all we have to do is filter it the right way for each and every one of them. 

Comments

[Steve Boriss]

I believe that this study is being too easily shrugged-off. Any news outlet which dismisses differences between mainstream articles actually published and most viewed/voted-on/forwarded/etc. without at the very least understanding why that is and thinking about ways to get more of these reactions to their stories is in a fatal state of denial. (Steve Boriss, The Future of News)

[Seamus McCauley]

Steve - "shrugging it off" was not at all the impression I was trying to give.

My point, and perhaps I expressed it with insufficient clarity, was that meeting the competitive challenge posed by the popularity of Digg etc is well within the power of news outlets since it is content created by those news outlets that Digg etc is aggregating. It isn't as if Digg or Techmeme or Reddit create news: they've just found new ways of ordering it. (Sure, that's a big, big "just"!)

Which isn't to shrug off the competitive threat of so-called social news, but to put it in its proper context. First, (most) social news isn't really that social, it's just a different but equally small set of gatekeepers; and second, since we're talking about ways of filtering news, not ways of creating it, news creators should be able to pull the same trick.

Thanks for commenting.

[Steve Boriss]

Seamus, My comment was not targeted at you -- it is based upon the reaction I've seen around the blogosphere. The future belongs to those offering original content -- there will be a consolidation down to original and best-of-breed sources. And, it will not be a bad measurement of success for those stories to be the most viewed/forwarded/etc. I'm seeing a lot of explaining and rationalizations, where I think we ought to see more determination to develop the types of stories that readers believe are worthy of passing along.

[Seamus McCauley]

Almost completely agree with you, except..."the most viewed/forwarded/etc" stories will be a good measure once the industry has come up with a way of attaching some inherent commercial upside to each story rather than hoping eyeballs can be monetised back at a central site.