he Latest News Headlines—Your Vote Counts September 12, 2007 If someday we have a world without journalists, or at least without editors, what would the news agenda look like? How would citizens make up a front page differently than professional news people?
If a new crop of user-news sites—and measures of user activity on mainstream news sites—are any indication, the news agenda will be more diverse, more transitory, and often draw on a very different and perhaps controversial list of sources, according to a new study.
The report, released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), compared the news agenda of the mainstream media for one week with the news agenda found on a host of user-news sites for the same period.
In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three leading user-news sites—Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us—were more focused on stories like the release of Apple’s new iphone and that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth, according to the study.
The report also found subtle differences in three other forms of user- driven content within one site: Yahoo News’ Most Recommended, Most Viewed, and Most Emailed.
The question of whether citizens define the news differently than professionals is becoming increasingly relevant. It started with offering visitors a sense of what others found interesting: what news stories were most emailed and most viewed?
Soon, establishment news sites like CBSNews.com allowed users to make their own newscasts. Then, names like Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us emerged as virtual town squares that became a way to measure the pulse of what the web community finds most newsworthy, most captivating, or just amusing. The trend continues, as even Myspace, the social networking site popular among 20-somethings, has launched a news page (http://news.myspace.com).
Indeed, these user-driven sites have entered the news business, or perhaps more accurately, they have entered the news dissemination business. Reporting is not a part of their charge. Instead, they turn to others for content and then they bestow users with the task of deciding what makes it on the page.
What do individuals do with that power? What kind of events or issues do they choose to highlight? And how does it differ from the news the mainstream press offers?
To find out, PEJ took a snapshot of coverage from the week of June 24 to June 29, 2007, on three sites that offer user-driven news agendas: Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit. In addition, the Project studied Yahoo News, an outlet that offers an editor-based news page and three different lists of user-ranked news: Most Recommended, Most Viewed, and Most Emailed. These sites were then compared with the news agenda found in the 48 mainstream news outlets contained in PEJ’s News Coverage Index.
A total of 644 stories from the three user-driven sites and Yahoo News’s three most popular pages were coded for the study and then compared to 1,395 stories from the same time period in PEJ’s News Coverage Index. The report first compared the content of the user- sites to that of the mainstream press. Next, it compared the three user-sites to each other. Finally, the study looked at the three user- oriented pages on Yahoo News, comparing them to Yahoo’s editor- selected news page, to the other user-sites, and to each other.
Some key findings include:
The news agenda of the three user-sites that week was markedly different from that of the mainstream press. Many of the stories users selected did not appear anywhere among the top stories in the mainstream media coverage studied. And there was often little in the way of follow-up. Most stories on the user-news sites appeared only once, never to be repeated again in the week we studied. The sources user news sites draw on are strikingly different from the mainstream media. Seven in ten stories (70%) on the user sites come either from blogs or Web sites such as YouTube and WebMd that do not focus mostly on news. The three user news sites differed from one another in subtle ways. Reddit was the most likely to focus on political events from Washington, such as coverage of Vice President Cheney; Digg was particularly focused on the release of Apple’s new iPhone; Del.icio.us had the most fragmented mix of stories and the least overlap with the News Index. On Yahoo News—even when picking from a limited list of stories Yahoo editors had already pared down—users’ top stories only rarely matched those of the news professionals. There were mostly similarities in what people are most likely to email each other versus what they recommend or view on Yahoo News. But there were some differences. Most Recommended stories focused more on “news you can use” such as advice from the World Health Organization to exercise one’s legs during long flights; the Most Viewed stories were often breaking news, more sensational in nature, with a heavy dose of crime and celebrity; and the Most Emailed stories were more diverse, with a mix of the practical and the oddball. Despite claims that the Web would internationalize consumers’ news diets, coverage across the three user-news sites focused more on domestic events and less on news from abroad than the mainstream media that week. Yahoo News, both on its main news page and three most popular pages, meanwhile, stood out for being decidedly more international that week. In short, the user-news agenda, at least in this one-week snapshot, was more diverse, yet also more fragmented and transitory than that of the mainstream news media. This does not mean necessarily that users disapprove or reject the mainstream news agenda. These user sites may be supplemental for audiences. They may gravitate to them in addition to, rather than instead of, traditional venues. But the agenda they set is nonetheless quite different. This initial report is based on a limited sample—a one week snapshot—to get a first sense of differences and similarities in user-driven and mainstream media. PEJ intends in a future study to delve further into this area of research.
The Big Picture
Past research by PEJ has found that week-to-week mainstream media tend to focus on a handful of major events that they monitor continuously over the course of a week or a month. Whether it be floods in the Midwest, the death of Anna Nicole Smith or debate over the President’s “surge” policy in Iraq, a sizable amount of airtime or space is often spent on just a handful of “big” stories of the week.
The week of June 24 was no different. There were no major breaking events demanding special media attention, but a handful of stories emphasizing political events in Washington and conflicts abroad dominated.
During that week, the immigration debate led the coverage, accounting for 10% of all news stories in the News Coverage Index. 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.
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).
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 Index and seven percent in the Yahoo-user material. Across the three user-news sites, it amounted to about 1%.
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.
[1] Myspace launched its news page on April 19, 2007.The Project considered including MySpace News in the study but the site is still in Beta form and at the time the study, there was very little user activity. On average, the top stories received just one vote and some on the home page of the site had no votes whatsoever.
Sources
One reason the line up of stories on the user-news sites may be different from the mainstream media is where they are drawn from. About seven in ten (70%) stories on Del.icio.us, Reddit and Digg, originally appeared on blogs and sites that generally offer very little news.
Overall, four in ten (40%) stories originated on blogs. Another sizable share (31%) originated on sites that offer information but were not news, such as YouTube, WebMd or Technorati. A quarter (25%) of stories originated from mainstream news outlets such as the BBC News and Slate. Only a fraction (5%) came from wire stories from Associated Press or Reuters, which make up so much of the content on many of the news aggregators on the Web. About 1% appeared as an original report.
There were some differences during the week in which of these non- traditional forms users drew from on each site. Del.icio.us drew more from blogs and non-news information sites. Digg users dug blogs more than any other source. Reddit relied more evenly on blogs, mainstream news outlets (other than wire services) and non-news sites.
Yahoo News, in contrast, was much more likely to draw on mainstream news sources, particularly the news wires, during our study. On Yahoo News’s main page, 100% were wire stories. Similarly, nine in ten stories (91%) stories on Yahoo News’s three most popular pages also came from the wires, with no less than 85% on each of these pages originating as wire content. The remaining stories (9%), meanwhile, initially appeared on now-wire, news Web sites.
Broad Topic
The best way to get a sense of trend among these sites is to look not at specific news events, but at broad topic areas such as politics, crime, and foreign affairs. Here, some consistency emerges day-to- day, and reveals again a focus quite different from editor-selected news.
Across Del.icio.us, Digg and to a lesser extent Reddit, technology and science stories drove coverage, with technology accounting for most of the coverage in this category.
On both Digg and Del.icio.us, roughly 40% of the stories were devoted to technology and science. They were only about half as common on Reddit (22%), but that was still more than ten times the coverage in the Index that week. There, technology and science stories accounted for just 2% of the stories. On Digg and Del.icio.us, that 40% was made up of different stories. On Digg, the release of Apple’s iPhone, released June 29, accounted for more than four in ten (41%) of all technology-related news. That story was completely absent on Del.icio.us, whose users pushed more stories about the latest high- tech moves by social networking sites.
A greater emphasis on technology may come naturally to this group of Internet users, found by the Pew Internet & American Life Project to be among those first to embrace sophisticated Web activities.[1]
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%.
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.
One topic area that both users and professional editors gave similar treatment to the week of June 24 was crime. In a week when the story of the murder suicide of wrestler Chris Benoit was breaking, crime accounted for 7% of the stories both in the mainstream news media and on Reddit, followed closely by Digg (5%). On Del.icio.us, however, just one crime story appeared in the downloads.
Coverage from Washington, a traditionally popular topic area among the mainstream media, was of much interest to Reddit users but considerably less so to users on the other two user-news sites. On Reddit, coverage of the federal government accounted for 13%. On Digg, it fell to 6% and readers of Del.icio.us--at least in the top- ten stories of each download--would find themselves completely freed of the subject.
The Washington-based story that carried most of the interest on these sties was Dick Cheney’s use of executive supremacy, largely fueled by reaction to the Washington Post’s exposé on the Vice President that week. Four percent of all stories on Reddit and 2% on Digg were devoted to coverage—often very critical—of Cheney.
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.
Meanwhile, coverage on Yahoo News’ most popular pages was more international than what we found in both the mainstream press and the three user-driven sites. Nearly three in ten stories (28%) covered topics from abroad. In comparison, the percentage of foreign news (non-U.S.) was 15% in the Index and 10% on the three user-driven sites.