Social Media Versus Mainstream Media

It seems both the Mainstream Media folks and bloggers are using a Project for Excellence in Journalism study as a club to beat each other with.

They looked at social media sites and compared the stories presented with traditional media and drew conclusions. Why is the study so controversial? First here is a quote from the site

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.

Not so bad is it really? They are saying the news stories would be about different things and would not rely on the same sources. Doesn’t seem like anything we need to disagree about. Oh, but we are disagreeing! As Nick at TechCrunch says

The “Mainstream Media” has had somewhat of an antagonistic relationship with “New Media”.

This relationship is the source of the disagreement I would suggest. For myself I do not need a study to tell me what appears on traditional news would be markedly different from what shows up on Digg. It’s just common sense.

Unfortunately some people are taking it to mean social media is dumbing down the audience. Check out this from Nicholas Carr

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.

In fact I have had access to more varied and open-minded news from social media. Once writers are freed from centralized agenda control they can investigate stories that are interesting or deserving without worrying if their paycheck will stop or if they will get censured from above.

The thing that grabs me most is the study might have been more useful had they compared like with like. Digg is not in the same market as Yahoo! News, the BBC or Wall Street Journal. It is like comparing the headlines of Sporting Life against PC Magazine.

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.

Of course they were! Do these people not know that Digg etc are dominated by geeks? Social news sites serve up what the users are interested in, not what we are told to be interested in. Geeks are interested in Iraq but we are just as interested in the iPhone. The mainstream media are dominated by crusty old editors, a handful of huge mega-corporations and tend to follow official government agenda. If it was up to mainstream media we would never have heard of certain candidates and we would have been under the impression that certain news shows were actually “fair and balanced” but through social media we have access to stories the mainstream media will not run.

What gets made popular on Digg is what the users want to see but despite what people will tell you, it is not entirely democratic. Although there are no editors, there are a small number of power-users. They effectively control what gets seen on the front page. Only a tiny percentage of Digg users have ever got more than a couple of stories to the front page and it takes a lot of time and effort to build a user up to that level.

As Dan Gillmor says at the Center for Citizen Media

We are not heading to a world with no editors. A portion of the editorial role, at least the part of the editorial role that involves picking stories, is moving to community-driven sites. Digg, Reddit and others in the PEJ survey are crude approximations, however, of what is coming.

Posted on September 13, 2007 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Web 2.0

Comments

4 Responses to “Social Media Versus Mainstream Media”

  1. Yoav Ezer on September 13th, 2007 12:42 pm

    Great article Chris :)

  2. Chris Garrett on September 13th, 2007 2:58 pm

    Thanks Yoav, I tried very hard to keep it up beat and not go off on a rant ;)

  3. Maura on September 18th, 2007 4:57 am

    Excellent article. You hit the head on the nail here…”Social news sites serve up what the users are interested in, not what we are told to be interested in.”

    I no longer read newspapers or watch TV news broadcasts, because I no longer have to “eat” what’s dished out to me…I create what news items appear on my menu.

  4. Chris Garrett on September 19th, 2007 12:27 pm

    Nice way of putting it Maura, I much prefer an all you can eat buffet rather than the “if you don’t like it, starve” approach :)

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