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New Study Compares User-Generated News Sites to Major Media Outlets

"What were the favorite stories on the user-driven sites? For the most part, there were no dominant ones."
By Web 2.0 News Desk
Article Rating:
September 15, 2007 04:45 AM EDT
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 9,800
Web audience interests are both more diverse and practical than the "big stories" orientation of the major media outlets. That is the main conclusion of a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ),a research organization that specializes in using empirical methods to evaluate and study the performance of the press.

Directed by journalist Tom Rosenstiel, PEJ  is non partisan, non ideological and non political. Its website is the splendidly-named journalism.org.

In order to pursue the question of whether citizens define the news differently than professionals, PEJ prepared the study by comparing 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.

Such user-driven sites, noted the study, "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."

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. 

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 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.

Published September 15, 2007 – Reads 9,800
Copyright © 2007 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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Most Recent Comments
john 09/22/07 04:05:33 PM EDT

www.videonewslive.com their slogen is "New media meets Mainstream media" interesting.
Fred 09/15/07 07:59:25 PM EDT

Great story, but I have found one website that has both "user generated" & news from "media outlet". The site is www.videonewslive.com maybe you should have a story about sites like www.videonewslive.com too. keep the good work