I have been looking for a reason to sound off on social bookmarking sites for ages, and it looks like the PEJ (Project For Excellence In Journalism) has given me quite a reason to chime in. They recently conducted a study that amounted to scanning the headlines of Digg, Reddit and their ilk and comparing them to “important” stories of the day. Not surprisingly, they found that “social media’s” news seemed lacking in shall we say, substance.

Is this a fair assessment? Yes and no. Mostly no, let me explain.

New Media, Like Old Media But Faster

Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and all those wizz bang, collaborative news portals should not be directly compared to mainstream media for several reasons. The first and most important is that these sites attract a demographic that has very set opinions on what is important. Stories that have to do with technology or those that slant slightly “left” have a much higher chance of being promoted than stories about a brief economic downturn. Does this mean that these stories are any less important? Absolutely not. Like Matt Ingram so eloquently put it, that would be like, “watching two television shows and reporting that the entire landscape of TV as we know it is an insipid swamp.”

What this means is that just as we should not get all of our news content from Fox or CNN, we should also be sure to select a diverse grouping of online resources to get a full perspective on the news of the day. There are entire blogs (which I would certainly argue fall under the broad banner of “social news”) that make it their livelihood to cover politics, business, technology and just about anything else you would find inside the New York Times. Often these blogs, since they are more specialized and source their material from a range of resources, offer a much broader look at these subjects.

The fight between journalists and bloggers seems to be an argument over how people should consume information. Journalists want to offer a one way dialog, finding as much information about a subject as possible, wrapping it in their social lens and presenting it to us as fact. Bloggers, on the other hand, do much less legwork and instead rely on the breadth of differing opinions and their readership (through comments) to provide a deeper reading experience. Neither of these two groups provides everything, and both would do well to learn from the other.

My take on the matter? Before you go bashing social media for being the blogosphere’s junk food diet, I suggest you turn on your television and watch any 24 hour news program. Between the commercials, the “human interest” stories, and an echo chamber that rivals even a Techmeme Saturday, it is really difficult to believe that mainstream media is so much more relevant than blogs.

None of these social news sources are perfect, all of them have their biases and I dare say too much power on these services are put into the hands of people who learn how to “use” them. That being said, this isn’t anything new. The only difference between the web and the world is our scope of interest, but just because you are able to see the problem more clearly does not mean that the problem is more pronounced.

Web 2.0 Roundup

From the PEJ study,

“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.”

I wonder how quickly this story will end up on Digg.

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