User-driven sites offer people new take on news

The interests of traditional news editors and their audiences are quite different, suggests a US study.

London, September 13 : The interests of traditional news editors and their audiences are quite different, suggests a US study.

Conducted by a wing of the US Pew Research centre, the study compared the stories making the headline in 48 mainstream news sources-including TV, radio and online-to that of three user-driven news sites, namely Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us.

A report on the study's findings, released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, took a snapshot of news stories from the last week in June 2007.

It was found that 70 per cent of the stories selected by the user-driven sites came from blogs or non-news websites, while only five per cent of stories overlapping with the ten most widely-covered stories in the mainstream media.

"Users gravitated towards more eclectic stories. There was a sense that users sifting through a lot of raw information; rumour, gossip, propaganda and the news were all throw into the mix," the BBC quoted Tom Rosenstiel, one of the authors of the report, as saying.

He said that in a week dominated by stories about Iraq and the debate about immigration, users were more interested in the release of the iPhone and the news that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth.

Rosenstiel further said that the technology bias was partly due to the fact that it was early adopters of technology that lead the way when it came to "playing with the potential of the internet to empower users".

He revealed that 40 per cent of the most popular stories on Digg and Del.icio.us were devoted to technology, while lifestyle stories were found to be the second most popular category.

The researchers also noted that he mainstream media tended to revisit the same story from a different angle each day, while users wanted to get reports on a variety of topics.

"It was more hit and miss with a sense that they wanted to know a little about a lot of things," said Rosenstiel.

He, however, said that news editors needed not to hang up their notebooks and pens because traditional news outlets such as the BBC still accounted for a quarter of the content on the user news sites.

According to the researchers, original content accounted for just one per cent.

"That suggests that people are re-aggregating the news in the style of citizen editors rather than journalists," said Rosenstiel.

"These sites offer people a different take on the news but it doesn't mean that traditional journalism has become irrelevant. They are forming more of secondary conversation about the news," he added.

ANI