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Citizens vs editors: what's news?

BBC News says, based on a new report from Pew Research Center, that "a news agenda formulated by citizens would be radically different from that put together by journalists." Suspicions confirmed for those of us who are swimming in it:

Seven out of ten of the stories selected by the user-driven sites came from blogs or non-news websites with only 5% 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," said Tom Rosenstiel, one of the authors of the report.

The study also suggests that readers (here in techville, we call 'em users) want to know a little about a lot of things, rather than going deep. If there's bad news, it's that readers were more interested in stories about consumer products and companies (iPhone, Nintendo) than in public affairs (Iraq, immigration).

I looked for this study at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, but I didn't find it. I did findf an August 9 report that says the "Internet news audience" is "highly critical of news organizations."

More broadly, the new survey underscores the fundamental change in basic attitudes about the news media that has occurred since the mid-1980s. In the initial Times Mirror polling on the press in 1985, the public faulted news organizations for many of its practices: most people said that news organizations "try to cover up their mistakes," while pluralities said they "don't care about the people they report on," and were politically biased.

But in the past decade, these criticisms have come to encompass broader indictments of the accuracy of news reporting, news organizations' impact on democracy and, to some degree, their morality. In 1985, most Americans (55%) said news organizations get the facts straight. Since the late 1990s, consistent majorities – including 53% in the current survey – have expressed the belief that news stories are often inaccurate. As a consequence, the believability ratings for individual news organizations are lower today than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. (See "Online Papers Modestly Boost Newspaper Readership," July 30, 2006.)

[Link to the BBC article]

jon posted this at 9:31 AM
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