Being a sometimes-media critic (in years past, I wrote for the media magazine Editor & Publisher), the effects of news aggregation sites like Digg on news organizations is a topic of constant interest.
Not so long ago, the vast majority of our news diet came from a single channel — reading (or listening or watching) a chosen news source. Whether it was our habit to pick up the Times every day, or to tune into 60 Minutes, whatever they decided was news, we’d learn about. In those days, the prestige and distribution of the news organization had an immense impact on the proliferation of a story.
Of course, times have changed. These days, the Web has added two more news avenues to the mix: search-directed results (Google, for example), and community-driven news aggregation (Digg, most prominently, but also awful chain emails.)
The spread of these channels, and Digg in particular, is having immense impact not only on our access to the news, but also on the type of reporting that news organizations undertake. And I’d venture to say that the end result could be nothing short of catastrophic.
A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
With Digg, the source of a news story is less important than ever. Unverified rumors are salivated over, and blogs such as this one have as good a shot at getting Dugg (a feat that comes with a guaranteed one-day readership of at least 50,000, conservatively) as The New York Times. In fact, look at the Digg homepage — the actual LOCATION of the link is in tiny, light-grey letters bound by parenthesis. When browsing Digg, the source of the news has almost no bearing on whether it earns a click or not. In essence, this is the commodification of news.
From a news organization’s perspective, this is a double-edged sword. The drive to be Dugg encourages sites, including old-time big media names, to pander to Digg’s base, and to consequently deliver a disproportionate amount of coverage on a few (often unimportant) topics at the expense of others. Lets just get them out there: gadgets, video game nostalgia, anything-Apple, customer service horror stories, and anything in list form are effectively catnip to Diggers. The perfect Digg story might be along the lines of “Top Ten Apple-related Customer Service Horror Stories.” While the saga of the guy who spent a week tracking down his stolen Sidekick makes for great reading, there is little plausibility to an argument that it is more deserving of mindshare than Darfur or Iraq
And that’s not to mention stories about Digg itself (yes, I’m aware of a tinge of irony here.) BusinessWeek (disclaimer: I have contributed to BusinessWeek in the past) recently ran a cover story on Kevin Rose and Digg. Do you think this was done because it was the most important issue in the news that week, or because it was a sure-fire hit on Digg?
Now lets combine Digg’s effective commodification of news with the drive by big media to earn slots on the site. If an organization with the resources of BusinessWeek is effectively competing for clicks with no-budget blogs, there are very serious implications.
Big-time news organizations are at their best when they are conducting the type of hard news and investigatory pieces that only they have the resources for. When such resources are squandered on stories because they are Digg-friendly, the public loses out. Just imagine a world where The New York Times fills its front page with top ten lists.
Seth Porges writes on future technology and its role in personal electronics for his column, The Futurist. It appears every Thursday and an archive of past columns is available here.
Seth, I gotta hand it to you, that one came out of left field. More thoughts after I finish CAD class.
Seth this is a great post. The issue I have though is that you suggest there is only three types of news.
1. Edited by Editors (the few)
2. Searched for by topic on google (what’s authoritative)
3. Aggregated by Digg (what’s popular)
I’d like to suggest there is a 4th.
4. News that matches your Personal Interests and is therefore personally relevant. Edited by an algorithm that understands your needs.
I’ve written about it here and may times since:
http://www.touchstonelive.com/blog/2006/08/people-powered-news-done.html
I am Digger but not a fanatical one. I usually find 3-4 good stories in my RSS feeds on Digg per day. Some are quality content while others are rumors or simply humor. And I have been known to download and watch Diggnation. As a web entrepreneur, Kevin Rose is also somewhat of an idol.
But Seth has raised some very strong observations about the dark side of Digg’s effects on news. Thanks for presenting some angles, that I honestly had not previously considered.
I’ll still Digg, but at the end of the day…I’m only reading those Diggs that are appealing to me and I think are news-worthy. And I have no issue with “Burying” commoditized lame or inaccurate fluff (of which there is more than plenty on Digg).
I would have to disagree with your points even though you did make some compelling ones. But the problem with news and the media has always been they show what they think is hot at that exact moment and it gets blown way out of proportion, especially when news networks like Fox News manipulate the story to appeal to the largest audience. I don’t want to hear the same stories over and over for a week till they milk all they can out of them and then go on to the next meaningless story.
I am 23 and I work for a web-hosting company overnight so just about all of the content on digg appeals to me. I love technology, computers, gadgets, etc… but I do also like to read important news stories from time to time, the problem with traditional media is that I have to conform to what they want me to read. Also if I wanted to find out about something important such as Iraq I’d much rather hear it from a soldier with a blog then a story built to make money. On digg I can choose what I think is important to me and relay that to other users by digging the story. Also I have the ability to see stories that would never be covered by traditional media.
You obviously don’t sound like a serious digger yet you submit your story to digg suggesting its downfalls which is a little disturbing to me. Since you more than likely would like traffic to your blog, and you know that digg is a great platform to do this. The entire purpose of the internet is so that Joe Smoe (you in this case) can get the same attention as The New York Times and at the same time it helps leverage the huge media companies into conforming to the “Net Mentality” which I feel is heavily based in my generations way of thinking. Its important to remember that digg is a tool that helps a community of people read the stories and find out about stuff that they want, nothing more nothing less.
I don’t think I would be going out on a limb guessing that the majority of the digg community doesn’t care about traditional media as we have seen time and time again that it does not work. You give me a magazine full of ads and I might find a story or two that is a month or two old that interests me. Also for the big news sites they don’t appeal to me since I don’t like being forced to receive content the way they want me to, I am solely interested in the story not where it came from as a new story is a news story no matter how you slice it and you are a lot more likely to be able to find the truth via digg then some big news corporation since the underlining principal for them will always be money and no matter how great a source is when it comes down to it the news corporation is looking out for its interests and not the readers or community.
Watch any local news channel.. if you find more than a couple of investigations a year that you think are worth the resources they put into them you let me know. For that matter, I can’t think of a national news story I have really been interested in that would really take a lot of resources to do.
The beauty of digg is that there are multiple kinds of news stories and you only read the ones you want. Sure, there are a lot of humor pieces, but sometimes that’s what people want! If you don’t want to read it, there’s a thousand other new stories on there.
I have to disagree with you. digg and the internet may be the death of way we have gotten news, from the tv and newspaper. But I do not believe it will be a catastrophic issue.. When it comes to reading about news stories I am actually interested in, I actually have more opportunity to do so. You say that Darfur is more important a guy tracking down his stolen sidekick, and I would agree, too bad that A) Darfur has never been a big news story on most of the major networks, and B) the death of a dumb blonde druggy was almost so big it eclipsed most reporting on the war in Iraq and many other “real” news stories. So from where I stand, you fear that digg will only give us crap news stories, but I say that counts for alot of what we get already from “trusted” news organizations. All digg does is give the power of choosing stories to the people, instead of the editors. And the best part, if I don’t want to read about Anna Nicole or the custody battler for her body/baby, I don’t have to read it. But if I turn on the tv to watch the news, all I can do is turn the station, and hope when I turn back the story is over and I haven’t missed any news of real value.
This has actually been going on for quite some time in journalism (my fiancee did her thesis on it in journalism grad school). It’s a mixture of several factors, though, and the prevalence of communal-driven news is only a piece of the overall puzzle.
For some time, since the advent of CNN as the first 24-hour news organisation, people have come to think of news less as a public service, and more of a money-making business. In the old days of the televised news hour at six, news was ALWAYS a loss-leader. It was one of those responsibilities of the networks that they simply had to have — an hour of news to inform the people in between programming that actually makes money.
Turner changed all that when CNN came around. He showed that it was possible not only to have a channel where news was on all the time, but also that it was possible to make money while doing it. Turner hired good journalists — the tops of their fields — to decide the news and report it. It created some of the most respected and sought-after news packaged ever, and people began to take notice that HERE was a model that worked.
Copies came about such as MSNBC, Fox News, etc., all offering their own take on the functioning model. But in the background, what the person at home never saw was that all these companies were being bought by larger companies, merging traditional news networks and the new news networks into one giant conglomerate. These media giants had no news background; they had no journalistic ethics courses in their training; they were marketing companies, pure and simple.
And suddenly, the focus was on the bottom line. News that didn’t ’sell’ was simply cut. Journalists were replaced with models and actors for on-screen work, and off-screen, they were simply fired. News was cheaper to buy from the wire services than to create, and AP and Reuters became the only voices of the world. The motto became, “if it’s not sexy, it’s not news.”
And now, perpetuating this decline, we add the news aggregators and news rating sites. We take the reigns away from the journalists and hand them to the public. The public decides what’s news, and they’re fed only what they’ll buy — glitz, glamour, sex-appeal, controversy.
Journalism as we used to know it is long-dead. What we see now is simply, and aptly-named, ‘media.’ It’s not news. It’s just a series of poorly-written commercials masquerading as respectability and erudition.
You argue that big-media will squander resources pandering to a user base in order to make money, while the “real” news will go unreported for lack of funding. Yet, any average-Joe blogger can hit the front-page simply by throwing out some wild rumor about the iPhone or talking about how Best-Buy tried to rip them off… You can’t have it both ways. Either it takes time, money and good reporting to be able to generate traffic by making the front-page of Digg, or it is so easy, “A cave man could do it.”
Life isn’t pretty or any one person’s vision of perfect. The average surfer or digger is not an educated concerned citizen looking for substantiated information to guide his or her political choices. They are regular folk with a bit of time to find out a bit of information on a topic that interests them.
How nice not to have to wade through political and economic pieces that you know are biased and based on incomplete information, and be able to get right down to the bit on copyright law, Anne Nicole Smiths bed partners or rat metacognition that you want to read about. How cool to get an overview of what the average joe or jolene thinks about your topic of interest. How cool to be able to make your comment, and know that a reasonably stable community of fellow readers will take a look and then possibly even rate your comment.
Yep. Digg will have a large impact on news. I think an excellent one.
Everyone here has made good points. No one wants to be fed a corporate agenda, but in the end news sources will still be judged on the old-school notion of credibility–at least by those of us who care.
Jacob’s assertion that the “Net Mentality” reflects his generation is probably true, but really sad. This shit was being built when he was sucking his thumb and watching Barney. That his self-absorbed generation is fills it with breathless stories about games and boring accounts of what they had for breakfast does not bode well for any of us.
I found this article from the Digg main page. Now it’s not there. In fact, when I search Digg, I don’t find it anywhere. Am I missing something? Even if it was suddenly buried by a slew of users, wouldn’t it be listed somewhere? Or was it hand-deleted?
You speak truth but I think you miss the possible long term benefit.
Only the money hungry organisations will continually try to be ‘diggworthy’, let them turn their publications into rubbish. It will leave room for some publications with real journalistic merit.
Imagine a newspaper actually filled with real news because all the rubbish stories are available through digg. Just because people like digg doesn’t mean that there aren’t still people who like real news.
Bush is bad, very bad for the World, not Digg!!!
The few that care are doomed to drown in the ocean of MORONS. That is all that is left. The MORONS are the only ones perpetuating. So relax get whatever concern is left, out of yourself. Endeavor to enjoy what is left of your life. You can’t stop the tidal flow of the MORONS. Or the organizations that pander to them.