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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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).

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