Just finished reading the results of a study, reported at Cyperjournalist.net, that compares user-ranked news to that of traditional media outlets (get the full study here). The study was conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the end of June, 2007. They compared what the top stories were in the mainstream news to what were the top stories on user-news sites — Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit. The results are pretty interesting.

First off, the top stories in the mainstream news barely made a blip on any of the user-news sites. The week of the study, the main stories in the mainstream press were Iraq and the immigration debate. That same week, the top stories at the user-news sites were Apple’s release of the iPhone and that Nintendo had passed Sony in net worth. However, even considering this, the stories on the user-news sites were much more diverse, and covered a very broad swath of topics.

One of the most interesting things they discovered was that 70% of the stories that appeared on these user-news sites were sourced from blogs and other sites. Mainstream news and wire service stories were a small percentage of stories:

Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism: http://journalism.org/node/7495

So what does this mean? Allow me to put my spin on it:
1. User-generated content rules social media; mainstream and wire service stories aren’t as important to online discussion
2. Social media participants are not restricted by a beat, an advertiser or parent company influence
3. People read and write about what is personally interesting to them, whether it is considered newsworthy or not

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Mass Media/Culture //