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12

Project for Excellent in Journalism: Citizens can be editors as well as journalists


This isn’t a new concept for those of us who have been out here in the blogosphere for a while. Actually, you don’t even need to have been in the sphere for that long to know this. But you just might not have thought of it this way.

Hattip to Ed Morrison, via Brewed Fresh Daily, for flagging this BBC article which is based on this Project for Excellence report, “The Latest News Headlines – Your Vote Counts.” I suggest going directly to the Project’s report to learn the most.

Key findings:

  • The news agenda of the three user-sites that week was markedly different from that of the mainstream press. Many of the stories users selected did not appear anywhere among the top stories in the mainstream media coverage studied. And there was often little in the way of follow-up. Most stories on the user-news sites appeared only once, never to be repeated again in the week we studied.
  • The sources user news sites draw on are strikingly different from the mainstream media. Seven in ten stories (70%) on the user sites come either from blogs or Web sites such as YouTube and WebMd that do not focus mostly on news.
  • The three user news sites differed from one another in subtle ways. Reddit was the most likely to focus on political events from Washington, such as coverage of Vice President Cheney; Digg was particularly focused on the release of Apple’s new iPhone; Del.icio.us had the most fragmented mix of stories and the least overlap with the News Index.
  • On Yahoo News—even when picking from a limited list of stories Yahoo editors had already pared down—users’ top stories only rarely matched those of the news professionals.
  • There were mostly similarities in what people are most likely to email each other versus what they recommend or view on Yahoo News. But there were some differences. Most Recommended stories focused more on “news you can use” such as advice from the World Health Organization to exercise one’s legs during long flights; the Most Viewed stories were often breaking news, more sensational in nature, with a heavy dose of crime and celebrity; and the Most Emailed stories were more diverse, with a mix of the practical and the oddball.
  • Despite claims that the Web would internationalize consumers’ news diets, coverage across the three user-news sites focused more on domestic events and less on news from abroad than the mainstream media that week. Yahoo News, both on its main news page and three most popular pages, meanwhile, stood out for being decidedly more international that week.

As I wrote in a comment on BFD, experiments in which readers/citizens are actually editing the news itself, as opposed to saying what they like and don’t like, include NewAssignment.net, which involves collaboration on everything from what stories will be covered to the content and writing of the stories.Then, there is NewsTrust, which I use and like. It sends you articles to look at and vote on just how trustworthy you think the reporting is.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 9:41 am September 12th, 2007 in Media 

Comments

One Response to “Project for Excellent in Journalism: Citizens can be editors as well as journalists”

  1. 1 Is it the End of News Times, or just a case of Munchausen by Proxy? : Writes Like She Talks on September 14th, 2007 11:33 pm

    [...] comments are really talking about.  It started when Ed Morrison drew attention to something (which I later blogged about with a hattip to him), but now – the conversation is going into nooks and crannies that seem better [...]

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