Russell Smith on the reporting deficit in the era of social news media (essentially, his take on the State of the U.S. News Media report).
This year's report summarizes its conclusions as a few major trends. Perhaps the most depressing of them is the fact that despite the massive proliferation of news-headline websites and "citizen" news sites (that is to say, blogs), there is no more actual news being found and reported. In fact, there may even be less. The simple explanation for this is that most websites simply repackage news found and written by the conventional media. In other words, reporters who are trained and paid to do the often dry work of gathering facts and interviewing people, or the dangerous work of visiting wars or disasters, provide the news stories, and the news sites gather them up and the bloggers comment on them.
But because of the commercial nature of news sites, the stories are often filtered by popularity. There is more and more technology available to enable editors to gather reader votes on the appeal of stories and to sort stories by their popularity. This leads to a narrowing of the number of stories that are posted: The most popular ones get the most play.
"News consumers may have had more choices than ever for where to find news in 2007, but that does not mean they had more news to choose from," the report says.
For example, it states that more than a quarter of the news stories on television and online last year in the United States were about the Iraq war and the presidential campaign. This kind of concentration of attention runs against what was expected of the kind of information universe the Web would provide. What we expected, 10 years ago, was a wild diversity, a babble of voices bringing light to the stories that the supposedly stodgy, politics-and-economics-obsessed newspaper newsrooms were not connected to.
What we've ended up with is a million sources reporting the same story.
The report could have mentioned the new phenomenon of websites such as Digg or Yahoo! Buzz that arrange news stories by popularity, determined by readers' votes, replacing editors with a simple free-market kind of demand. It's democratic, yes, but it also explains why celebrity news and trivia tend to trump all other kinds of story on free news pages such as Yahoo's.