This is a paper I wrote in December 2009. I’ve decided to post it now, partially because it contains a previously unreported 30-day content comparison of Digg versus the New York times. Looking back on this work, I think that its greatest weakness is an under-appreciation of the importance of production processes in determining what gets reported and how. In other words, I believe now that the intense pressure of daily deadlines shapes the news far more than external influences such as political and commercial pressures — at least in countries where the press is relatively free. Also available as a pdf.

Abstract
There are now several websites which allow users to assemble news content from around the internet by means of voting systems. The result is a new kind of front page that directly reflects what the audience believes to be salient, as opposed to what the editorial staff of a newsroom believes the audience should know. Content analyses of such sites show that they have little overlap with mainstream media agendas (5% in a previous study). In fact, many of the items selected by users would not traditionally be considered “news” at all. This paper examines the shift from editor to audience agendas in the context of previous theories of news production, discusses existing content analysis work on the subject, and reports on a new 30 day study of Digg.com versus NYTimes.com.

Introduction
No news organization can cover everything. Traditionally, it is ultimately the editor of a news publication who decides what is newsworthy: what stories reporters will follow, and what stories will be published. It has been considered part of the value of a news organization to determine what its audiences need to know about.

It’s never been entirely clear how professional journalists decide which events are worth reporting, out of all the events taking place in the world. Neither has it been obvious how editorial choices relate to the audience’s personal judgments about what is important, but  such questions were largely theoretical before the advent of the web. “I own a newspaper, you do not” was always the implicit end to discussions about who got to decide what was news.

Today, publishing is near-free and the news package has been disaggregated. An online audience member can select single stories that interest them, without reading or even really being aware of the traditional news package. Alongside this disaggregation we find a new class of online applications that re-aggregate content from multiple sources. Readers vote on pages from across the web, and the top-rated items are displayed on the aggregator’s home page.

News consumers are literally tearing the world’s newspapers apart and re-assembling them to fit their own agendas, including lots of content not traditionally considered news at all.

This paper examines what we can learn about the online audience’s judgment not only of what is important but what is news at all, and how it differs from that of traditional newsrooms. I review previous work on “news values”  and “news agenda” in professional journalism, look at measurements of what audiences view online, and report on my own 30 day quantitative study of Digg as compared to the New York Times.

Features of the audience-generated agenda
Continue reading What is news when the audience is editor?