Web users differ from mainstream agenda: The news agendas of traditional media websites have very little overlap with news sites based on stories selected by web users themselves, according to a new study comparing the content of mainstream sites in the US with popular user sites such as Digg.
The findings come at a time when news organisations around the world are investing heavily in their web operations in an attempt to engage readers and viewers online.
The report, published on Wednesday by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research organisation that specialises in analysing the performance of the press. It compared news coverage from the week of June 24 to June 29 on 48 mainstream news outlets to that on user sites Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit. All three of these operate without news editors and instead let users decide what is most important or interesting.
Few of the top stories selected by editors on mainstream sites appeared on the user-generated sites.
