It is sobering for journalists to realise that what they think is important, and therefore, what they think people should be reading, is not shared by their readers. A new piece of research by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) has showed once again that there is a wide gap between journalists and their audience.
The PEJ researchers compared a week's stories on three leading user-news sites, along with Yahoo's most popular stories, with 48 print, cable, online, network TV and radio news outlets. Result: online users preferred very different topics than those from traditional news outlets.
The study said: "In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three leading user-news sites - Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us - were more focused on stories like the release of Apple's new iPhone and that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth."
Among other interesting, but unsurprising, findings:
Many of the stories selected by users didn't appear anywhere among the top stories promoted by the mainstream media.
Seven in ten stories on the user sites come either from blogs or non-news websites, such as YouTube and the health site WebMd . There were also clear signs that people were far more interested in domestic events than in international news.
Kourosh Karimkhany, general manager of Wired Digital, which owns Reddit, said: "The traditional news outlet wants to put a lot of gravitas on their front page. They want the readers to eat their spinach." But, he added, users are now able to create their own news "agenda" from multiple online sources, rendering a traditional front page increasingly "irrelevant."
As I say, I'm not surprised. If we go back to 1969, when Rupert Murdoch acquired The Sun, he revealed a similar mindset among newspaper readers. He and his editor, Larry Lamb, flew in the face of the received wisdom of that time. Rather than regarding the paper as an educational tool, with journalists deciding what people should be reading, they believed that readers should be allowed to make content decisions. The market would be the arbiter. They would, in other words, give the people what they wanted.
Of course, that was both an imperfect and a tentative experiment. Imperfect because both Murdoch and Lamb still wished to push a certain political and economic point of view. Tentative because they were trying to maximise sales and didn't wish to offend the masses they were attempting to attract.
Now, however, the internet can offer virtually anything to everyone, allowing individuals to decide. Do they want information? Yes, according to the PEJ survey, they do - but not necessarily about the minutiae of Washington politics or even the war in Iraq. They prefer to know about health instead.
As the PEJ study says: "The user-news agenda... was more diverse, yet also more fragmented and transitory than that of the mainstream news media. This does not mean necessarily that users disapprove or reject the mainstream news agenda. These user sites may be supplemental for audiences. They may gravitate to them in addition to, rather than instead of, traditional venues."
Journalists in the digital world have to take this fact on board.
