Surprise: Social Sites Skew the News

These days, I rarely visit a CNN, New York Times, or MSNBC site as a first port of call. I get there haphazardly, from a blog that links to a page on one, courtesy of a social site like Reddit or Delicious. I'm hardly alone, and I've long known that reliance on social sites has been both a blessing and a curse: While I'm exceptionally well-versed in what's going on in the tech world (that's my job, right?), I can be oblivious to foreign affairs, say.

Now someone has put a little science behind what has long been known and offered more analysis on how the major social news sites differ in the stories they promote the as opposed to the mainstream media. While it doesn't surprise me that 40 percent of the news on Digg and Delicious is tech-related, I was surprised to see that all of the top five types of stories in the mainstream media are political or sociological (comprising 50% of all stories), social news sites are lucky to give these topics 10 to 20% of their coverage.

I'm not so naive as to pretend I don't see what's happening here. Users flock to these sites because they offer more tech news than the mainstream, and the users in turn feed the site with even more tech stories. (At one point I had to disable all "Apple" related stories from appearing on my Digg feed, as they were eating up about 80 percent of all the stories on the home page.)

But is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is my adherence to Reddit really informing me better or is it just a crutch? The answer, of course, depends on who you ask. While the risk of groupthink is palpable (TechCrunch goes so far as to ask "Does Social Media Make You Dumb?"), I realize I'm part of the process, too, for better and worse. As the TechCrunch piece also notes: Social news sites reflect what people actually read. Mainstream sites can only reflect what reporters write. The much-heralded immigration debate got a lot of ink over the summer, but, in a nutshell, no one in the web world seems to have cared very much about it.

Ya got me there. 

LINK: User-news sites offer diverse stories, some questionable sources