Is Social Media More Relevant Than Mainstream Media?

Mainstream media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, etc.) continues to play an essential role in every PR campaign; however, social media sites such as Digg, Reddit, Mashable and Del.icio.us are becoming more relevant and rapidly changing the way people consume news.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) recently released an intriguing report - "The Latest News Headlines - Your Vote Counts" - comparing the news agenda of the mainstream media for one week with the news agenda found on a host of user-news sites for the same period.

Here are a few of the key findings:

• The news agenda of the three user-sites that week was markedly different from that of the mainstream press. Many of the stories users selected did not appear anywhere among the top stories in the mainstream media coverage studied.
• The sources news sites draw on are strikingly different from the mainstream media. Seven in ten stories on the user sites come either from blogs or Web sites such as YouTube and WebMD that do not focus mostly on news.
• The user-news agenda, at least in this one-week snapshot, was more diverse, yet also more fragmented and transitory than that of the mainstream news media.
  

The report goes on to conclude that, "For now, the percentage of Americans who rely exclusively on news from user-driven sites is just a fraction of what it is for mainstream news sites. And in this increasingly fragmented era, many who visit Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit may also be reading the online versions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal."

"But whether or not we see further divergence between user-driven sites and mainstream media over the next few years will surely remain a key question for researches, journalists, and of course, citizens."

While the debate continues, one thing is for sure - the PR industry is evolving, and traditional agencies that don't quickly adapt to integrate social media will be left behind.



See what The San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the PEJ report:

User-news sites offer diverse stories, some questionable source
The San Francisco Chronicle
By Joe Garofoli - Sept. 12, 2007

. . . The traditional news outlet wants to put a lot of gravitas on their front page. They want the readers to eat their spinach," said Kourosh Karimkhany, general manager of Wired Digital, which owns Reddit. Technology allows users to create their own news "agenda" from multiple online sources, rendering a traditional front page increasingly "irrelevant," he said.

Instead, on these growing sites - Digg welcomed 19.5 million unique visitors last month - consumers rely on the "wisdom of crowds" (other readers) to figure out what are the top stories of the day.

The study found that the news items on these sites are "more diverse, more transitory and often draw on a very different and perhaps controversial list of sources." It found that 40 percent of the stories on user-news sites originated on blogs and 24 percent came from mainstream sites like BBC News. Only 5 percent came from wire services. . . .