Gold Diggers
By Neil Dodds
28 February, 2006
Jeff Jarvis reports on the Digg phenomenon in the Guardian. He argues that the site is making the news "a community activity again."
For the uninitiated, Digg is a tech news site that "employs non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do."
It works like this: Users spot a story that appeals to them, and post it on Digg. Other users then approve (or disapprove - you can mark a story "lame") and the link moves up the Digg league of popular stories.
The site includes a Spy function, which allows you to watch Digg's 150,000 users approve ("digg") their favourite stories in real time. Users can subscribe to a feed of their friends' favourite stories and scan Digg by subject.
Plans are afoot to expand Digg to cover non-tech news. (Newsvine works on a similar principle, and Correspondent.com covered a number of other community-policed news sites last year.) There's also a Digg podcast and vlog, Diggnation, in which Digg's founder and a sidekick discuss the top stories selected by their readers.
Jarvis floats the idea that Guardian readers might be interested to see what that newspaper's website might look like if stories were ranked according to reader approval. It's an interesting exercise in democratising editing - though not journalism, as Digg doesn't actually include original writing.
Will it take off outside the tech world? Well, news communities already exist where users can tip one another off about interesting stories. Leftist-activist site Indymedia has been doing it for years.
Recently, the definition of what makes a story interesting has changed: You might not count an amusing email circular forwarded by your colleague as "news" but it is certainly "information" and it's likely that soon you will be able to join a community that allows you to rank such emails or stories for others to read, rather than simply file them in the bin.
For the news industry, it's another challenge. No-one on these sites is writing news, though attaching blog-style commentary to others' stories is an obvious next step. Will readers continue to go through newspaper home pages or Yahoo for news, or will they prefer to leave the choice of top stories to their peers?
Digg works because it is well-established group of techie users who respect one another (most of the time). Others using the model will need to build a large, mutually respectful community - no mean feat, particularly when one of the other dynamics working on the news industry is increased individualisation of news. On one hand, you can create and edit your own news site; on the other, you read news as recommended to you by thousands of other readers. Anyone who isn't a news media junkie might conclude it is easier to let editors choose for you.
Moreover, Digg focusses on a fairly narrow subject matter - tech news, and quite often fairly obscure developments at that. It's likely that the Digg model would appeal to similarly tight audiences - celebrity gossip, music news - but harder to see it working for mainstream "hard" news.
Applying the Digg model to the Guardian, say, based on the newspaper's most popular recent stories, would put the following on the front page: The possibility of a Mormon president of the US, two football stories, news on the Da Vinci Code trial and a report on an actor's knighthood excited Guardian readers most. An inspiring front page? You decide. Some newsmen might be surprised to see Sport moving from its own section to top billing, though they're probably accustomed to celebrity news hitting the headlines these days.
Of course, hard news today only makes up a small percentage of what passes as news - which may be the the most difficult part of Digg's challenge for news professionals to stomach.
Update: JD Lasica at New Media Musings has a round-up of the most popular community-ranked and citizen's journalism sites - some interesting links here.
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