Citizen Editors

After reading Citizen Marketers ch.2 I did a little research on Digg.com and found an article on BBC news called Citizens New Take on News. It talks about how news agenda would be completely different if it were planned by everyday citizens rather than journalists. US Pew Research Center, mentioned in Citizen Marketers, compared news stories from mainstreams news sources, such as TV, radio and online, to three user driven sites – Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us. The study found that the news stories that appeared on mainstream news sources and those most popular on user-driven sites varied tremendously.
People were drawn to more eclectic stories rather than stories about Iraq from different angles. There was little emphasis on single stories because readers today want to know a little bit of everything in order to be a worldly, informed citizen. The most popular stories on the user-driven site were about technology (40%) while the next popular were lifestyle stories, which is not the main content of mainstream news.
The user-driven sites are driving now web2.0highway with the top down, making your everyday people the new editors.