Evil of Digg Overestimated

“Story rankings play havoc with tra­di­tional journ­al­istic tenets” appar­ently. In his Dow Jones MarketWatch ‘Ethics Watch’ column, Thomas Kostigen says that digg-​​style news-​​voting systems are messing with his mind, con­tinu­ally tempting him to write popular stories.

It emerges, however, that actually it’s not digg that is directly respons­ible, that’s just a trendy hook for the story. It’s being on the Internet as opposed to a (paper) news­paper. Statistics packages can provide some pretty harsh feedback for news writers that you’d never get for filing unpop­ular stories back in olden times. They can also supply golden inform­a­tion on the types of story that ‘work’. But does this ability to supply stuff people actually want to read mean that journ­al­ists aren’t doing their duty by covering the unpop­ular truth that no-​​one wants to hear?

The job of a journ­alist is to lobby and report stories that he or she covers, or better yet, uncovers. In this way, the story is forced upon readers. At a news­paper that’s more easily done because an editor can’t point directly to a story’s ranking and say, “Look son, no one wants to read about that. Go cover some­thing else.” But now he or she can.

This ability to judge pop­ularity is normally viewed as a good thing, of course. If your readership’s engage­ment with stories can be measured then you can find out what your audience wants and do more of it. You can discover that nobody likes this or that topic and drop it.

But does this threaten to put a stop to invest­ig­ative journ­alism that doesn’t suit a hedon­istic, irre­spons­ible public, as Kostigen says? Well, top of digg right now is a story about a man who was tasered, clubbed and com­mitted by the police as a result of his epilepsy. In fact, pretty much all the top ‘world and business’ stories at the moment are about polit­ical scandals, anti-​​war, and anti-​​establishment news stories. If you use digg as the baro­meter of what the public really wants, then the front page of MarketWatch might look a bit different.

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• Digg to Repair Holes
• The Future of Digg
• Understanding digg: rate, not volume