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Will MySpace be the next digg, the downfall of news?

To answer the question in my title, I don’t think so. But, to read this item, you might think so. (Well, maybe it’s more optimistic than that, but you get the idea.)

Apparently, MySpace is looking to jump into the news aggregator business in digg-like fashion. Seems natural to me. They have a huge userbase built it. Why not harness it to let people see “these are the stories most popular with your friends” or “these are the top stories voted on by other MySpace users.”

The Poynter column says:

Now I’m wondering how that audience would use the service — especially with the option for posting articles to personal pages.

What kind of news would the largely young audience post? Would the service, as Heaton predicts, help us understand what kind of news they’re interested in? Would it help engage young people in the news?

WASHINGTONPOST.COM
options to share from the Washington Post

What bothers me about this is I don’t remember similar questions being raised when Facebook quietly added this ability months and months ago. Yeah, Facebook already allows you to share stories and videos or pretty much anything with your friends. You can post them to your wall. You can pass them along to friends. You can comment on their shared items, and so forth. Although not a rate-the-item community like digg, I do see a number of my own friends posting items or sending me videos or stories they come across.

NYTIMES.COM
options to share items on nytimes.com

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times have a Facebook icon in their share selection. That in itself is significant. The NYTimes has only three icons, digg, facebook and newsvine. Of all the sites available to post stories, it views facebook as one of the top three. For the Washington Post, it’s in the top six. Think about that and what it already says about the value of word-of-mouth (or click) to reach young people in an online world.

Do I think this will be bad for the news business? Not at all. It will get the stories in front of more eyes, eyes that typically shy away from traditional media companies. As the column states:

It seems we could learn a lot from users’ interactions with the news service — not just for getting a better picture of news consumption habits, but for generating story ideas as well.

Agreed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 11:10 am and is filed under Commentary, Journalism, News, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Will MySpace be the next digg, the downfall of news?”

  1. Dana Says:
    March 16th, 2007 at 3:02 pm

    You’re so right about the MySpace/Facebook coverage. Most people older than 30 know what MySpace is from expose after expose, news story after news story about “Do you know what YOUR kid is posting on MySpace?” and “Could a predator find your child on MySpace?” And now here again it’s MySpace that gets the spotlight still (and it’s almost positive coverage at that, a new one for MySpace).
    It’s odd that I have yet to actually meet someone significantly older than myself who has ever even heard of Facebook, but I find what NYT and the Post are doing to be encouraging. I hope the media will continue to embrace such interactions so as this first generation of Facebook/MySpace users grows up, they can use these sites for something a little more mature than showing off their underage drinking bashes.