This report - The Latest News Headlines—Your Vote Counts (.pdf) - is worth reading, even though it's quite frustrating in sections. For example, it's opening analysis of news content on various user-contributed sites (Reddit, Digg) found their focus to be on iPhones and Nintendo, while mainstream media was focused on Iraq and immigration. The veiled insinuation is that while Rome burns, user-content sites fiddle. That misses the point completely. The real point isn't the content itself. Rather, it's that any community can filter information that it finds to be of greatest importance. What is valuable is process, not the specific content. Many of the news sites - like digg.com - are focused on the tech community. Why not ask what the gossip magazines were discussing while mainstream media was doing "serious work". I'm guessing the journalistic emphasis of these magazines were heavily focused on Britney, Paris, and Lindsay. This is just silly.
After that initial diversion, the report goes on to make important points - namely the increased diversity of user-generated media and less obsessive attention (remember days of CNN repeating the same story every 3 1/2 minutes? Just in case we had forgotten) paid to current themes. I regret the "either/or" nature presented by the report (though toward the end they acknowledge readers being active in both online and traditional media spaces). I think we can happily blog, contribute to Digg...and still read involved research reports and have a concern for global politics. I go to digg for a different type of news, a type I cannot readily find in regular media. And when I find it, it's obsolete.