If you started reading this post based on the title, you’ve already half proven the point I’m about to argue. Sensationalism combined with social media is killing the news. Sensational headlines have always captured eyeballs, even when the dominant media was newspapers. However, with online developments such as hyperlinks, RSS feeds, news aggregators, and online voting mechanisms like Digg, headlines are often all readers use when determining newsworthiness.

I’ve been doing some research lately on how political communication in evolving with Web 2.0. Going through my notes, I came across the following snippet from an interview with one of the co-founders of a leading political blog and social networking site:

“There is this whole debate about the destruction Digg is doing to how information is disseminated. You have all these people who are going through [the site] and reading sensationalized headlines that have to be fictionalized, by nature, to get promoted. These are accompanied by a very small summary that is usually not very well written, and again, slanted because most people, and I’m guilty as charged, are attracted to those types of stories. The people creating the headlines are just trying to drive traffic back to their sites.

[...] The problem is that the people reading the news [on Digg] feel that by scanning these headlines they’ve been informed. You could scan the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and get a sense of the news, whereas now if you scan Digg-type sites, you’re getting a very slanted sense of the news. You form an opinion about an issue without really reading about what happened. I think that’s what’s scary about these things. Of course, the counter argument is that in order to be portable you have to be precise and you have to be digestible. It’s the whole snack media notion that everybody’s taking, but there’s got to be a little substance behind this or it’s going to work against us.”

Perhaps the problem is not so much using a popular vote to pick news stories but rather the disappearance of a true “front page” presented by a non-biased third party editor. For me, the real issue with sites like Digg is that scanning the “most popular” section has become synonymous with scanning the news. So, is “snackable media,” combined with our natural inclination to promote fun and entertaining stories really killing the news? You be the judge. I present the top 10 headlines on Digg for the past week (overall and stories tagged as “News”), as well as the top headlines from The New York Times Online.

Top 10 Headlines on Digg over the Past 7 Days:

1. Coolness (image)
2. It’s official: HD DVD is dead, the format war over
3. Do you dress like a douchebag? (image)
4. Fidel Castro Announces Retirement
5. Most Destructive Weapon in FPS history! (video)
6. Comedian Goes on Anti-Fox News Rant During Live Broadcast (video)
7. Jesus…What Are You Doing With That? (image)
8. Man Proposes During NBA Halftime; Doesn’t Go As Planned (video)
9. Daily Kos Diary: I Refuse to Buy into the Obama Hype
10. Star Wars according to a 3 year old (video)

Top 10 “News” Headlines on Digg over the Past 7 Days:

1. It’s official: HD DVD is dead, the format war over
2. Fidel Castro Announces Retirement
3. Daily Kos Diary: I Refuse to Buy into the Obama Hype
4. Portal 2 Confirmed by Valve
5. Scourge of $cien+ology Dies in Apparent Suicide
6. Stanford is free to students whose families make less than$$
7. Dubai Architecture: Dubai is NUTS!
8. The 15 Most Annoying Video Game Characters of All-Time
9. Scientology Given Direct Access To eBay Database
10. Firefox hits 500,000,000 downloads

Top 10 “Most E-Mailed” Headlines on The New York Times Online over the Past 7 Days:

1. Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location
2. More Americans Are Giving Up Golf
3. David Brooks: When the Magic Fades
4. Gentlemen, 5 Easy Steps to Living Long and Well
5. Frank Rich: The Audacity of Hopelessness
6. Paul Krugman: Poverty Is Poison
7. Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?
8. The Energy Challenge: Move Over, Oil, There’s Money in Texas Wind
9. A Big-Time Injury Striking Little Players’ Knees
10. Novelties: Learning From a Native Speaker, Without Leaving Home

Aside: For an interesting look at just how obsessed people are with manipulating headlines to make them Diggable, read the post “Quantifying Digg Popularity” on the the Social Media Explorer blog, which includes links to a keyword tool and title checker that users can employ to increase the likelihood of being popular on Digg.