If the dreaded MSM (mainstream media) is a big, bad oligarchy of elitist J-school grads who want nothing better than to tell the rest of us how to think, then the web, the blogosphere, and the rise of user-generated content have been seen as a way around the filter. In a world where publishing is cheap or free, millions of unique voices will present a far greater variety of news and opinion. "They" can't censor "us" now!

But a funny thing happened on the way to the new media revolution; it got taken over by old media. While the Internet is home to a staggering diversity of voices, most people still get their online news from established, old-media players. The Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released a report on the state of the news media in 2008, and it finds that top online news destinations command an even greater percentage of readers than than do the top offline news destinations.

"Even with so many news sources, more people now consume what old-media newsrooms produce, particularly from print, than before," says the report. "Online, for instance, the top 10 news web sites, drawing mostly from old brands, are more of an oligarchy, commanding a larger share of audience than they did in the legacy media. The verdict on citizen media for now suggests limitations."

In addition, bloggers don't tend to be the voice of the people; instead, the report notes that the most-read blogs tend to be produced by people "with even more elite backgrounds than journalists."

That's not to say that the web hasn't changed the newsroom; it has. The report notes two key changes that news organizations had to make as they shifted their operations online. First, news isn't a "finished product" anymore. Constant updates to stories and to websites throughout the day are now the rule. In addition, readers have become increasingly savvy about sources, and they no longer are willing to take a journalist's statements on their own merit. Links, once used only by bloggers to document sources and offer background, have gradually found their way into the traditional newsroom. As the report puts it, "a news organization and a news web site are no longer final destinations."

But no matter the destination, the basic stories are fairly limited. A survey of news coverage from 2007 showed that more than a quarter of all news stories dealt with the Iraq war and the 2008 elections. Education, religion, race, welfare, abortion, and other topics each generated less than one percent of all stories. This isn't necessarily helped by the rise of cable talk shows, the strength of talk radio, or even bloggers, since most of these outlets have few or no reporting resources and instead devote their energies to rehashing the biggest (and most controversial) stories of the day.

Online news does stand out from more traditional sources by having a stronger international focus. 25 percent of the stories studied on major new web sites dealt with "foreign affairs that did not involve the US," a number that is six times higher than cable news and four times higher than nightly TV news.

So who's winning the online news war?

Yahoo News MSNBC CNN AOL News New York Times Gannett ABC News Google News USA Today CBS News

While it's generally a list of the usual suspects, entries like Google News do bring a bit of diversity by regularly linking up niche or international sources that readers might not regularly visit. But as the rest of the list makes clear, traditional sources still dominate the conversation.

When it comes to blogs, signs of acceptance are a bit harder to come by. A 2007 Zogby survey found that blogging was classed as an "important" news outlet by only 30 percent of Americans (web sites were highest at 81 percent).

So we're left with the online "oligarchy" and some elitist bloggers. Does that match up with your own experience of trolling the web for news?

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