I've heard there are studies that confirm this (sorry, no citation handy), and I've also heard it said that Yahoo! Mail's success was due in part to their recognition of this fact. Put news next to email and you reduce the friction of social interaction.
Edit: The Habermas Thesis. http://hpronline.org/specialty-blogs/hprgument-blog/why-both...
It would be nice though if all content had an audit trail, which you could trace through to the original sources. Could be quite enlightening.
I agree - this is the key! I've been really thinking hard about the whole reputation problem. In a way, Google found a way to solve reputation problem on the Internet for website, and therefore their tremendous success. Would equivalent method work on people - just give reputation points by Citation (or Followers, as Klout is trying to do)? I don't think that's enough - plus my feeling is that there are bunch of dimensions to a Reputation. And on top of all that - we haven't even solved Identity issue on the Net yet.
When Techmeme first started I had a conversation about this with Gabe Rivera - the founder of the site. He realized early on that he had to steer away from personalization because a large part of the attraction to Techmeme was the readers all referring to stories featured on it -for eg. 'did you see this on Techmeme'.
It facilitates conversations within the group of people that read the site as they are all literally reading off the same page. Apparently The Druge Report realized this early on as well which is why they go with one major story per day (or did).
When you are part of an industry or group you want to, or need to, know what everybody else is reading so you can 'keep up' and be 'in the loop'. In silicon valley tech is it Techememe (and HN) and in politics it is Druge, etc.
Reading How to do X better articles, on the other hand, not so much.
Case in point: I visit hacker news for the comments.
Not to mention that you would have read 100 articles from a single source that is a government-controlled channel of information from a country that is partly responsible for starting the Israeli-Palestinian mess in the first place.
It even takes itself to task hugely, as shown recently when a BBC reporter was destroyed in an interview about how much better the Sky and iTV coverage was than the BBC during the capture of Tripoli, by another BBC journalist live on air.
It's only the "gold standard" for mainstream sources, which is not saying much. For people shopping for more accurate information elsewhere, it's nothing to write home about. Would you take your technical reporting from the BBC? Well, I wouldn't take my world affair's reporting either.
That said, I have worked with the BBC several times in the past (and other outlets, as a stringer). No mainstream coverage is accurate, and a lot are just used to justify a point the reporter has already made. Don't be fooled by spectacles like a BBC journalist "destroying" another BBC journalist on air.
The function of news is to facilitate smalltalk.
I am reasonably convinced of this. News, as such, is mostly just something that you're supposed to have read so that you can get by in usual social interactions. What we read (and are supposed to have read) is very tied to our place in the social hierarchy. Most folks don't actually want news to be too personalized because then it loses its social function.
I stopped reading the news at one point -- for a couple years -- because of its persistent lack of depth. I realized that reading 100 BBC articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would leave me knowing virtually nothing about it, other than some factoids, whereas the same time spent reading books would be worthwhile.
There's an interesting problem to be solved here -- one that's been on my mental back-burner for a while. I'm not sure if Pandora's box can be resealed and we can work our way back to mediums with more depth and less distraction, but I both hope we can, and have much interest in the mechanism for such.