The Project for Excellence in Journalism, part of the Pew Research Centers, has published a report that shows that the content selected for online versions of major news outlets, such as newspapers and television news programs, is strikingly different than what is selected by online users themselves, on sites where users can “vote” on content, such as Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us. The report notes:

The news agenda of the three user-sites that week was markedly different from that of the mainstream press. Many of the stories users selected did not appear anywhere among the top stories in the mainstream media coverage studied. And there was often little in the way of follow-up. Most stories on the user-news sites appeared only once, never to be repeated again in the week we studied.

The sources user news sites draw on are strikingly different from the mainstream media. Seven in ten stories (70%) on the user sites come either from blogs or Web sites such as YouTube and WebMd that do not focus mostly on news.

The report did note that this was gleaned from a one-week “snapshot” of news sites versus reader-ranked sites, and that the users of reader-ranked sites may be using those as supplements to learning about news from more traditional news sources.

Nevertheless, if there is a trend among younger Web users to information sites that are primarily user-generated, the information on those sites appears to be quite different from what many people consider “news,“ as well as fragmented, transitory, and from sources other than professional journalists.