Crowd-Sourcing the Agenda

As I was dutifully copying the little circular chart Professor Adler drew on the board today illustrating the cycle of agenda-setting and news-creation--from the President's office down to the people and back around to Congress--I realized that there is another step being introduced to this process. Call it the Facebook effect, or "new media" exerting its power, or the WikiAgenda. I think that a lot of what people (especially those around my age) consider to be important to the agenda is set by other people like themselves, rather than the newspapers or a governmental PR office.

Take the NYTimes.com homepage. There is very clearly an agenda being set by the editorial board: the ongoing situation in Egypt is primary, along with responses in Iran and the rest of the Middle East. The budget takes precedence a little lower down the page, with local news and a report on New York Fashion Week closer to the bottom of the page. Once you "enter" the site by clicking on an article, however, the most direct link to the next article is via the "Most Popular" tab, which gives you a smattering of "high-priority" issues along with an expose on JC Penney's abuse of Google's search rankings, an article about the Grammys, and a progress report on Gabrielle Gifford's rehabilitation. All fascinating stuff (even the JC Penney article--read it!) and not junk or tabloid journalism, but not exactly the agenda that the NY Times wanted to set.

Moving beyond the news website itself, I think it's safe to say that many young people read serious news articles mostly when they come across them on Facebook (or Twitter - sigh). The way we process the news and the official agenda comes to us through our social networks and our friend's priorities. In fact, right now New York Magazine is telling me that I can be the first of my friends to "like" this article about the 1.65 trillion dollar deficit.