Great post by Nick Car looking at a recent study at the difference between the news reported by major outlets and what bubbled to the top of user generated sites. Nick's conclusion:
When you replace professional editors with a crowd or a social network, you actually end up accelerating the dumbing-down of news. News becomes a stream of junk-food-like morsels. The people formerly known as the audience may turn out to be the people formerly known as informed.
Lots of tech news popped to the top, which is par for the course for sites that cater to technology literate, but what is clear is that the idea of a user generated utopia where users will force online conversations to topics that bear on global and local news event that deeply affect people's lives is a bit farther off than people might have hoped.