Cautionary lessons on innovation for newsrooms from Digg

Chris O'Brien
The Next Newsroom Project
3 min readAug 23, 2010

Digg, the crowd-sourced news aggregation site that was once a Web 2.0 darling, is on the cusp of a dramatic overhaul of its site.

I’ve been playing with the “new” Digg for a few weeks now, which is still officially in an invite-only alpha. And I think it offers up two important lessons for people working in newsrooms of all shapes and sizes.

The first is that innovation must be a continuous process. Digg took its eye off the ball, and has lost significant momentum.

The second lesson is that the new Digg places more value on what our friends are doing, rather than a larger crowd of strangers. Digg is embracing the notion that our social networks are increasingly the most valuable way we discover news and information.

Let’s take the first lesson. Too often, I hear people in newsrooms say they need to reinvent what they do. But often it’s put in terms that are singular. Like, if we just create a newsroom optimized for today’s digital world, we’ll be fine. The problem, as we can see from Digg, is that the Web continues to evolve at a rapid pace that is accelerating. And that means that the ideal service or process today needs to be constantly changed and reinvented, not just re-thought once.

In Silicon Valley, we can see that in the rapid rise and fall of any number of companies. Just a few years ago, everyone thought auctions were the way we wanted to shop online, and eBay was king during the first few years of the last decade. Yahoo also fell quickly from a lofty perch. And then, MySpace got slapped by Facebook. In each case, the company in question got too comfortable with its core service, and assumed incorrectly that it would endure. That’s not just a trap that newspapers fall into, it’s a larger problem with the culture of successful organizations.

To avoid that fate, newsrooms need to develop the capacity to continually innovate. Once is not enough. If that process stops, they’ll inevitably find themselves being left behind by the way the Web changes.

Just a couple years ago, everyone in the news business was in awe of Digg, and it’ ability to drive traffic, the lessons it taught us about the way game theory could be incorporated into news discovery, and the power of the crowd. There was the infamous 2006 Businessweek cover story on Digg founder Kevin Rose: “How this kid made $60 million in 18 months.”

Digg was revolutionary, until it wasn’t. See this chart from the Nielsen Company:

Digg has lost over half its traffic in the past two years, and it’s an ever steeper fall from a year ago. It’s probably no coincidence that those were the years that saw Facebook and Twitter come to dominate the social Web. Digg stood still, and paid the price.

Thus, the new Digg. The company is attempting a radical shift. Is it too late? We’ll see over the next year.

The second lesson goes to the heart of the way Digg is changing, and what it says about the Web. The new Digg focuses much more on the things your friends are reading and “digg-ing” and the news brands that you choose to follow on Digg. The rankings of what the whole mass of Digg users are reading is still there, but very much de-emphasized.

The new Digg makes it clear that the first thing it wants you to do is “See what the people you follow are digging.” There is still a “top news” tab to see what is now called the “classic Digg.” (Are Classic Coke jokes inevitable?) But that is very much secondary.

Whether it succeeds or not, I think this is the right move for Digg for now. Unfortunately, there aren’t many second acts. And Digg is in a downward spiral that most never manage to escape.

Are you using the new Digg? If so, share your thoughts below on how it compares to, ahem, “classic” Digg.

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Chris O'Brien
The Next Newsroom Project

Business and Technology Reporter living in Toulouse, France. Silicon Valley refugee.