Everyone is a journalist due to the modern Internet, we are told.   Not so, says a University of Georgia analysis.    Instead, 2 percent of people who start discussions attract about 50 percent of the replies and that is good news for traditional journalism.

The downside is they used Internet newsgroups to validate this belief - if you aren't familiar with newsgroups, that's because Web-based interfaces killed their popularity but throughout much of the 1990s newsgroups were popular and even Google makes the newsgroup interface more attractive.

Newsgroups are already a niche subset of the Internet and not representative of Internet culture as a whole.   The uprising in Egypt was not brought to worldwide attention by newsgroups.

The journalists behind the analysis examined discussions among more than 200,000 participants in 35 newsgroups over a six-year period. They focused on political and philosophical newsgroups on Usenet, the oldest Internet discussion platform.

To identify the differences, if any, that exist in the content posted by popular participants and their less popular counterparts, they examined the content of a subset of the messages. Only 12 percent of messages from the popular posters presented their own comments and opinions; most of the time, they simply imported content from other news sources. Of the imported content, 60 percent came from traditional media, such as The New York Times, CNN and other national and local outlets, while 8 percent came from blogs and personal websites. Fifteen percent of posts used content from online-only news sites, and 6 percent of posts used content from government and nonprofit organizations. 

For those who fancy the Internet as a great equalizer that brings equality to the voices of the masses, however, the findings suggest that it could never meet that lofty ideal.  Study author Itai Himelboim, assistant professor in the UGA Grady College of Journalism, said he wasn't surprised to find that online discussion groups tend to become hierarchical. Even in grade school, he pointed out, everybody wants to be friends with the most popular kid.

What did surprise Himelboim was that the larger the group gets, the more skewed the network of interactions becomes. People exhibit what's called a preferential attachment toward those with many connections, which suggests that having many connections makes it easier to make more connections. Himelboim said that because people can only spend so much time communicating with others, the growth of these so-called hubs comes at the expense of their less-connected counterparts.

In a related study that randomly assigned nearly 200 participants to one of several simulated forums, Himelboim and his colleagues found that posting high-quality content is necessary for attracting attention—but not sufficient. That is, high quality posts with few replies drew few additional replies and never became hubs.

So what does one need to do to attract attention on the Internet?

"That's the million dollar question," Himelboim said. "But just posting a lot will not make you a hub for attracting attention."

- Communication Research