Imagine a world without editors and journalists - a completely user-generated media world in which consumers decide which stories are worthy of publishing. A report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism did just that, and the results were interesting.

The report compared the news agenda of the mainstream media for one week with the news agenda found on a host of user-news sites for the same period.

The question of whether citizens define the news differently than professionals is becoming increasingly relevant. The process began with offering visitors a sense of what others found interesting.

To find out what news stories were most e-mailed and most viewed, PEJ took a snapshot of coverage from the week of June 24 to June 29, 2007 on three Web sites that offer user-driven news agendas: Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit. In addition, the Project studied Yahoo News, an outlet that offers an editor-based news page and three different lists of user-ranked news: Most Recommended, Most Viewed, and Most E-mailed. These sites were then compared with the news agenda found in the 48 mainstream news outlets contained in PEJ's News Coverage Index.

A total of 644 stories from the three user-driven sites and Yahoo News' three most popular pages were coded for the study and then compared to 1,395 stories from the same time period in PEJ's News Coverage Index.

The report first compared the content of the user-sites to that of the mainstream press. Next, it compared the three user-sites to each other. Finally, the study looked at the three user-oriented pages on Yahoo News, comparing them to Yahoo's editor-selected news page, to the other user-sites, and to each other.

In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three leading user-news sites-Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us-were more focused on stories like the release of Apple's new iPhone and that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth, according to the study.

Past research by PEJ has found that week-to-week mainstream media tends to focus on a handful of major events that they monitor continuously over the course of a week or a month. Whether it's floods in the Midwest, the death of Anna Nicole Smith or debate over the President's "surge" policy in Iraq, a sizable amount of airtime or space is often spent on just a handful of the "big" stories of the week.

In short, the user-news agenda, at least in this one-week snapshot, was more diverse, yet also more fragmented and transitory than that of the mainstream news media. This does not mean necessarily that users disapprove or reject the mainstream news agenda. These user sites may be supplemental for audiences. They may gravitate to them in addition to, rather than instead of, traditional venues. But the agenda they set is nonetheless quite different.