The New Daily Fix?

Everybody’s been weighing in with opinions on the Digg vs. New York Times thing. Michael Arrington was the first, and it’s started making the rounds.  It’s a valid opinion.  Before the launch of Digg 3.0, I visited Digg, at most, once a day.  Since the 3.0 launch the inclusion of other topics besides technology, I’d say I probably visit it somewhere around 12-15 times a day.  I’m digging topics, I’m leaving comments, I’m checking out what my friends are doing; the overall result is a much more comprehensive and immersive site where I know I’m going to be able to find out the latest cool stories in music, movies and more.

Does Digg outweigh the New York Times? Not entirely.  For regular news, Digg still can’t keep pace with places like CNN.com or even Newsvine, because the Digg community doesn’t stay as active in posting world news as they do in the other containers.  I’m not sure that, at least for a lot of people, anything will ever take the place of sitting back in a chair in the evening and reading the newspaper. I get all my news from the web, because I don’t watch television and I don’t read the paper, but that’s me. I’m an early adopter. I stay on the bleeding edge of technology, so it’s easier for me to get my news via the web.

Digg is great.  It’s one of my top three favorite sites out there. But it’s not the New York Times, and it doesn’t matter if Digg KILLS NYT in internet pageviews; if you mixed in the daily readers of the NYT, those who have subscribed for years, the story would look a lot different.