Can Social News Sites Be In Bed With News Organizations?

After the title, this Read/Write Web article misses the point:
Mixx, a Gorgeous Digg Competitor, Gets in Bed With LA Times

"Social news site Digg is a love-it or hate-it phenomenon.  Here at ReadWriteWeb, we love Digg, but I’ve got to admit that new competitor Mixx is worth a real close look.  Mixx announced today that it’s taken a strategic investment
(meaning a small one with a bunch of influence anyway) from the giant
newspaper the LA Times. It’s just the latest in a series of deals that
the little company has signed with outfits including USA Today,
Reuters.com and The Weather Channel. This deal is a strange one though,
because in addition to Mixx functionality being live on the Times site,
LA Times stories will now be favored in the Mixx search results. That’s
the first thing I don’t think I like about Mixx, but there’s a lot that
I like about it very much."

After that, Read/Write web goes on a long rant about how great Mixx is.

As I noted in the comment of this post: I’ll be the first one to criticize Digg and point out how other sites can be better. When it comes to social news sites, I try to call it like I see it (although full disclosure I work for Propeller). Checking out Mixx, I can admit it has a great design.

Design-shmizine, the site is tainted and Read/Write web, or anyone, should harbor on the fact that it ISN’T a social news site by virtue of the fact that it is taking money from news organizations to ensure their content gets more play on the site.

The whole revolutionary concept of Del.icio.us, Digg and Propeller is that the users are in control of the content. They decide what is important and no commercial entity can have sway over them.

At Propeller money gets involved, yes: They pay scouts to submit news: but we are not paid to submit news from any one source – there are no editorial guidelines about what to submit. More importantly – we are NOT allowed to submit content from our own sites and have that count towards our quota. Finally: The community still is in control – voting stories up and down.

If a newspaper started writing stories about its advertisers everyone would cry foul. Imagine it: Nobody wants your newspaper to write a story about the same companies it’s taking advertising from. And if they do you at least want them to be upfront about it (it’s called a disclaimer).

Well — there either needs to be a disclaimer all over Mixx — or I cry foul. Mixx may have a good design, but it looks like a step in the wrong direction for social news to me. I realize it’s a small step: Just having content highlighted on search results – but it’s a slippery slope, and that road only gets uglier.

Post Thoughts: Steve Peterson, who is a brillant guy from the Bivings Report asked about how this compares to Reddit being owned by Conde-Nast.

My thoughts: I don’t think this is the same as buying Reddit. Or the new deal that Digg has with WSJ. Those deals consist of: Putting "Digg This," or "Submit to Reddit" buttons on their content. And the Digg-WSJ deal also means that WSJ content that ends up on Digg will be free to users. But Digg WON’T highlight the WSJ content – that’s still up to the voters. And that’s key.

Same with Propeller: AOL pays people to submit news: But the scouts get to submit whatever they want. In fact, the only caveat to that – we CAN’T submit our own stuff and have that count towards our work for them. And finally, again, it’s up to the community to vote content up or down.