Newspaper editors can relax. Geeks aren’t replacing them yet. The Project For Excellence in Journalism reported a study compared the leading stories on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, and Delicious to 48 mainstream news outlets, finding great differences in the types of stories that get the most visible placement.

Social bookmarking sites, who’s stories are chosen by anyone with an account on the site, have a greater focus on blogs and other user generated sites like YouTube. These stories rarely overlapped with the lead stories in major news outlets. Social bookmarking sites focused more on technology like the iPhone and video games, crime and celebrity stories, and a lack of international coverage.

The study tries to hold social bookmarking sites to task for being standards of what’s news and what’s not. The study says:

Despite claims that the Web would internationalize consumers’ news diets, coverage across the three user-news sites focused more on domestic events and less on news from abroad than the mainstream media that week. Yahoo News, both on its main news page and three most popular pages, meanwhile, stood out for being decidedly more international that week.

Unfortunately, the study forgets one important detail about social bookmarking sites: the people. Social bookmarking caters to niche, often geeky audiences who pick stories they like to recommend to others. Digg thus far is not positioned nor intentioned to replace standard media outlets for news coverage. Instead, it helps the social community around the site find articles, websites, and features that would interest the community. Finding popular stories increases your clout among the community. But like any social community, sociability is only as good as the community.

Digg, Reddit, and Delicious are still catering to early adopters, often tech-savvy individuals, much like how Wikipedia features more articles about Star Wars characters than world religions. There’s nothing wrong with this, even though this study seems to portray these bookmarked articles as trivial. They are not trivial to the people who take the time to post them or the people who make them popular. There is a difference between what people need to know and they want to know. The question should be who is responsible for each.