Talk to a journalist about tagging and their eyes are bound to glaze over. But at a time when search is becoming the way people navigate the internet, there is a greater need than ever for this metadata on stories.

According to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the people formerly known as the audience are doing it for themselves. The study (PDF) found that 28% of Internet users have tagged content, and 7% have done so on a typical day.

The figures reflect how some Web 2.0 services based on tagging have taken off. Flickr and YouTube rely on people tagging their content to organise the material. And it is hardly surprising that the people most likely to tag media are early adopters – under age 40, on broadband and with above-average income and education.

Tagging is attracting as it lets people organise things in multiple categories, compared to a hierarchical approach like the Dewey system.

As David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, explains:

You may want to tag, say, a Stephen King story as ’horror,’ but maybe to me it’s ’ghost story’ and to a literature professor it’s ’pop culture’.

It is a logical step for journalists to take on board the importance of tagging. But it is also important to provide ways for the users to tag the content and organise it in ways useful to them.

Imagine how such a news website might look. It is a radical departure from the traditional approach in journalism, where editors decide what stories make it to the front page.