This is a must scan/read for anyone interested in print journalism, online journalism, and social media . It's loaded with charts and graphs.
Even if you don't have time now to get to the full report, the overview has plenty of information worth knowing and thinking about. What follows are a few items from the overview that we believe are worth a bit of extra attention.
Chapters include:
+ The Blogosphere
+ Twitter
+ YouTube
+ Social media’s agenda versus the MSM, week to week
+ Methodology
A Selection of Material from the Overview:
News today is increasingly a shared, social experience. Half of Americans say they rely on the people around them to find out at least some of the news they need to know. Some 44% of online news users get news at least a few times a week through emails, automatic updates or posts from social networking sites. In 2009, Twitter’s monthly audience increased by 200%.
[Clip]
What types of news stories do consumers share and discuss the most? What issues do they have less interest in? What is the interplay of the various new media platforms? And how do their agendas compare with that of the mainstream press?
To answer these questions, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has gathered a year of data on the top news stories discussed and linked to on blogs and social media pages and seven months’ worth on Twitter. We also have analyzed a year of the most viewed news-related videos on YouTube. Several clear trends emerge.
[Clip]
[Our emphasis] Across all three social platforms [Blogs, Twitter, You Tube], though, attention spans are brief. Just as news consumers don’t stay long on any website, social media doesn’t stay long on any one story. On blogs, 53% of the lead stories in a given week stay on the list no more than three days. On Twitter that is true of 72% of lead stories, and more than half (52%) are on the list for just 24 hours.
And most of those top weekly stories differ dramatically from what is receiving attention in the traditional press. Blogs overlap more than Twitter, but even there only about a quarter of the top stories in any given week were the same as in the “MSM [Mainstream media].”
Instead, social media tend to home in on stories that get much less attention in the mainstream press. And there is little evidence, at least at this point, of the traditional press then picking up on those stories in response. Across the entire year studied, just one particular story or event – the controversy over emails relating to global research that came to be known as “Climate-gate” – became a major item in the blogosphere and then, a week later, gaining more traction in traditional media.
[Clip]
A Selection of Specific Findings
Social media and the mainstream press clearly embrace different agendas. Blogs shared the same lead story with traditional media in just 13 of the 49 weeks studied. Twitter was even less likely to share the traditional media agenda – the lead story matched that of the mainstream press in just four weeks of the 29 weeks studied. On YouTube, the top stories overlapped with traditional media eight out of 49 weeks.
[Snip]
The stories that gain traction in social media do so quickly, often within hours of initial reports, and leave quickly as well. Just 5% of the top five stories on Twitter remained among the top stories the following week. This was true of 13% of the top stories on blogs and 9% on YouTube. In the mainstream press, on the other hand, fully 50% of the top five stories one week remained a top story a week later.
While social media players espouse a different agenda than the mainstream media, blogs still heavily rely on the traditional press – and primarily just a few outlets within that – for their information. More than 99% of the stories linked to in blogs came from legacy outlets such as newspapers and broadcast networks. And just four – the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post accounted for fully 80% of all links.
[Snip]
Twitter, by contrast, was less tied to traditional media. Here half (50%) of the links were to legacy outlets; 40% went to web-only news sources such as Mashable and CNET. The remaining 10% went to wire stories or non-news sources on the Web such as a blog known as “Green Briefs,” which summarized daily developments during the June protests in Iran.
Questions
+ Is to much information (information overload) part of the cause for brief attention spans, especially with social media? Although age was not part of the survey, we wonder if that is also a factor regarding short attention spams.
+ Re: Twitter. What do they mean by "on the list?" What type(s) of blogs did they use? A cross-section or just the most popular? Did topical blogs=trade magazine or newsletters included? Were blogs from mainstream/legacy news organizations considered?
"With Twitter more than one-half of the stories are gone within 24 hours." Again, does this massive tidal wave of info cause stories not to stay around for long because it's time to get to the next one.
+ We've always wondered when we see someone following one hundred, two hundred, or perhaps up to 500 Twitter streams how do they keep up since the material is gone from the first two or three pages in a matter of hours or even minutes. Unless you have keyword searches set-up (and that still might not be the answer) are most people just setting themselves up to be overwhelmed? We heard these same types of issues and concerns in the glory days of RSS. Perhaps perhaps information selection and personal info management is a skill info pros should be actively teaching our users.
+ Finally, it's really interesting that almost all of the links, 99%, on blogs came from the mainstream press. So, to some degree the mainstream press is a wire service for the blogosphere (and Twitter, to a lessed degree) while the blogosphere is a place where either an individual or group can write extended "letters to the editor" to use a legacy term. Now, those with opinions based on a story they read from the legacy press have the possibility of reaching a global audience in seconds. However, if a correction is made on a story do bloggers usually write another post with the update or go back and update the earlier post?
What is even more interesting (amazing is probably a more accurate term) is that 80% of links on blogs came from only four mainstream media sources, that's right only four.
1) BBC
2) CNN
3) New York Times
4) Washington Post
With the mainstream media having so many financial problems, what does this mean for the long term viability of the blogosphere? It would be interesting to know how many articles from CNN, NY Times, and Washington Post were actually AP stories? With the The New York Times starting to charge (in 2011) remove them from as a top source for bloggers? Finally, what does this incredibly small numbers of sources say about the blogosphere as a place to discuss a wide range of issues when much of the underlying content come from one of only four legacy sources?
We would have thought that by this point many bloggers would be relying heavily on links from a much wider variety of sources including the alternative press, the international press, the trade press, audio from NPR and video from CNBC as well other blogs as sources to generate topics and discussion on their blogs. We also would have thought that bloggers, when possible, would be linking to primary sources if they were web accessible.
It sounds link Twitter might be the way to go for a more diverse sampling of stories and opinions. Does this also hold true for Facebook? A negative is that you can only say so much and provide a URL in 140 characters. However, services like Tinypaste and TwitLonger could be a potential solution to that issue.
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Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
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Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
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