For the first time, PEJ is able to include a full analysis of the year in new media. In January, PEJ launched its New Media Index, a weekly report on the top news stories discussed and linked to on blogs and social media. In June, we added another component to the analysis: the news stories most linked to on Twitter.

Over the course of the year, several characteristics became clear.

• The stories and issues that win the most attention in blogs and on Twitter differ substantially from the mainstream press.
   
• Between the two social media platforms, Twitter users strayed the farthest from the mainstream press. Blogs were a bit more traditional, at least in the sources they drew on.
  
  
• On both platforms, though, one clear characteristic was the ability of new media to quickly trigger and concentrate passionate debate and activity around a specific issue.

A closer analysis of the year of content will come in a separate forthcoming report. Here we offer the main findings surrounding the lead stories compared with the mainstream press, common topic areas and the sources linked to most often.

Top Stories of the Week

• In the 47 weeks studied during 2009, blogs and the mainstream press shared the top story just 13 times. The storyline shared most was the U.S. economic crisis (five weeks in all). Other storylines that drove attention on both platforms included the initial H1N1 flu outbreak in late spring, the death of Ted Kennedy in August, the June protests in Iran and the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, in November.  

Blogs often filled the role adding analysis or debate when highlighting these stories. Following the shootings at Fort Hood, for instance, bloggers linked to straight news accounts, with some then expressing condolences to the families of the victims, while others quickly pivoted to discuss the role that the suspect’s religion may have played.

In many other instances, the blogosphere mirrored talk radio, parlaying the story of the day into heated political arguments. After the botched terror attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day, for instance, a number of conservative bloggers immediately blamed President Obama, while others claimed that the overall fear of terrorism had become larger and more irrational than it should be.

“As predicted by everyone knowledgeable on terrorism, Obama’s soft stance on war, and terrorism has emboldened the terrorists and they are working to strike America again,” declared one of the bloggers, Russ Alberson. “Once again thanks Obama for continuing to destroy our country and endanger Americans.”

There was another view from another blogger. “Americans are paying tens of billions of dollars in taxes to subject themselves to searches, seizures, regulations, and bureaucracy that does not work,” posted Connor Boyack. “It is imperative that we refuse the temptation to spend more money, inflate the government, and clamp down on innocent individuals in the name of providing security that—like a 99 cent magic trick—is merely an illusion.”

• On Twitter, the top story was even less likely to be the same as in the mainstream press – just 4 of the 27 weeks studied, or less than one sixth of the time. (Iran on two occasions, Fort Hood and the Christmas day terror attempt.)  All but one of those was also a top story among the blogs that week.
   
• The vast majority of Tweets were not opinionated or analytical at all, and this went beyond the fact that Twitter is limited to 140 characters. Most of the Twitter posts were designed to alert people to something interesting, to pass along information. Of those Twitter feeds that contained news links, the vast majority tended to simply repeat the headline from a website.

Major Topics Over All

• Beyond what emerged as the Top Story each week, what topics drew the most attention overall in social media in 2009, as measured in the New Media Index?¹ Bloggers shared the mainstream press’s interest in public affairs, but through a much more opinionated lens.  President Obama and how he was doing in office drew the most discussion, appearing on the list of top five stories 18 times (8% of all stories). That was followed by the debate over health care (15 appearances) and the economic crisis (11 appearances). Often, the online commentary split along ideological lines.

As the economic stimulus package was being debated in February, for example, bloggers clashed over the list of programs included in the bill.

Conservatives viewed the bill as being full of wasteful programs that would not provide any economic benefits. One such conservative, wrote East Coast Mark, offered bluntly, “Take a look at some of the absolute garbage the Democrats are filling this bill with.”

“Everything on the Republican list of ‘wasteful projects' is stimulative,” disagreed Gregg Carlstrom on Fedline. “$88 million for a new Coast Guard icebreaker? Someone is getting paid to build the ship.”

In July, when Obama’s approval ratings were slipping, conservatives like Jerry Fuhrman at From on High seized on the polls to proclaim, “The thrill is gone.”

Liberals, such as Matthew Yglesias, on the other hand, said that “the progressive president is more popular than the somewhat dawdling congressional Democrats and way more popular than the obstructionist Republicans."

• On Twitter, a unique tendency crystallized early in our analysis. The favorite subject matter, accounting for 10% of all top stories, was Twitter itself.  Whether it was a new tool for tracking recent posts or complaints about a two-hour outage of the site in August, Twitter users clearly saw a shared mission in advancing this social media platform. 

For example, when a Scottish psychologist suggested in September that the use of Twitter actually made people dumber, a number of Twitter aficionados took offense. “We have a winner for the moron of the day!” tweeted Mark Sigman.

And when the five billionth tweet was sent on October 19, nicknamed the Pentagigatweet, many, such as Giorgianni celebrated the landmark. “Woo hoo! I account for 4.0 × 10-7 percent of all tweets in the world!”

• Other technological developments also sparked common interest and sharing on Twitter. Apple products like the iPhone and the iPad made up 8% of all top stories. Stories about Facebook, such as anger over privacy issues, accounted for 7%; Microsoft developments like the release of Windows 7 prompted 5%, and news of Google, including an outage of its e-mail service, gmail, 3%. In all, technology-related news made up 44% of all top stories across the 27 weeks.
  
  
• Twitter users in general, shared less news about politics and public affairs. Obama-related news for example, the biggest news storyline discussed by bloggers, ranked ninth among Twitter posts (3% of the stories). And debate over the health care bill ranked second among the blogs but seventh on Twitter.   

The political issue that drove the most postings was the civil unrest in Iran surrounding the election. It was the top story seven weeks in a row and took the influence of Twitter to a new level. Here the posts were not simply passing along interesting information to others, but also serving as a critical information source for people directly involved. The motives for many of the Tweets were as much to promote participation and activism as they were to convey information. Among the most popular links in Iranian-related posts was a page entitled “cyberwar guide for beginners.” It explained how users could help, or accidentally harm, the protests efforts online. Others encouraged people to change their avatars to the color green as a show of solidarity with the protesters.

Sources for News

• While new media – particularly bloggers – congregated around different story lines than the national press, it was still traditional outlets that provided most of the original reporting. American legacy outlets like newspapers and broadcast networks accounted for 80% of all items linked to stories on blogs. International legacy outlets like the BBC and The Guardian in Britain accounted for 20%. Web-only sites, on the other hand, did not make up even 1% of the links.

• Three outlets alone provided two-thirds (65%) of bloggers’ linked news articles. The New York Times led the pack with 28.7% of the links. The second most popular source was the CNN website (18.9%), followed by the BBC (17.6%).
  
  
• The stories they linked to from the mainstream press were a mix of opinion columns and news accounts. About one-quarter (26%) of the New York Times articles bloggers linked to were opinion, as were 29% of the articles from the Washington Post.

Twitter users strayed farther from the mainstream press. Here, Web-only, U.S.-based outlets accounted for nearly the same amount of news links (31.6%) as U.S. legacy outlets (31.6% for online-only sources and 31.9% for legacy outlets). The Web sites of U.S. newspapers accounted for a mere 2.8% of the links, not even a tenth of the presence they had among blogs. International sources counted for a third of the links on Twitter (33.6%), but nearly all of that came from links to one site on one day – http://helpiranelection.com/.

• And while opinion columnists like George Will and Frank Rich attracted some of the commentary, the vast majority of links -- 86% on Twitter and 83% on blogs – went to straight reporting.