â–¶ News Sharing: Pew Research Center found that 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. Specific findings include:
• There’s a disconnect between shared and traditional media: Blogs shared the same lead story with traditional media in just 13 of the 49 weeks of the year studied. Twitter was even less likely to share the traditional media agenda—the lead story matched in just four weeks of the 29 weeks studied. On YouTube, the top stories overlapped eight out of 49 weeks.
• Shared stories have little longevity. 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, 50% of the top five stories one week remained a top story a week later.
• Different types of content seem to aggregate on different types of media. On blogs, 17% of the top five linked-to stories in a given week were about U.S. government or politics. These topics were even more prevalent among news videos on YouTube, where they accounted for 21% of all top stories. On Twitter, however, technology stories were linked to far more than anything else, accounting for 43% of the top five stories in a given week and 41% of the lead items. (By contrast, technology filled 1% of the news in the mainstream press during the same period.)
• 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 80% of all links.
• On Twitter, 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.
Source: Pew Research Center