When everything old is still only old
Some answers to how new media differs from old media are offered in a report published yesterday by Pew Research Center (“How Blogs and Social Media Agendas Relate and Differ from Traditional Press” May 23, 2010). The question was the focus of a 2009, year-long study by Pew.
First answer — the differences between the new and the old are substantial, Pew reports.
Excerpt:
Most broadly, the stories and issues that gain traction in social media differ substantially from those that lead in the mainstream press. But they also differ greatly from each other. Of the 29 weeks that we tracked on all three social platforms, blogs, Twitter and YouTube shared the same top story just once…
Each social media platform also seems to have its own personality and function. In the year studied, bloggers gravitated toward stories that elicited emotion, concerned individual or group rights or triggered ideological passion. Often these were stories that people could personalize and then share in the social forum — at times in highly partisan language. And unlike in some other types of media, the partisanship here does not lean strongly to one side or the other. Even on stories like the Tea Party protests, Sarah Palin and public support for Obama both conservative and liberal voices come through strongly…
So much for critics who claim that bloggers and other social media sites are only re-cycled imitations of traditional media. And the finding that new media content isn’t homogeneous indicates that it’s less susceptible to the pack journalism syndrome. That’s good news.
Another finding from the Pew study may point to why traditional media is struggling to gain the eye and ear of new generations of audience. Referring to content of new media sites, Pew reports:
…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.”
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.
That last sentence packs a wallop.
How many blogs are there?
A gazillion and climbing, roughly speaking. But if you insist on actual facts and stuff and the latest informed commentary, check out this essay by Sarah Boxer on The New York Review of Books website.
Boxer, an author and New York Times reporter and critic, draws info from ten books recently published on blogs. In addition to an overview of all things bloggy, as she puts it, her review is full of interesting color bits. At times she snapshots the big picture and then entertainingly tacks on a gold nugget of a detail, as in the following:
(The largest number of blog posts, some 37 percent, are now in Japanese, according to a recent Washington Post article by Blaine Harden, and most of these are polite and self-effacing—”karaoke for shy people.” Thirty-six percent of posts are in English, and most of them are the opposite of polite and self-effacing.)
Hint: don’t miss the essay’s final two paragraphs, summing up blogs — she nails it.
