New Media Index Contrasts Blogs & MSM

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) is widely considered one of the most authoritative efforts tracking the quality of journalism in mainstream media, but until today, it has not been able to provide a similar service for bloggers, social media sites (SMS), or other user-generated content (UGC) sites.

With the launch this morning of its New Media Index, that is changing. “We’ve been struggling with how to do this for a couple of years,” PEJ Director Tom Rosenstiel told me in a telephone conversation. “The challenge has been how could you get a large enough group of blogs to draw any useful conclusions?”

The answer lay in adopting a degree of the automation that already exists to track bloggers. Both Technorati and Icerocket index millions of blogs and SMS posts by identifying the news stories they link to. PEJ is now collecting the data on each day’s top embedded news links, and analyzing them to provide a weekly report in parallel with its News Coverage Index of mainstream media.

The first report, published today, analyzes which stories were the most discussed online last week, Jan. 19-23. Not surprisingly, the Inauguration of President Barack Obama was the top story, but according to Rosenstiel & team, bloggers focused on this event far longer and in much greater detail than did their mainstream cousins.

One factor that drove bloggers’ imagination was the remarkable photo essay published by the Boston Globe; another was The New York Times‘ interactive feature listing the most-spoken words in all inauguration speeches since George Washington’s day.

Meanwhile, the mainstream press mostly dropped the Inauguration coverage after a day to concentrate on the new President’s Cabinet appointments and policy agenda.

Of the other top news stories that week, only two — Carolyn Kennedy’s failed bid for Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat and the state of the economy — made both the mainstream and new media lists. Bloggers were more concerned with Gitmo and the Dutch MP who compared the Koran to Mein Kampf, while the traditional media covered the war in Gaza and terrorism.

“It’s very early,” says Rosenstiel, “But my first half of an impression from these results is that there are a variety of subjects that are important in new media that get scant attention in the old media world.”

If this analysis proves accurate over time, he notes, it will refute the MSM stereotype that the blogosphere is actually just “one big echo chamber.”

“We are seeing bloggers grabbing stories that get only minimum notice at the distant reaches of the radar screen in traditional media and raising them onto the new media agenda,” Rosenstiel said, again stressing that these are only preliminary impressions. “But it also feels like real people talking, as opposed to the monotonic, neutral, omnipotent voice of traditional media. There just seems to be much more passion in the dialogue online.”

Amen, brother…You’ve definitely got that one right!