I rarely watch television, let alone television news shows. I get all my news online. Well, it turns out that, as a result of this, what’s ‘news’ to me is not the same as ‘news’ to people who watch television newscasts.

I suspected as much based on discussions with friends and family who watch TV news. Now, however, a study from the Pew Research Center confirms that people who watch TV news do not get the same news as those of us who consume online news.

Based on data gathered between January 19, 2009 and January 15, 2010, Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that some 44 percent of online news users get news at least a few times a week through emails, automatic updates or posts from social networking sites.

Moreover, according to Pew, the news stories and issues that become widely circulated in social media differ greatly from those that lead in the mainstream press.

Pew Research Center 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, as well as a year of the most viewed news-related videos on YouTube.

Pew found that 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 in just eight out of 49 weeks.

Pew also found that the news stories that gained traction in social media did so quickly, often within hours of initial reports, but left just as quickly. Only 5 percent of the top five stories on Twitter, 13 percent of the top stories on blogs, and 9 percent on YouTube, remained among the top stories the following week. In the mainstream press, meanwhile, 50 percent of the top five stories in a given week remained among the top stories in the following week.

Source: Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, May 23, 2010

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