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The stories and issues that gain traction on blogs, Twitter, and YouTube differ substantially not only from those that lead in the mainstream press but also from one another, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

Each of the three social platforms studied has its own personality and function. For example, over a 29-week study period that included analysis of Twitter, blogs, Twitter, and YouTube just once shared the same top story—the civil protests that followed the Iranian elections during the week of June 15-19, 2010.

Across all three social platforms, however, attention spans are similarly brief: 53% of the lead stories on blogs stayed on top of the list for no more than three days. On Twitter that was true of 72% of lead stories, and 52% were on the list for just 24 hours.

Below, other findings from the study New Media, Old Media, from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ).

Bloggers Prefer Emotional Stories, Science and Technology

Bloggers gravitate toward stories that elicit emotion, those that involve the rights of an individual or group, or those that trigger ideological passion. During the 49-week study period that included analysis of blogs and YouTube, popular blog stories were often those that people could personalize and then share in the social forum—at times in highly partisan language. 

In the broadest sense, the top news agenda in the blogosphere coincides with traditional press. Among bloggers, politics (17%) and foreign events (12%) were the topic areas linked to most often, compared with traditional press's 15% and 9%, respectively.

However, the next most popular subjects differed dramatically. In blogs and on social media pages, science stories (10%)—often offbeat findings—were the third most popular subjects, followed by technology-related news stories (8%), compared with traditional press's 1% and 1%, respectively.

Meanwhile, articles related to health and medicine (and economics were more important to readers of traditional press (11% and 10%, respectively) than to bloggers (7% and 7%, respectively).

Blog Sources

Despite the unconventional agenda of bloggers, traditional media still provide most of the information to blogs: 99% of linked stories originated from legacy outlets, such as newspapers and broadcast networks.

US legacy outlets constituted 75% of all news items in the blogosphere, while Web-only sources made up less than 1% of links. 

BBC News led the list of individual sources, accounting for 23% of the links studied, followed by traditional American media outlets CNN (21%), the New York Times (20%), and the Washington Post (16%).

Only one other non-US news site, The Guardian, received even 1% of the links.

Most bloggers linked to straight news accounts (87%) rather than editorials or op-eds (13%), while 83% of the links examined were to stories that were text-based, compared with 17% of stories linked to multimedia sources.

Twitter Heavily Focused on Technology

Some 43% of the stories that made the list of top 5 in a given week were technology-based, more than three times as many as the next largest topic.

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