For the second week in a row, news about the fallout from the News of the World phone hacking scandal was the top news link tweeted, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's New Media Index for July 11-15, but down sharply from the week before. In fact, two separate hacking stories made the top five links.
Links to the News Corp. story accounted for 19% of the links, down from a whopping 53% the week before, even though there was a spotlight on the story this week with testimony in Parliament by James and Rupert Murdoch and even a pie-throwing anarchist in the mix.
Rounding out the top five news links on Twitter were stories about Google+ (16% of the links), the new social network site gunning for Facebook; another hacking story (9%) about someone who hacked into his neighbor's Wi-Fi to try and frame the family (9%), another Google story (9%), this one about how search engines may be changing the way people's brains organize and store info; and coming in at number five with 7% was the story of "an exotic animal owner who choked to death on a sex toy."
