There is a major disconnect, or at least a major difference, between what kinds of stories and issues old and new media focus on.
According to a new Pew Research Center study for its Project for Excellence in Journalism, blogs and traditional media outlets had the same lead story in only 13 of 49 weeks, and that was the closest the traditional media got to overlapping with social media stories.
On YouTube, the top stories were the same only 8 of the 29 weeks measured, and for Twitter only 4 of 29 weeks.
Among Twitter, blogs and YouTube, only one story--the Iranian election protests last June--topped all three in any of the 29 weeks measured.
Among the issues at an FCC workshop on media ownership issues last week was the complaint that the Web's diversity of voices was little more than an echo chamber for the same mainstream media voices.
The Pew study appeared to give some purchase to that argument, at least when it comes to the blogosphere. While the blogs may have not been leading with the same stories as traditional media most of the time, 80% of their stories came from just four legacy networks or newspapers, the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
But the door does not swing both ways. Only one story that developed in the blogosphere, global research e-mails that became part of the "Climate-gate" story about alleged spinning of data to support global warming, then became a story in the traditional media, according to Pew.
