The finding worth pulling out of Pew’s State of the News Media report for 2011 was how little the three overlapped. Blogs, on the report’s measure, tracked the mainstream media closely: the two agreed on nine of the top ten stories of the year, among them the economy, the midterm elections, the health care debate and the war in Afghanistan.
Twitter did not. None of the top five subjects in the mainstream press or on blogs appeared in the top five stories shared on the platform. The four most-shared were about technology companies — Apple, Google, Twitter and Facebook — and the agenda was noticeably more international, with four of the top ten subjects having a foreign focus, including the war in Afghanistan, the Haiti earthquake, the European economy, the UK elections and WikiLeaks.
Pew read the technology bias as evidence of a different function rather than a different audience: at least for the moment, users were treating Twitter partly as a consumer affairs forum, a place to publicise, share and criticise new gadgets. The report also noted that where some blogs worked as the written equivalent of a cable or radio talk show, that pattern was rare on Twitter. Its own caveat was the sensible one, given how young the platforms were: all of it might evolve in the years ahead, particularly as sharing and receiving news through social networks became normal.