A survey comparing online and mainstream media finds that 27 percent of lead news stories in the former had an international focus compared with 16 percent in the latter.
"That's a pretty big difference, says Paul Hitlin of Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism(PEJ) of Washington, D.C.
Only five of the top 10 stories in media overall last year were international, compared to seven of 10 in online media, Hitlin told a conference of journalists and journalism authorities at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover(MSL).
The seven international stories that made the top online 10, he said, were Iraq, Pakistan, the Olympics, Afghanistan, the Georgia-Russia conflict, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Zimbabwe.
For the conventional media---newspapers, TV, and radio---the campaign and the economy were "by far the biggest stories, Hitlin said, taking up 51 percent of all space. Online, those two stories combined to make up 39 percent of all space.
To track Internet coverage, Hitlin says PEJ is publishing a New Media Index Friday mornings on its website, Journalism.org.
Two characteristics of Internet activity, he said, are opinion columns and stories that are driven by small, but intensely interested, groups of readers.
"Articles that get the most attention from bloggers are not articles, they're columns, Hitlin says. "They're opinion pieces, very often New York Times columns. Paul Krugman or David Brooks of the Times "will write something, and those will become among the most talked-about things by bloggers.
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