New Media Index: News of the World Is News of the Twitterverse
The phone-hacking scandal at and subsequent shuttering of News Corp.-owned British tabloid News of the World dominated news links shared via Twitter for the week of July 4-8, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index.
The phone-hacking scandal at and subsequent shuttering of News Corp.-owned British tabloid News of the World dominated news links shared via Twitter for the week of July 4-8, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index, while the most-watched news and politics video on YouTube was footage of the July 5 sandstorm in Phoenix, and the most shared news story in the blogosphere was a report that the White House is preparing to keep as many as 10,000 troops in Iraq after 2011 ends.
The fallen newspaper and continued repercussions for News Corp. and the Murdoch family accounted for 53 percent of tweeted news links, followed by: debate over the costs of social services in England, at 8 percent; an article in Time about the waning popularity of Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, at 4 percent; the execution of Mexican national Humberto Leal in Texas, at 3 percent; and a CNET item about Facebook and Microsoft teaming up to compete with Google, also at 3 percent.
The Arizona sandstorm was followed on the list of most-viewed news and politics videos on YouTube by: the jury’s verdict in the Casey Anthony trial; footage of a mayor in the Philippines punching her city’s sheriff; a French news report of President Nicolas Sarkozy being assaulted during a June 30 appearance in Lot-et-Garrone; and BBC video of Labour leader Ed Miliband disapproving of the strikes by public sector workers around the United Kingdom.
The prolonged troop presence in Iraq accounted for 24 percent of news links shared by bloggers, trailed by: a government warning about the threat of terrorists surgically implanting explosives into people, at 11 percent; the financial issues of presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, at 8 percent; the cleanup of an ExxonMobil oil spill in Montana’s Yellowstone River, at 6 percent; and news that the Secret Service will investigate the hacking of a Fox News Twitter account and tweeting of a false message that President Barack Obama had been assassinated, at 4 percent.
