Project for Excellence in Journalism

Bloggers Ponder Every Aspect of Obama's Inauguration

January 30, 2009

From the preparations to the swearing-in to the music, President Barack Obama's inauguration was by far and away the dominant subject debated and dissected by bloggers, user news sites and other social media last week.

That discussion often diverged from the one in the mainstream press, though the historic nature of Obama's road to the White House created a week when both the online and traditional media focused on the same story.

In the new media, seemingly every aspect of the ceremony was critiqued often quite passionately, the emotions ranging from euphoria to dread.

In the more traditional press, the inauguration disappeared fairly quickly and the focus moved onto to the politics of the stimulus package and other administration business.

These are some of the findings of the premiere edition of a new feature by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The New Media Index is an effort by PEJ to monitor the content appearing in new media platforms. The biggest element of this Index is what appears in the more than 100 million blogs and other social media web pages concerned with national news and public affairs tracked by two monitoring sites, Technorati and Icerocket. Both track the commentary online by identifying what news stories bloggers and other websites link to. Each weekday, PEJ captures the top linked-to stories and analyzes their content. It then compares those findings with the results of its weekly analysis of more mainstream media, the weekly News Coverage Index. The Project also tracks the most popular news videos on YouTube each week.

From January 19 to 23, almost two-thirds (63%) of the links embedded in social media sites focused on a single story; the inauguration of Barack Obama, the country's first African-American president.

Obama's first week also dominated the mainstream press. But while the old media quickly turned away from the inauguration to the announcements and decisions during Obama's first frenzied days in office, the online discussion remained more sustained on the implications of the inauguration itself.

The second-biggest topic was another political story covered widely, if somewhat less intensely, in the mainstream press: the on-again off-again possibility that Caroline Kennedy would be named to the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. Fully 13% of the embedded links were on that topic, versus 5% in the mainstream press.

The third and fourth largest stories in the social media world last week were Obama's decision to order the closure of the detention center in Guantanamo Bay and the ongoing financial crisis facing the U.S. economy, though bloggers devoted much less attention to the economy than did the mainstream press. The economic crisis accounted for 3% of the linked to stories versus 15% of coverage studied in PEJ's NCI.

The new media world didn't deviate in basic subject matter from the traditional media until the fifth biggest subject of the week. That topic (at 3% of all links) was a story about free speech. A Dutch politician named Geert Wilders was ordered to go on trial for making anti-Islamic statements comparing the Koran to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.

PEJ is launching the New Media Index as a companion to its weekly News Coverage Index. Blogs and other new media are an important part of creating today's news information narrative and in shaping the way Americans interact with the news. The expansion of online blogs and other social media sites has allowed news consumers and others outside the mainstream press to have more of a role in agenda setting, dissemination and interpretation. PEJ wanted to find out what subjects in the national news the online sites focus on, and how that compared with the narrative in the traditional press.

As the week began, online anticipation of Obama's swearing-in was building. Many bloggers linked to a photo essay by the Boston Globe detailing inaugural preparations, from construction of the viewing stands to parade rehearsals to a close-up of the tickets. A good many bloggers focused on two photos of a model of the ceremony built from Legos in Carlsbad, California, which included a Lego Obama, Chief Justice John Roberts and even thousands of spectators. "Legobama has already begun his inaugural proceedings," enthused wocka wocka wocka.

As the actual ceremonies got underway on Tuesday, bloggers, linking to a range of media stories (from C-Span video to text of the speech itself), reacted to the event in real time. Their commentary ran the ideological gamut, often with a passion not found in the traditional press.

"This is what I will tell my kids," Elisha Blaha posted along with a picture of her television tuned to Obama's speech. "I will tell them that I clapped my hands and stood on the couch as President Obama walked out on to the stage to cheers. I will tell them that I was gitty¹ with excitement and so proud of the confident man who now represents my country." Blaha included a link, as did others, to an interactive feature on the New York Times Web site that compared the most-used words in every presidential address since 1789.

Almost every aspect of the event was blogged, virtually moment by moment.

For the full report and more information on the New Media Index see journalism.org.

1. For the sake of authenticity, PEJ has a policy of not correcting misspellings that appear in direct quotes from blog postings.