Project for Excellence in Journalism

Economy Leads on Blogs

January 6, 2011

In the last week of the year, bloggers' interest in the economy reached its second-highest level for all of 2010. But it wasn't exactly a passionate debate over stimulus dollars or tax policy. Instead, bloggers dissected new government parameters for measuring long-term unemployment.

For the week of Dec. 27-31, 31% of the news links on blogs were about the economy, making it the No. 1 subject, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Only once before in 2010 did the economy generate this much attention among bloggers -- from Oct. 4-8, three different economic stories made up a third (33%) of all links. The week of June 14-18 also came close at 29%, largely in response to President Obama's urging Congress to approve state and local government aid.

If the economy was the overwhelmingly dominant subject among bloggers last week, the buzz among Twitter users was all about Apple (the No. 1 story at 25% of links), and more specifically its iPad. Indeed, the most linked-to story was an attempt to vet rampant rumors about an expected second generation iPad.

The No. 2 story on blogs last week was the news about NBA star Gilbert Arenas' rocky relationship and potential breakup with his long-time girlfriend, Laura Govan (12%).

The other top stories in the blogosphere had a distinct Beltway angle to them. The third biggest was about members of Congress getting donations from the same companies they are writing legislation for (7%), followed by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton topping the list of most-admired people (6%), and an op-ed by George Will urging congress to pass the Public Employee Pension Transparency Act (6%).

Continue reading the full report at journalism.org.

_{*For the sake of authenticity, PEJ has a policy of not correcting misspellings or grammatical errors that appear in direct quotes from blog postings.}