No easy answers for mainstream media’s grab for our short attention spans

By Helen A.S. Popkin for MSNBC.com

There was just one story mainstream media and social media found equally important last year: the Iranian election aftermath of June 15-19, 2009. For those five days, the story took over headlines, blogs, Twitter and YouTube, according to a 29-week study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

During the rest of that study period, social networks followed their bliss, with little similarities between the top news trending on brethren sites, let alone the mainstream media.

These basic results may seem obvious to anyone who’s ever wasted time at work surfing the Internet, but the Pew study’s results, released this week, offer a valuable window on the rapidly changing way we collect and assimilate news, and what we as individuals consider “important.”

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