Social Media & the News

On Facebook, news is a common but incidental part of the experience, according to a new survey. Roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults use Facebook, and half of those users get news there.

In recent years, natural disasters around the world have been chronicled by a new kind of visual journalism, often produced by citizen eyewitnesses and posted to the video sharing site YouTube. These videos represent a way of “crowdsourcing” a dramatic breaking news event, frequently before professional journalists can arrive on the scene.

The Twitter debate about gun control has taken many twists and turns since the Newtown killings, according to a new Pew Research Report that looks at the mainstream coverage and social media conversation on that issue. Which terms did the media most often invoke when discussing gun control? And how big a factor was President Obama in driving the narrative about it?

Gun control was an immediate focus of the conversation on social media and in the opinion pages of newspapers following the shooting at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School, according to a special PEJ report. How does the response to this tragedy compare with other shootings? How did coverage in opinion pieces differ than the social media conversation? The report offers answers.

PEJ and The Economist Group have announced the results from their Future of Mobile News Infographic challenge, hosted by Visual.ly. Three designs, as well as a student entry, stood out among a number of strong submissions. See the featured infographics on our site and learn more about them.

At a time of major news developments in the Middle East and North Africa, the Arab-American media’s efforts to meet the demands of its audience have been complicated by declining ad revenue, new technology, and growing competition from Arab outlets in the Middle East and North Africa, according to a new PEJ study.

Obama enjoyed a surge of positive news coverage the last week of the campaign—one of his best weeks in months—in the wake of new polls and Superstorm Sandy. How did Mitt Romney fare? Was the tone of the conversation different on social media than in the mainstream press? A new report offers answers.

How did people use Twitter during Hurricane Sandy and what did they tweet about? A new study from PEJ shows that over half of the conversation on and around the hurricane’s landfall was news, information, photos and videos of and about the super storm.

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have both received more negative than positive coverage from the news media in the eight weeks since the conventions, but Obama has had an edge overall, a new PEJ study finds. The report also examines how the candidates fared in different media outlets, the tone of the conversation on social media and offers comparisons to 2008 campaign coverage.

As the presidential election enters the last lap, where are people going to learn about the campaign and the candidates? A new PEJ survey finds an increasingly diverse ecosystem for political news.