Gaza Convoy Raid, World Cup and Smoking Toddler Dominate PEJ New Media Index

The top news stories on the Web for the week ending June 4, according to the latest Project for Excellence in Journalism New Media Index, were the Israeli attack on a Turkish ship bound for Gaza (Blogs); Soccer and the World Cup (Twitter); and an Indonesian 2-year-old who smokes two packs a day (YouTube).The top story that week in the mainstream press was the oil spill, though No. 2 was the Israeli attack. Nearly a third of the blog stories were about the Israeli attack that left nine dead, followed by a story about the fastest 500 supercomputers and a mass shooting in England.

Soccer led Twitter with 13% of the coverage, followed by two AT&T stories combined, one about the consequences of a customer’s e-mail to the CEO, and one about the company’s announcement of new pricing for mobile broadband. The third most tweeted story was about California charging customers for using store-issued paper bags.

The top two videos on YouTube were the smoking toddler and the Israeli incident. Actually, they were also the top five, with two different toddler videos coming in at numbers 1 and 5, bracketing three different views of the attack.