Teen Rape Story Tops Blogosphere, Hardly Registers in Mainstream

The story of a California teen gang-raped while a crowd stood by and watched commanded the attention of the blogosphere last week while not registering among the five most-covered stories in the mainstream media, according to the latest New Media Index from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ).

For the five days spanning Oct. 26-30, the story claimed more than a quarter (26%) of the links to news-related stories on blogs, topping Afghanistan (16%) at number two and the swine flu with 11% at number three.

The fifth-largest story was about the curry spice that may kill cancer, continuing a trend, the index pointed out, of bloggers' fondness for strange science stories. Past stories have included meat-eating plants and a chemical in blue M&M's as a treatment for spin injury.

By contrast, according to PEJ's weekly News Coverage Index, the gang rape story commanded only 1% of the mainstream media's coverage Oct. 26-Nov. 1 (the latter is a seven-day measure to capture the Sunday newspapers and public affairs shows). Health care topped their list at 16%, followed by Afghanistan at 13% and the economic crisis at 12%.

Tops on Twitter was a CNN story about two hapless burglars who tried to disguise their faces with indelible black marker, which accounted for 14% of the tweets.

PEJ uses data from icerocket, technorati and twetememe to monitor Web coverage.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.