This Storify combines conversations among three journos as they dissect a conclusion on Twitter’s influence contained in the May 9, 2011 Pew Center report on online news use:

The researchers made four important findings:

• roughly 0.05% of the population accounts for almost half of all attention
• almost half the information that originates from the news media is spread by opinion leaders, not the media organizations themselves
• the URLs with the longest life come more often from bloggers and less often from media organizations.
• videos and music have the longest life, “continually being rediscovered by Twitter users”

One of the charts in the study being discussed today revolves around the third point. It shows social media blog Mashable ranking seventh among the top 20 domains for URLs that lived more than 200 days. It’s interesting because no traditional media organization is in that list; in fact, few original content sites are.

Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson argues that Mashable’s popularity is due to its focus on “service-y” content with evergreen characteristics. The Nieman Lab’s Megan Garber argues further that Mashable’s success is built on listicles — Top Five-type lists — anchoring articles that are context-focused and offer “frameworks for understanding a topic or event.”

What does this mean for news organizations? Obviously many news stories aren’t easily structured in a list. In fact, the very nature of a list suggests an overt editorial ranking, which is at odds with the traditional journalistic approach, which values impartiality. But the research also lends support for the “news you can use” approach. Derided by some as tabloid-y, it speaks to a strong desire among social media users (and news consumers generally) for context and understanding.

A long life in Twitter may not necessarily be a goal for news organizations. (Is a story on an important constitutional challenge going to live long on Twitter? Probably not.) But Twitter popularity is something all media organizations should be concerned about. Raju Narisetti, the Washington Post’s managing editor for online said Friday “To survive as a media company, we have to grow our [online] audience.”

One Canadian news organization that has clearly been thinking about these issues is the Toronto Star, with its Moneyville personal finance site. Take a look at Mashable and then Moneyville and you’ll see a lot of similarities. Lots of lists, Top Five selections, and stories focused on helping readers solve their day-to-day problems — especially in areas such as credit, home buying, renovations and autos. Is it news? Not really. But it need not be far from it. In fact, the one thing the Star could be doing better is making a more direct (and frequent) link between news content and the Moneyville news-you-can-use. For example, a story published yesterday “5 things you should never do with your credit card” could be more tightly linked to a news story about increasing rates of credit fraud.

It’s certainly an issue more news organizations should be thinking about.

It concerns the strange condition that afflicted Los Angeles CBS reporter Serene Branson. Here it is:

The problem is, Branson may not have had a stroke at all. A Globe and Mail story later Monday suggested that Branson had not been hospitalized — in fact she was examined by paramedics and allowed to go home.

Sure, I used the weasel-word “may.” But I had speculated on someone’s health situation, which is never a good thing. However, that was just one of the things wrong with this tweet. As this post by Patrick Smith rightly points out, the Telegraph story I linked to was horribly sourced. No sources, no facts, no byline. No one should be linking to stories like this. What’s worse? I ignored guidelines for retweeting that I, myself, had authored for the Canadian Association of Journalists last year. Yikes.

How could this have happened?

I remember reacting emotionally to the ridicule being heaped on Branson online in my Twitter stream, with many tweets punctuated with the #fail hashtag, which I dislike. The judgments seemed mean-spirited. Branson has been nominated for two Emmy awards — she’s no amateur and it’s highly unlikely she just forgot what she was going to say or had a tough time spitting out her words. The situation looked like an obvious health issue. Here it is:

I did a quick search online to learn more and found the Telegraph article suggesting she had been hospitalized. Credible news organization, right? Alas.

Nearly two days after the event, we still don’t know what happened to Branson. My pride was assuaged somewhat today by Tara Parker-Pope’s blog post on the New York Times site. Parker-Pope quoted neurologist Daniel Labovitz regarding Branson’s alleged treatment:

I very strongly suspect this was a stroke or transient ischemic attack … Even if it wasn’t a stroke, you need to get it checked out. It’s a tremendous opportunity for her to talk about what stroke is and what T.I.A. is, and what to do. You don’t go home.

Still, I led with my heart, not my head on this one. It’s just one more reason we need a mechanism within Twitter to issue corrections. Craig Silverman has some excellent ideas about how to make this happen.

Jenkins, a journalism and cinematic arts professor at the University of Southern California, makes a blunt statement about the relevance of news in the social media age: “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.”

Obvious? Perhaps. His point is that news organizations need to better understand how — and why — people take content and re-package it for others. He likens the transaction to a bottle of wine you buy at a store then give to your dinner host. You might put the wine into a decorative bag and tell the cook a story about how you thought of her when you chose that label and vintage.

We bought it as a commodity, we give it as a gift, and the moment of transformation comes when we remove the price tag. We need to better understand the same transformation as consumers take content from commercial sites and circulate it via Twitter or Facebook to their communities.

When people spread content to their social networks, they edit it and add comments to frame it for a specific social purpose. Others might re-mix the content and mash it up — think the Donald Duck and Glenn Beck mashup and, in Canada, Rick Mercer’s Photo Challenge. Sure, these are lighthearted examples. But as Jenkins points out, people make sharing decisions based on the “social or sentimental value of the content.”

I’m reminded of the New York Times’ excellent interactive last week “Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget.” It didn’t provide the tools for a mashup, per se. But it promoted participation — a social experience that people could share with their friends, something people apparently did on Twitter more than 11,000 times.

Jenkins argues news organizations have to be able to meet people in their conversations: ”Journalists need to know how they fit into those circuits.”

However, according to Mathew Ingram, even on new platforms such as the iPad, news organizations are lagging in promoting sharable content. Publishers, he argues, seem to be “hoping that you will forget all about the Internet and social media and all of those irritating things that get in between you and the consumption of their wonderful content.”

Jenkins refers to a “constant tension” in the news business between “meter access” and “spreadability.” We can see it in the New York Times’ persistent plan to erect a metered paywall in early 2011, even while being fully cognizant of the power of social media. Jenkins would seem to be skeptical of the Times’ chances in restraining the social nature of the Internet:

News sites which prevent the sharing of such content amongst readers may look like ways to protect the commercial interest of that content, but in fact, they kill it, destroying its value as a cultural resource within networked communities, and insuring that the public will look elsewhere for news that can be spread.”

What to do for the rest of us? A good starting point might be Rohit Bhargava’s 5 New Rules Of Social Media Optimization, which offers tools for getting your content more frequently included social media conversations.

Your social media gut says share the information with a dose of skepticism and see if anyone can corroborate it. Your journalistic head says don’t touch it — you don’t know where it’s been.

The issue of whether journalists should forward information they find in social networks without verifying it cuts to what has traditionally been a core principle of journalism: we publish true things only.

But does retweeting constitute “publishing” as we’ve traditionally defined it?  News organizations such as the LA Times and the Associated Press say it does — and journalists should apply the same standards as they would with any story. Others such as Reuters and the BBC suggest retweets constitute a process of journalism, not an end product.

I’ve been working with three colleagues on the Canadian Association of Journalists Ethics Committee over the past couple of months to prepare a draft of guidelines for retweeting or forwarding information found in social networks. We conclude that journalists can gain a lot by participating in real-time social networks. But if they retweet, they should apply a checklist of questions about sourcing and aim for transparency about what they know — and don’t know.

The draft will be discussed Friday, May 28, 2010 at the CAJ conference in Montreal. Take a look and tell us what you think.

Photo: Extra Ketchup/Flickr

Interest in the report authored by U.K. teen Matthew Robson says a lot about how much we fret over how young people consume media.

London-based market research firm Morgan Stanley published the report, authored by their 15-year-old intern, last week. As the Globe and Mail reports today, the paper, “How Teenagers Consume Media,” has since become a minor sensation. Much has been made about the excess of anecdote and lack of research in the report, but it is clear Matthew is a remarkably articulate 15-year-old with an unusual ability to synthesize the activities of his peers.

Why the interest? My guess is a general fear that young people understand something about the Internet that we oldsters don’t.

Matthew’s comment about Twitter use among his peers is the most quoted observation. He states that while most teens are heavy Facebook users, “Teenagers do not use Twitter … They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets” are pointless.” The comment follows barely a month after Nielsen’s announcement that Twitter was the fastest-growing Web brand this spring.

Huh? How do we reconcile that?

Well, 16-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky makes a fine argument as to why it’s important we not read too much into Matthew’s paper.

Twitter is a different type of social network than Facebook. Facebook is about connecting people, and sharing information with each other … With Twitter, it’s the exact opposite. Anyone can follow your status updates. It’s a completely open network that makes teenagers feel “unsafe” about posting their content there.

Teens are all about socializing with close friends — an activity well suited to closed networks such Facebook. Twitter is about spreading information far and wide to people you don’t even know.

As Suw Charman-Anderson points out, the most interesting thing is how little seems to be understood about this age group. Every generation struggles to understand young people, of course. But there is a fair bit of research about them (see John Palfrey’s Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives). Charman-Anderson cites danah boyd’s research and suggests that there’s still a strong disconnect between academics and analysts — not to mention the general public — on the issue.

The fact that they haven’t ever had a clear insight into the teen demographic would seem to imply that their existing researchers and analysts aren’t doing their jobs properly. The information is out there, a lot of it is freely available, and all that remains is for someone to read it and write the report.

It would seem there is much work for journalists here too.

Twist's data on "Michael Jackson" tweets on June 25.

There were some interesting observations today about the effect of Michael Jackson’s death on search services.

Google reports that interest in the June 25 event was “meteoric.” It led to one of the largest mobile search spikes Google had ever recorded, involving 5 of the top 20 searches that day. The spike in queries was so great that Google News initially mistook the barrage as an automated attack. Its software automatically suspended queries on the topic for 25 minutes, interpreting the requests as a denial of service attack.

A number of users reported that the wave of interest slowed Twitter to a snail’s pace. Twist, a site that tracks trends in Twitter, recorded “Michael Jackson” appearing in a peak of 22.61% of all tweets yesterday. Twitter temporarily disabled search results late in the day. No real surprise there. Service problems at the 2-year old start-up are well known.

Mashable reports that Facebook was actually by far the dominant sharing service for the news. Its data from widget network Clearspring shows that roughly five times as many people who shared a story using its website widget used Facebook than used Twitter. Facebook, of course, has a much larger user base. But Twitter usage received most of the media coverage.