A recent TV campaign for a new Motorola smartphone satirizes both the pervading silliness in new media messages (the category of communication that brought us OMG and LMFAO) and traditional media’s struggle to get hip to it.

A “serious” anchorman reads inane new media messages, such as, “This just in via text message and wall post: The search is on for cute boots.”

The commercial is funny because it exaggerates. We all know that the mainstream media is becoming more and more social all the time. Nary an article gets published online that doesn’t come with widgets to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and a bevy of other sites — not to mention the comments section at the bottom.

And people turn to Twitter and Facebook to find out what news — local and global — their friends are discussing.

So what are the real differences between the news content that the MSM create and the news-like content of our tweets and status updates?

It turns out the Motorola commercial, while ridiculous, may not be that far off in concept.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism gathered a year’s worth of data on the top news stories talked about on blogs, in YouTube videos and on social networking profiles, plus seven months of same on Twitter.

The study found that not only do trad. media and social media differ from each other, different social media platforms each have a different function and personality. For example, bloggers tend to talk about stories that elicit emotion and involve things like political ideologies. On Twitter, the majority of the news talk revolves around technology. YouTube’s news content is dominated by foreign (non-US) video.

Perhaps the most surprising thing PEJ found, however, is that social media covers what the press does not (emphasis mine).

[S]ocial media tend to home in on stories that get much less attention in the mainstream press. And there is little evidence, at least at this point, of the traditional press then picking up on those stories in response. Across the entire year studied, just one particular story or event – the controversy over emails relating to global research that came to be known as “Climate-gate” –  became a major item in the blogosphere and then, a week later, gaining more traction in traditional media.  

That’s it? Climate-gate? That’s all the blogosphere generated? I find that surprising. Perhaps if the PEJ surveyors had drilled down to a more local level, they would’ve found less division between the press and the people. Having worked at an alternative newsweekly half of the past decade (which, granted, is not really part of the so-called MSM), I know that we always kept a collective eye to our Facebook and Twitter feeds for newsworthy local developments.

But, in any case, PEJ found that when it comes to breaking national/global news, the biggest news companies still have the widest reach:

More than 99% of the stories linked to in blogs came from legacy outlets such as newspapers and broadcast networks. And just four – the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post accounted for fully 80% of all links.

Find out what else this rather stunning report uncovered here. And if you were shocked (or not shocked) by the differences between the Fourth and er… Fifth(?) estates, shout it out in the comments.