Since a young Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire on December 17 to protest conditions in his North African country, and the country went up in flames, most Western, and all American media, has been unearthly silent.

Untitled from Slim Amamou on Vimeo.

#sidibouzid

Only yesterday a survey of the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and Miami Herald showed absolutely no front-page coverage of Tunisia.

Meanwhile, the social web has lit up with the topic. Led by, but not restricted to, Arab and Muslim bloggers, the oppression of young people, workers and others by the Tunisian government, the protests it has led to, the rolling out of the military, and the approximately 50 deaths, have been covered extensively on Twitter and on other social media.

Instead, those interested have turned to Twitter accounts like that of @wedaddy, a Mauritanian in Boston and journalist @monaeltahawy. Brian Whit's Al-Bab blog provides a daily digest of news from Tunisia.

On Twitter, the coverage has been hashtagged #sidibouzid, for the city Bouazizi killed himself in and where the protests started. Additional tags have included #jasminrevolution and, for the hacktivist actions against the government's websites by Anonymous some are using #optunisia.

Another important source for news on Tunisia is YouTube and other video sharing sites. (Here's a collection of 134 videos on the events in Tunisia.) The violence against protesters has been extravagant and bloody and witnesses have not been shy about posting the results of the government crackdown.

Slim

The topic of the Tunisian crackdown has become important in French media, in part thanks to Fabrice Epelboin, the editor of our sister-publication, ReadWriteWeb France. His open letter to the French Foreign Minister got a lot of attention, including a story by Public Radio International's Clark Boyd on The World radio show (an "exception that proves the rule" for American media coverage).

Among those arrested during the crackdown is our own Slim Amamou. Slim is a popular Tunisian blogger and proponent of free speech. He's also de la familia, having contributed articles to ReadWriteWeb France and helped me with perspective on both technology and North African life. Slim is just the kind of man a sane government would want on the outside, engaging in conversation devoted to improving his home. Instead, he remains locked up.

The day before he was arrested he too was interviewed by Boyd on The World.

As a vacation destination for Europeans, coverage of Tunisia has gained some traction there. However, given the horrendous shooting of Rep. Giffords and others at her rally in Arizona by a lunatic, it may have been inevitable that American coverage would start slow and stay slow. This morning the New York Times published a short story on the army being called in, and since then stories on Tunisia have begun to trickle into the U.S. news stream. This nascent coverage notwithstanding, the media here still seems to be treating it as a something of a sideshow

It remains most likely that the first and best coverage of breaking news on this awful situation is going to continue to come from the social web.

Wikileaks says that this news has been reported in more than 700 articles across the Web and that it's all based on "a single tabloid blog at Wired Magazine".

A post today on the same Wired blog calls for "Wikileaks to make good on its pledge to reveal hundreds of thousands of U.S. military documents on the Iraq war," but Assange calls it simply "another fabrication". Assange says that revealing this sort of information is not how Wikileaks operates:

WikiLeaks does not speak about upcoming releases dates, indeed, with very rare exceptions we do not communicate any specific information about upcoming releases, since that simply provides fodder for abusive organizations to get their spin machines ready.

At the beginning of his excoriation of the Wired blog and media in general, Assange points out that "you won't see this blog cited, generally, in the mainstream press articles" and indeed, if you take a look, there is no source cited for the claim. Only the Associated Press cites a source, saying that "the Pentagon says the group has as many as 400,000 documents from a military database on operations in Iraq." The AP also offers Assange's refutation, while other stories seem to simply tout the supposedly upcoming release.

Looking a bit closer, we have to doubt that this news has been written about more than 700 times, as claimed by Assange. His number comes from one blog that wrote on the topic today, saying that a search for "400,000" on Google News returns more than 700 results. Searching for "400,000" and "Wikileaks" on Google News, however, returns just under 200 results. Either way, the claim remains the same - the news, Assange says, is based on a "fabrication".

The Wired blog is now updated to say that "the original version of this story incorrectly stated that WikiLeaks had announced a schedule for releasing the Iraq documents." We requested comment by email from the article's author, but have not received any response.

The full text of Assange's denial can be found here.

"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."

This is one of the assertions in the latest report from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, "New Media, Old Media."

This figure seems wildly out of sync with the admittedly non-statistical experience of the editorial staff at ReadWriteWeb.

No Original News on Twitter?

Another surprising finding was about original news on Twitter. According to the study, there was no original news at all on Twitter.

"Here half (50%) of the links were to legacy outlets; 40% went to web-only news sources such as Mashable and CNET. The remaining 10% went to wire stories or non-news sources..."

Pew used the term "links" here, though earlier in the report they ask, "What types of news stories do consumers share and discuss the most?" Have they limited their discussion of Twitter solely to Tweets with links? It is a common way of sharing news on Twitter, but not the only way. ReadWriteWeb has reported several times on not just news reporting but breaking news on Twitter.

Questions to Pew about these figures and their sources were not returned by posting time. We will add an update when and if they are.

A Difference in Emphasis

Which stories were deemed most important differed between mainstream media and social media and between types of social media.

"Blogs shared the same lead story with traditional media in just 13 of the 49 weeks studied. Twitter was even less likely to share the traditional media agenda - the lead story matched that of the mainstream press in just four weeks of the 29 weeks studied. On YouTube, the top stories overlapped with traditional media eight out of 49 weeks. "

Of all the social media covered in the study, YouTube had the most international focus. The report states that 26% of the news videos watched were of non-U.S. events. But the most-watched videos were not of "the most important or pressing topic of the week, but rather what image or video was the most interesting to view."

Examples included Susan Boyle on "Britain's Got Talent" (the most popular video during one week in June and viewed 100 million times in less than a month) and a drunk bus driver endangering students.

Update

We received this email response from Pew's Tom Rosenstiel.

The blogs looked at are the ones that are tracked by the prominent blog-tracking sites Icerocket and Technorati. They follow millions of blogs each day, so no complete list would be possible.

As we described in our methodology, we collected the articles that were most linked to on blogs that made the top five lists on Icerocket and Technorati each weekday. Of those, 99% were from legacy outlets as you noted.

Also, as we noted in the report, we relied on the "news" categorization that Icerocket and Technorati used. We made no judgment as to whether a story was considered news versus some other type of story.

It also made no difference what the type of blog was making the link. It only mattered what the story was that they linked to - so if a knitting blog, for example, linked to a Washington Post story about the deficit, that would have been included.

Your own experience may be different depending on the blogs or social media you follow, of course. This is a quantitative statistical analysis over far more material than one person would encounter.

Some have argued that Technorati has been a less than robust source for social media information for some time. Icerocket has recently show signs of substantial re-invigoration but was on the fade for a while.

The relationship between social media and traditional media is a strong one, a reality that should be pretty clear for anyone involved in both. The way that the study was done, however, focusing on a slice of a slice of a slice, may make it less indicative of the state of that relationship as a whole than it might seem at first blush.

Now, we know what you're thinking. But this had nothing to do with Twitter. Rather, it had to do with an aptly named server "justworkplease.handbrewed.com." A server that supports a service called SocialSite, which - in their defense - is still "in private alpha." The service probably seemed like a good bet, given that it was also used for the Obama inauguration. But be that as it may, the service is still in private alpha. It's not the safest bet for adding a server-melting Twitter stream to your site.

ABC News learned that lesson in a very public way.

If at First You Don't Succeed

Hopefully, this event doesn't scare ABC - or other news outlets - too far away from trying things like this again. It's online. These things happen.

Other news outlets - like CNN - have learned how to incorporate Twitter into the work that they do - and they've had their own stumbles as well. Properties like Twitter have had their scalability issues, but they have learned how to scale for the sheer volume of users that descend upon sites during events such as these.

ABC may have to weather a bit of snark for it, but it's a great learning experience for them. And a testament to the sheer volume of users who share their opinions via Twitter - and the potential the service holds.

Here's hoping the next endeavor is more successful for them - and the users who expected to share their opinions with other ABC viewers.

Screenshot courtesy edubyad.