PEJ (Project for Excellence in Journalism) tracks the topics that New Media, including bloggers cover each week. Not surprisingly, the first order of coverage went to AIG bonuses and the financial crisis. The next biggest story was a “news of the weird” story about a teenager’s prank (see below.)

I wrote a short tidbit about a study that indicates that surfing the internet for leisure, while at work, can increase productivity by 9%. This bi-modal interest in “important” issues and in some funny but trivial story seems to reflect that kind of attention in bloggers. As bloggers are “covering” topics on the internet, they take “attention breaks” to shop, check out products, and to look for strange news. This is reflected this week in the PEJ index.

The second-largest story, at 12% of the links, was of a much less serious tenor, a prank a British teenager played on his parents. The 18-year-old painted a 60-foot version of a distinctive part of the male anatomy on the roof of his parents’ mansion. Remarkably, no one discovered the painting for a year.

This is the second time a strange practical joke made the list of top blogger stories since PEJ began tracking social media in January. From January 26-30, a story about hackers who changed a road sign in Texas to warn of a “zombie attack” was the No. 2 topic.

via Bloggers Focus First on the Economy and Then on a Strange Prank | Project for Excellence in Journalism PEJ.

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