A new Pew Forum poll indicates that the new social media platforms have once again re-shaped our conversations about what’s hot in the news. The Internet is now the third-highest platform for receiving news coverage. Only national television news and local television news rank higher. This is significant as a sociological trend in general, but also significant to us as Mormons specifically, in light of our desire to be, as Elder Ballard suggested, more “influencers” of our culture than “influenced by” it.
A More Good Foundation blog gives more information about the Pew study, and also gives some great suggestions on how to influence public perceptions, conversations, and media-talk news about the Church online.
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http://community.beliefnet.com/go/forum/view/44071/69899/Latter_Day_Saints
I am on many forums, including the above. Help is urgently needed there at Beliefnet from internet savy LDS, to counteract the Apostates who pose as active church attending LDS, but whose posts are far from it, and which give misconceptions and anti LDS themes.
What are your thoughts on LDS youtube folks. Have you heard of shaycarl? He doesn’t actively profess his religion but his viewers hold him as a great example of a father and family man. I did a post about him on my funnymormons.com blog and it drives over 80% of the traffic to my site. I made sure to link my post to mormons.org so people can learn more about why he is a young family man.
I think you need to edit what you say. The Internet is the third most popular source of news after national television news and local television news. Internet news has passed newspapers and radio not all four of those sources. See the 2nd paragraph in the Pew Forum link: “the internet is now the third most popular news platform, behind local television news and national television news.” From my reading that means that national TV news is the first source, local TV second, Internet news third.
Warren, thanks for pointing that out. I’ve updated the text in the blog.