The Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism has recently conducted a study in which it sought to discern particular differences between social media and traditional press. In order to do so, they gathered information from news stories that were the most linked to in blogs, Twitter and other forms of non-traditional media.
Surprisingly, the non-traditional types of media shared very few similar stories. With the exception of the protests following the Iranian election, the non-traditional media sources reported on a variety of different stories, thus allowing for the individual sites to develop their own personality and voice. Even further, most of the stories reported by non-traditional news sources concentrated on highly emotional subject matter that the news source could easily personalize. Overall, the non-traditional types of media, YouTube in particular, appeared to cater more toward entertaining their subscribers with "must see" material.

Considering the popularity of sites like YouTube, Twitter, and individual blogs, it appears that consumers are moving toward sites that define themselves as having a particular function and voice. Given that consumers know the type of information they can expect from particular sources on YouTube or Twitter, they can go directly to that news source for the information they want without wasting time sifting though less interesting information. Even further, they can choose sites according to political bias that is aligned with their own viewpoints. While this does allow for consumers to more easily access the type of news that they prefer, it does also prevent them from hearing ideas that are contrary to their own and therefore further developing, or contradicting, their own ideas. Overall, while non-traditional media caters more to the preferences of individuals, it does put the consumer at risk of being constricted to a reiteration of their own ideas without much variation.

Overall, the movement toward social media sources could mean the restriction of the movement of ideas. Unlike traditional media, which tends to avoid bias, the rise of social media could mean that consumers could choose their media circle according to political bias and never move outside of it.

Sources: Pew Research Center Publications