A 30-minute video advocacy campaign exposing Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony got viral last week on the web reaching 17 million views on Vimeo and about 80 million views on YouTube.

The Kony 2012 video, realised by Invisible Children, generated a huge debate, amongst others, about how to conduct an advocacy campaign, how to cover complex issues trying to reach a wide audience or how to report on Uganda problems.

From a journalistic point of view, what was most interesting is how the video went viral so quickly thanks to the role of social media and online sharing.

An article on Forbes illustrated the 12 lessons we can learn from the video about how powerful social media can be in aiming for social changes.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project published a survey about the role social media played amongst young people, ages 18-29, in sharing the video. It was based on telephone interviews conducted 9-11 March 2012, among a national sample of 814 adults 18 years of age or older living in the continental United States, the report says.

@font-face { font-family: "ＭＳ 明朝"; }@font-face { font-family: "ＭＳ 明朝"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }.MsoChpDefault { font-size: 10pt; }div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1; } The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released the State of the News Media 2011, the eighth edition of the annual report on the health and status of American journalism.

The study shows that in terms of news consumption, mobile devices are emerging as one of the most promising fields, whether smartphones or tablets. There is also more interconnection between digital actors as boundaries become more fluid: news organizations rely more on independent networks to sell ads, aggregators are starting to concentrate more on news production while mainstream and legacy media are moving closer to the social media world and establishing new partnerships with local and hyperlocal startups, blogs and non-profit organizations.

Seven out of 10 Scots continue to read newspapers, either on print or digital, at least three to four times a week, a telephone survey conducted by Ipsos MORI Scotland, also called the Scottish Public Opinion Monitor, has revealed, AllMediaScotland.com reported yesterday.

While the affluence of area in which people live does not affect newspaper readership, the supposed disinterest of young readers towards newspaper content has been overstated, according to AllMediaScotland.com. Despite lower income households being more likely to have less or no Internet access, 70 percent of low income residents reported reading newspaper content regularly. This is almost equal to the 73 percent in the country's most affluent areas.

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ComScore Media Metrix Rankings of Top 50 US properties for June 2010 have revealed the absence of any traditional newspaper websites among the top ten. Considering most of these websites have recently put in some effort towards improvement, there were much higher expectations than the statistics reported.

In any case, it was not an all gloomy tale as newspaper ratings were considerably higher than the same report from June 2009. Tribune Interactive, with 28m hits and The Washington Post Company with 26m hits made it to numbers 40 and 47 respectively, even though they were not at all on the list last year. New York Times Digital shot up three places to claim 13th, with a viewership of 69m. This is good news, but will this change when the NYT's paywall is implemented in January?

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft remained the top three visited sites, with better traffic than last year. Highly controversial content farm Demand Media moved up from 25th to 17th place, experiencing a near-doubling of traffic with 55m visitors compared to last years 29m. The role content farms have to play in journalism has been recently discussed at length.