by FERN SHEN

Yesterday’s Pew Research Center study that concluded that Baltimore’s Old Media is increasingly lame and its New Media ain’t in the game may be old news here, but it continues to cause a nationwide sensation among those who analyze the media.

The New York Times’ blogger-on-the-media, David Carr – who recently recommended the “small and charming” Baltimore Brew as a reason for cheer in an otherwise dismal year — gets all meta and self-deprecating and David Carr-ish in his post about the Pew study.

This writer in Iowa, meanwhile, has a worthwhile critique of the study, which is being seized on by some as evidence that only newspapers can report real news.

Media commenter and consultant Steve Buttry argues that the study is inherently skewed toward newspapers because it examined coverage of subjects favored by newspapers (crime, government, the justice system, health care.) rather than, say, neighborhoods, sports, community schools or the arts.)

“If old media are losing audience because they are not covering stories that are relevant to their communities, this study would have no value in telling you whether anyone was covering the relevant information,” Buttry wrote.

Since the study focused on a week in summer, it might have meant the media were not staffed in a typical way, Buttry argued. And the value of Twitter and other social networking to report the news was also underplayed, he argued.

“I suspect that Twitter produced significant discussion about at least three of the stories studied, if not all six. I would be surprised if that discussion didn’t break some news that old media either reported later or missed entirely,” he wrote.

Finally, Maryland Politics Watch’s scoop about the plan to put listening devices on MTA buses, discussed in the report, deserved more attention, Buttry argued.

It is pretty fascinating, what happened there:

A contributor to MPW noticed (a month after it was posted on a government website) that the Maryland Transit Administration wanted to put listening devices in its buses. His post noting that this was happening and seemed “creepy” was picked up days later by Baltimore Sun transpo blogger Mike Dresser. Dresser asked the MTA about the crazy idea and posted about it. At that point, the MTA killed it.

And it wasn’t until that point — after the story had been broken by a blog and validated by a reporter — that the news cycle caught up, as television and others did story after story about the already deep-sixed idea.