PEJ New Media Index: Talk of Change Again Incites Bloggers

The word came down from the BBC early Tuesday morning.

Mattel, one of the companies that makes the popular board game Scrabble, announced it would be changing the game's rules for the first time in its 72-year history. Proper nouns such as places, people, or companies would now be allowed.

Throughout the Web, bloggers uniformly condemned the decision as a signal of the dumbing-down of our culture. The outrage was palpable.

There was one problem, however. The initial BBC report, along with similar reports in British outlets such as the as The Telegraph and the Daily Mail, was misleading. Scrabble was not changing the rules to its classic board game. It was issuing a new game- Scrabble Trickster- with these new rules, and only in the U.K. The original game would remain.

Before that became clear-within hours of the erroneous reports-bloggers sprung forward to object. Nearly a quarter (23%) of the week's links in the blogosphere April 5-9, related to Scrabble, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Read the full report Talk of Change Again Incites Bloggers on the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism Web site.