Apple makes headlines.

That’s the conclusion of a yearlong study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which found that Cupertino generates a disproportionately large amount of news coverage compared with other tech companies–even titans like Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT).

Of the 437 tech stories Pew analyzed, 15.1 percent were primarily about Apple (AAPL)–more than Google (11 percent), Twitter (7 percent), Facebook (5 percent) and Microsoft (3 percent; “Microsoft has, at least for now, fallen off the mainstream media’s radar,” says Pew).

Which, if you follow tech news at all, is hardly a surprise. As former Apple CEO Gil Amelio explaind in his 1998 memoir, “On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple,” people obviously like reading about the company:

I could well understand an extensive interest about Apple in the Bay Area and the trade press covering high tech. But why this excessive level of coverage in other locations? So, I posed the question to a New York Times staffer: “You’re a New York newspaper and we’re a California company, why do you include so much coverage of Apple?”

“Because we sell more papers.”

I asked him to be more specific.

He said, “I can give you the exact statistics. When we run a strong story on Apple, we sell three percent more papers. So, we run stories on Apple. That’s the bottom line.”

The annual look at the health of journalism by the Project for Excellence in Journalism was just released and the outlook is predictable: Those darn kids love the Internet even more.

In its latest report online, called the State of the News Media 2008, the PEJ cites several continuing trends: news has shifted from being a product to a service (news you can really use!); news Web sites are no longer final destinations (widgetize!); user-generated content is maybe not so valuable (I know–shocker!); newsrooms are becoming the most innovative and experimental parts of the business (by necessity); the news media agenda continues to narrow (by 2016, fyi, it will only cover Britney Spears); and Madison Avenue still has not gotten on board the online express (yet another shocker!).

More interesting, in the online news arena, while the same percentage of people go to the Web for news (71%), the percentage of those who do it on a regular basis has risen.

That might be promising for news sites, except that more of the ad dollars, whose rate of growth is slowing a bit, will be going to–guess who?–Web aggregators, most especially, Google (GOOG).