Just 9 percent of American adults frequently get their news from their pals at the two services. And those who do end up getting it much more frequently from Facebook than Twitter. That’s according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center and its Project for Excellence in Journalism. (Apologies that we didn’t have the link when this story first published – it wasn’t available in advance.)

That’s a lot more than a few years ago, when that number would have been a goose egg for both services, because they didn’t exist.

But it’s still a whole lot less than Google and other search engines*, which do the trick 32 percent of the time, or good old-fashioned news sites, which account for 36 percent of the audience’s tips. Aggregators — Pew calls them “news organizers” — pick up the rest.

Take off your digital blinders for a minute and this shouldn’t be a huge surprise. It’s easy to extrapolate your behavior, and the behavior you see from your peers, and assume that it applies universally. But that doesn’t mean it’s right. (If it was, we’d actually see statistical evidence of cord-cutting.)

At AllThingsD, for instance, we’ve been making a concerted push to bring in visitors via Twitter and Facebook, mostly through the efforts of our social media whiz Drake Martinet. But even though our audience hangs out on the right end of the early-adopter bell curve, Drake says social services account for about 15 percent of our referrals, predominantly from Twitter. (Which is a whole lot better than it was before Drake started working his magic.)

Wait a minute: Aren’t the Pew people the same ones who told us, a year ago, that Facebook was an increasingly important source of traffic for news sites?

Yup. (Good memory!)

But these two reports aren’t mutually exclusive. Last year’s survey pointed out that social media is a lot more important to news sites than it used to be. This one just reminds us that, for most sites, other stuff still matters more.

*Okay. Basically, just Google.

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).