The annual assessment of the state of the U.S. news media, spearheaded by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, is out.
The entire thing is 178,000 words, so a pithy summary -- at the end of a day that left my head exploding -- ain't gonna come from me.
Rick Edmonds, who was involved in the study, wrote the following on the Poynter Institute's website:
How has your diet of news been lately? Do you find yourself eating several meals, grazing the rest of the day, but still going to bed hungry for high-fiber news content?
My colleagues at the Project for Excellence in Journalism, whose third edition of the State of the News Media electronic yearbook is released today, have an explanation. While we have an ever-expanding menu of media choices, all that media focuses, repetitively, on an ever smaller set of daily stories. It amounts to a kind of pack journalism in which the herders, especially on national news are too often able “to control what the public knows.”
State of the Media 2006
State of the Media 2005
Rick Edmonds on State of the Media 2005This year the project’s content analysis was across all media for a single news day, May 11, 2005. It didn’t take long to identify an example of commodified reporting. All three morning shows highlighted a story on a security scare in advance of President Bush’s trip to China. All three interviewed the same lone person, a security expert from Citibank.
It is old news by now that cable obsesses on chat about “cases” like Natalee Holloway’s disappearance in Aruba and that celebrity couplings and other piffle are on the rise, displacing less sexy news that matters. (2005 was a year of sharp gains for celebrity magazines and circulation losses and layoffs at major news magazines).
However, the report finds a much broader erosion of substance:
“Most local radio stations, our content study this year finds, offer virtually nothing in the way of reporters in the field. On local TV news, fewer and fewer stories feature correspondents, and the range of topics that get full treatment is narrowing even more to crime and accidents, plus weather, traffic and sports. On the Web, the Internet-only sites that have tried to produce original content (among them Slate and Salon) have struggled financially, while those thriving financially rely almost entirely on the work of others. Among blogs, there is little of what journalists would call reporting (our study this year finds reporting in just 5% of postings). Even in bigger newsrooms, journalists report that specialization is eroding as more reporters are recast into generalists.”
Other coverage:
NYT, March 13: Study finds more media outlets, covering less news
Washington Post, March 13: The Big News -- shrinking reportage
USA Today, March 12: Web-savvy news 'dinosaurs' take a page from history
L.A. Times, March 13: More news outlets, fewer stories: New media 'paradox' (reg. req'd)