The Project for Excellence in Journalism, an arm of the Pew Research Center, is releasing today its annual State of the News Media report, and the news is not good. Although the exhaustive report covers every aspect of journalism and news gathering — newspapers, magazines, the Internet, radio, cable, national and local TV — the Project appears to ring the loudest warning bells for newspaper journalism.
As James Rainey at the LA Times points out, the new trend of “hyper-local” coverage in newspapers comes in for particular criticism by the Project. The trend toward hyper-localism has resulted (and perhaps was triggered by) cost-cutting; major papers around the nation have slashed or shuttered their international bureaus, for example, and filled the resulting holes with more intensive, and less expensive, local coverage. “Concepts like hyper-localism, pursued in the most literal sense, can be marketing speak for simply doing less,” the report states.
The report also raises some very obvious issues that have bedeviled the news media over the past two to three years and makes some no-brainer recommendations, such as “The evidence is mounting that the news industry must become more aggressive about developing a new economic model.”
One interesting observation made in the report is that blogging is starting to splinter into elites and non-elites when it comes to standards and ethics. Because bloggers range from true journalists all the way down to part-time rumormongers, some top journalists are moving in the direction of professionalizing the blogging world, ironically creating an elite sphere in what is the “citizen’s” medium.
To protect themselves, some of the best-known bloggers are already forming associations, with ethics codes, standards of conduct and more. The paradox of professionalizing the medium to preserve its integrity as an independent citizen platform is the start of a complicated new era in the evolution of the blogosphere.
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:52 AM|Comments(0)
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