Category: Media & Journalism

Most interesting but least surprising line of the day

“The internet has surpassed newspapers and radio in popularity as a news platform on a typical day and now ranks just behind TV.”

Pew Internet & American Life Project

  • 78% of Americans say they get news from a local TV station
  • 73% say they get news from a national network such as CBS or cable TV station such as CNN or Fox News
  • 61% say they get some kind of news online
  • 54% say they listen to a radio news program at home or in the car
  • 50% say they read news in a local newspaper
  • 17% say they read news in a national newspaper such as the New York Times or USA Today

When the media is the disaster

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Rebecca Solnit, Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

I urge you to read Solnit’s entire essay, especially where she asks, “What Would You Do?”

How long can print newspapers last?

Reflections of a Newsosaur takes a look at print newspapers and makes some conclusions, including this:

From the available data, we know with a reasonable degree of certainty that half of the newspaper readers today are 50 years of age or older, even though this age group represents only 30% of the total population. We can conclude from the demographic distribution of the newspaper audience that individuals under the age of 50 are far less likely to read newspapers than their elders. And we know everyone eventually will die, with the oldest readers statistically likely to expire sooner than the younger ones.

Unless something unforeseeable happens to change the news-consumption habits of younger readers, it stands to reason that the total audience of newspaper readers will shrink as the older generation dies off.

Bottom line, he concludes that print newspaper readership will drop from 89 million (today) to 44 million (2040).

A commenter at the site points out the disproportionate amount of coverage given to Jay Leno vs. Simon Cowell. To most Americans, which is the bigger deal? But you’d never know from reading the printed news.

How's the paid online subscription thing working out?

Factoids from Reflections of a Newsosaur:

“A puny 2.4% of print subscribers is the average number of people paying for online content at the handful of daily newspapers that have been bold enough to erect pay walls, according to a new survey.”

“But wait, it gets worse. Because only about a third of American households subscribe to newspapers, the survey suggests that the actual average penetration of pay sites is at best 0.7% of total households.”

Even though the Newport (RI) Daily News charges $420 annually for online access, its 1.7% penetration rate is identical to that of the Colorado Springs (CO) Gazette, which charges web subscribers only $1 a year.

Albuquerque Journal daily circulation is 101,810; Albuquerque Journal online subscriptions: 1,133. That’s 1.1%, among the lowest of the 26 newspaper pay sites surveyed.

Best summing up our news media line of the day

“At our office we have one of the cable news channels on at all times. And here I am, late in the day, much of the staff gone, hearing Wolf Blitzer on CNN — part of the on-going coverage of the Climate Change debate and the Copenhagen conference. First we hear Al Gore, discussing the evidence for warming. And after that, the latest from Sarah Palin discussing the science on her Facebook page. That’s the debate. Proud moment. ”

Josh Marshall

The political press follows; it doesn't lead

Matt Taibbi has a good Taibbi-esque treatment of the current media “conspiracy.” It includes:

Palin never had anything like that kind of attitude toward the press [accomodating], although in fairness the bullets were flying at her from the moment she entered the campaign. It doesn’t matter; the point is that she’s getting it from all angles now and that wouldn’t be happening if she still had any friends in high places.

The press corps that is bashing her skull in right now is the same one that hyped that WMD horseshit for like four solid years and pom-pommed America to war with Iraq over the screeching objections of the entire planet. It’s the same press corps that rolled out the red carpet for someone very nearly as abjectly stupid as Sarah Palin to win not one but two terms in the White House.

Not exactly anything new line of the day

“[T]he traveling press covered Obama’s meetings with Asian officials as if this were a bunch of stops in a presidential campaign tour, and as a result missed or misrepresented what was going on.”

James Fallows paraphrasing journalism professor Howard French. Many critics familiar with China have leveled the same criticisms of the American coverage.

Some News Factoids

Gleaned from The Reconstruction of American Journalism, mentioned in previous post.

Morning Edition (NPR) has an audience about one-third larger than the Today show.

Public radio has about 28 million listeners each week; public television about 75 million viewers.

A 1999 study of 59 local TV station newscasts “found that 90 percent of all their stories reported on accidents, crimes, and scheduled or staged events.” Anyone think local TV news has improved since then?

205 TV stations around the country have their news produced by another local TV station.

The Future of the Newsroom

It may not be essential to save any particular news medium, including printed newspapers. What is paramount is preserving independent, original, credible reporting, whether or not it is popular or profitable, and regardless of the medium in which it appears.

Above from Leonard Downie, Jr. and Professor Michael Schudson in their long look at The Reconstruction of American Journalism. Among the continuing stream of narcissistic reports, this is seen as an important one.

I found the report worth skimming, but dull and not much new, except perhaps a push for public radio and TV to get more involved with local news reporting.

UPDATE:

An excellent critique of the report — Follow the Breadcrumbs — “mile-wide, inch-deep.”

Most Popular News Web Sites

Yahoo! News — 42,649,000 — 12%
CNN Digital Network — 38,266,000 — 3%
MSNBC Digital Network — 36,511,000 — (-16%)
AOL News — 25,733,000 — 20%
NYTimes.com — 21,530,000 — 7%

Fox News Digital Network — 17,909,000 — 20%
Tribune Newspapers — 16,453,000 — (-9%)
ABCNEWS Digital Network — 14,631,000 — (-15%)
Google News — 14,555,000 — 8%
Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division — 12,272,000 — (-10%)

CBS News Digital Network — 10,575,000 — (-5%)
McClatchy Newspaper Network — 10,543,000 — (-1%)
USATODAY.com — 9,908,000 — (-13%)
Advance Internet — 9,530,000 — 21%
TheHuffingtonPost.com — 9,474,000 — 26%

Editor and Publisher

Figures are for September, ranked by number of unique visitors and including change from one year ago. Click on link to Editor and Publisher for the top 30.

I routinely go to just two of these.

Best line of the day

“It’s literally amazing to me that our press corps hasn’t yet managed to draw a distinction between good news on Wall Street for companies like Goldman, and good news in reality.”

Matt Taibbi

Taibbi continues:

“I watched carefully the reporting of the Dow breaking 10,000 the other day and not anywhere did I see a major news organization include a paragraph of the “On the other hand, so fucking what?” sort …”

Best line of yesterday not concerning health care

Just as the news cycle has shrunk, so has the bottom line.

And too often, we fill that void with instant commentary and celebrity gossip and the softer stories that Walter disdained, rather than the hard news and investigative journalism he championed. “What happened today?” is replaced with “Who won today?” The public debate cheapens. The public trust falters. We fail to understand our world or one another as well as we should—and that has real consequences in our own lives and in the life of our nation.

President Obama at Walter Cronkite’s memorial service as reported by CJR.

Best line of the day, so far

NewMexiKen is taking the day off to celebrate the blog’s sixth anniversary.
The posts today are being written by readers just like you. This is from Avelino.

“Anybody who can’t make enough money off that shouldn’t be allowed to operate a hot dog stand, much less a media corporation.”

Athanae at First Draft, on the estimation that people spend 26.4 million hours per day reading the print edition of The New York Times.

Best line of the day

If I’d written about, say, the Cleveland (61-101) Indians in August of 1987 as though the team were a serious pennant contender, I’d have been fired before I got back to the hotel. And yet, there they were on Charlie Rose: serious political pundits, talking seriously about what a power Sarah Palin is in the Republican party without any of them pointing out that the very fact that she is a power is prima facie evidence that the party is a festival for fruitcakes.

Charles Pierce