State of the News

Printer-friendly versionSend by emailThe Project for Excellence in Journalism has produced a detailed report on "The State of the News Media 2004." It points to eight major trends, including the following: "Much of the new investment in journalism today - much of the information revolution generally - is in disseminating the news, not in collecting it. Most sectors of the media are cutting back in the newsroom, both in terms of staff and in the time they have to gather and report the news. While there are exceptions, in general journalists face real pressures trying to maintain quality. In many parts of the news media, we are increasingly getting the raw elements of news as the end product. This is particularly true in the newer, 24-hour media. In cable and online, there is a tendency toward a jumbled, chaotic, partial quality in some reports, without much synthesis or even the ordering of the information. There is also a great deal of effort, particularly on cable news, that is put into delivering essentially the same news repetitively without any meaningful updating." And there's good news for flacks: "Those who would manipulate the press and public appear to be gaining leverage over the journalists who cover them."