Newspapers still do the news gathering

The Project for Excellence in Journalism reported today on a new study of how news is created and gathered–still by newspapers.  Here’s the story.

How News Happens: A Study of the News Ecosystem of One American City

Monday, January 11 — For all that the media landscape is expanding, a new study of how the news is created and gathered in one American city finds that what the public learns is still overwhelmingly gathered, synthesized, and framed by traditional media—particularly now much-diminished local newspapers.

The study, by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, examined all the news reported in one city, Baltimore, Maryland, for a week and then took an even closer look at six key storylines that ran through the news in that week.

Inside those storylines, the study found that much of the news people received revealed little new information. Indeed, eight out of ten stories were repetitive and contained no new information.

Of the stories that contained significant new information in these key storylines, 95%, came from traditional media—most of them newspapers. These stories then tended to set the news agenda for other media outlets.

The report also finds that the increasing universe of new media, including blogs, Twitter and local websites, played a key role, but mostly as an alert system and as a vehicle to disseminate stories others had produced. Interestingly, traditional media now used these new technologies more heavily than did new media.

The study also finds that the official version of events is becoming more important as news is posted faster, before any enterprise reporting is applied. Press releases appeared verbatim in first accounts of events, though often not cited as such, and then became news accounts as they careened across the net. The study also found instances of plagiarism–—reposting stories without attribution.

These are some conclusions from the study, which examined the 53 outlets that produced local news in Baltimore during the week of July 19-25, 2009.

The six storylines included:
    * The release of the governor’s plan to cut the state budget
    * Announcement that a local university would help develop the swine flu vaccine
    * A short-lived plan to put listening devices on buses
    * The sale of a historic local movie house
    * A shooting of police officers
    * A combination of six different events that all concerned juvenile justice in the city

This study was designed and produced by PEJ, a non-partisan, non-political institute that is part of the Pew Research Center in Washington , D.C.

Click on the headline to read the full report.