With newspapers all over the country on the brink of collapse and an epicenter shift occurring in the way people get their news, it's worth a look at the Pew Research Center's recent survey of where core news—genuinely new information—is coming from and what it consists of (visit www.journalism.org/analysis_report/how_news_happens). The headline: The Web's runaway popularity notwithstanding, the most original reporting still comes from newspapers.
The Pew study looked at news coverage in the Baltimore area for one week, tracking coverage of six subjects: state budget cuts, a surveillance plan for public busses, juvenile crime, a university contract to study swine flu, the sale of an historic theater and a shooting of police officers.
The study found that only 17 percent of all news items published in the city's 53 media, from newspapers to broadcast outlets and blogs, offered information that had not been published already. Of that "new information," 95 percent came from newspapers and other "traditional media" such as law and business publications. "These stories," the researchers pointed out, "then tended to set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets."
Farther into the study there are details worth pondering. For example, when the Pew researchers followed a vein of news about state budget cuts, they found that 71 percent of the articles were initiated by statements from the governor, while only 7 percent were sparked by reporters' initiative. That suggests, the researchers say, that as newspapers cut staff, the official versions of things, rather than critical examinations of them, loom larger in what passes for news.
The study also found that, though a greater percentage of TV news than of print news was taken up with local issues, 58 percent of the lead stories on TV news programs were about crime or accidents (though the study didn't make this point, it's worth noting that such items seldom involve the kind of criticism of political or business interests that creates conflicts for the stations or results in civic improvement). This is the same result the Pew Center got in a national survey of television news in 2007.
No one will be surprised at the study's finding that the Web moves news faster than any other outlet. The caveat: what appears as "breaking news" on the Web is often just press releases, with little content added and few assertions checked. "We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such," the researchers wrote.
