Study: Newspapers still top in local news

Posted by Leah McBride Mensching on January 11, 2010 at 2:46 PM

Most local news still originates from newspaper reports, according to a review of 53 media outlets - including newspapers, TV, radio and Web-only news operations - by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Sixty-one percent of original reporting and new information on six top stories came from print newspapers and their Web sites in the week of July 19-25 in Baltimore, according to the content analysis study.

The "modern news 'ecosystem'" in the average U.S. city overwhelming relies on newspapers, while "much of the 'news' people receive contains no original reporting. Fully eight out of 10 stories studied simply repeated or repackaged previously published information. And of the stories that did contain new information, nearly all, 95%, came from traditional media - most of them newspapers. These stories then tended to set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets."

Although this study makes it clear how much the media relies on newspapers, it also shows us how much we stand to lose if economic woes continue to hurt the industry.

Currently local newspapers offer much less news than they once did. In 2009, The Baltimore Sun produced 32 percent fewer articles "on any subject" than in 1999, and 73 percent fewer than in 1991 (although at that time, the newspaper still published a morning and evening newspaper with competing newsrooms), according to the study.

New digital media, such as Twitter, blogs and local Web sites, "played only a limited role: mainly an alert system and a way to disseminate stories from other places" in Baltimore, the study states. "In the growing echo chamber online, formal procedures for citing and crediting can get lost. We found numerous examples of Web sites carrying sections of other people's work without attribution and often suggesting original reporting was added when none was. We found elements of this in several major stories we traced."

The Sun's editor, J. Montgomery Cook, wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press that he wishes the study had lasted longer than a week. Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism told the AP that TV news coverage has also been down in recent years, and also pointed out that if newspapers did "disappear, what would be left [for search engines and blogs] to aggregate?"

Basically, if the bottom falls out for newspapers, sooner or later, other outlets - from local TV news to Google - suffer too.

"There is a very limited capacity to do original reporting, let alone enterprise reporting PEJ Director Tim Rosenstiel told Poynter's Bill Mitchell in an interview. "The news outlets don't have a lot of staffing, and the old media - which had been set up with a lot of reporters - are now much smaller."