Report: UK newspapers decrease international news coverage

Posted by Clara Martínez Turco on November 2, 2010 at 9:40 AM

Foreign news coverage in British newspapers has declined by 40 percent since 1979, according to a report issued yesterday by Media Standard Trust, The Guardian reported.

The study, called Shrinking World: The Decline of International Reporting in the British Press, analysed the number of international news published in The Guardian, The Telegraph, Daily Mail, and the Daily Mirror during a week in 1979, 1989, 1999 and 2009, Journalism.co.uk explained.

In 2009, these articles represented 11 percent of the overall stories published by the four newspapers, down from 20 percent in 1979, The Press Gazette pointed out. But the coverage has gone down despite the increase in newspaper pages. For instance, "The Guardian has gone from under 30 pages a day to over 100; the Mirror from just over 30 pages to more than 70," said Martin Moore, director of Media Standard Trust, in a article published by The Guardian.

The study also showed that the number of international stories that appeared on the front pages declined from 44 percent in 1979 to 30 percent in 2009. However, the lowest proportion was reported in 1989 when only 22 percent of the foreign news made it to the front pages.

"You could argue that the decline in quantity and prominence of international news is symptomatic of a wider malaise in traditional news. Yet we live in a far more globalised world than in 1979, one in which our work, our social networks and our travel are vastly more international than they were," wrote Moore in an introduction to the report, Journalism.co.uk quoted.