News in the News

As the options for getting information such as news increase, so does the consumers appetite for fast coverage.

Yesterday at 12noon, during the AdFed meeting I was attending, the news director from WANE-TV, did a live recap of the latest headlines. Included was the announcement that Hillary Clinton was going to be making a campaign stop sometime Friday in our town, but details were not yet available as to when or where.

45 minutes later, the news director was able to give us an update, due to a message he received on his Blackberry.

Newspapers that are published daily are often filled with incomplete or outdated information on breaking stories. Perhaps they need to return to (or start if they never did) investigative reporting that digs deeper than publishing press releases and police blotter reports.

Where does an advertiser go to reach the masses who want news and information? Take a look at this report from my email today:

The Troubled News Media

This fifth edition of the annual report "The State of the News Media 2008,"tracing the revolution of news by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, can certainly not be summarized in a "Research Brief." However, the content is so encompassing, and the analysis so probing, that it begs excerpting to compel interested readers to pursue the complete study through the link provided.

The recently released study opens by saying "The state of the American news media in 2008 is more troubled than a year ago. And the problems, increasingly, appear to be different than many experts have predicted."

Concluding this brief summary, the report says that an analysis of more than 70,000 stories from 48 separate news outlets in five media sectors in 2007 offers an empirical look at the content of the American media. Among the findings overall:

• The agenda of the American news media is quite narrow
• Rather than cover the world, only two countries in 2007 received notable coverage, both closely related to the war - Iran and Pakistan
• Geopolitical events in the rest of the world made up less than 6% of coverage studied that includes Afghanistan, Korea, China, Russia, Israel and everywhere else combined
• The media and the public often disagreed about which stories were important in 2007. Citizens wanted more coverage of bread and butter issues, such as rising gas prices, toy recalls, and the legislative battle over children's health insurance, and less coverage of the crisis in Pakistan, certain aspects of the Iraq debate, and of other distant places in the world.
• The media also showed a marked short attention span in 2007

Each news medium is examined in more detail, and the complete study may be freely accessed here.

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