President's Perspective
Baltimore-Based Study of 'How News Happens' Is Troubling

(Feb. 26, 2010) Earlier this year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, part of the Pew Research Center, issued a study, "How News Happens," which examines the origins of news reports and how they are made available to the public. The study's focus was on Baltimore.
       
The results are troubling to anyone who cares about news – and who cares about democracy.

There are more facts and figures than can be repeated here. But these are a few of the numbers that have me concerned:

* The amount of local news being generated is down 33 percent from 10 years ago; and 73 percent from 20 years ago. One might think that those numbers are somehow reversed, but people who have lived in this region long enough will remember that Baltimore residents had both a Morning Sun and an Evening Sun six days a week before a merger of the two newspapers into a morning-only publication in the early 1990s.
       
* With such a drop in news content from the daily press, is the blogosphere picking up the slack? Hardly. "New media," as the Project for Excellence in Journalism calls it, accounts for just 4 percent of breaking news. News sources we consider "traditional" still account for 96 percent of authentic news; bloggers tend to take the day's top stories and slice and dice – and sometimes aggregate – them to their heart's content in order to appeal to an audience that supports online advertising even less than current readers support newspaper print-advertising.

* Maybe the most wince-inducing statistic of all: Government was the originator of 62 percent of the local news stories. Colleges and universities accounted for another 10 percent. That's close to three out of every four stories that likely started with some official spin. The "press" itself had enough reportorial enterprise to come up with only 15 percent of all stories, and "citizen" tips acount for almost all of the remaining 12 or 13 percent.

The current business model isn't working – primarily because newspapers don't generate enough profit to subsidize all of the debt payments our modern megamedia giants incur when they swallow whole other news properties. But rather than whine, the Washington-Baltimore Guild will continue to take a more active (and activist) stance on media matters.

We will soon convene a working group of WBNG members to study the issues facing journalism, and to suggest ways that we can work with other allies in this important field to develop a preferred future for journalism. The local's composition is such that we represent not only some of the top producers of news, but some of the area's most savvy consumers of news. Together, they will make a striking presence in the media-reform landscape.

Part of it is self-interest. Those of us who are journalists love our jobs and don't want to see them wither on the vine. But all of us are citizens, and there can be fewer things worse to a functioning democracy than to have the Fourth Estate simply parrot the government line spewed out at "news" conferences.

If you want to see the report for yourself, go to www.journalism.org/analysis_report/how_news_happens. You may not like what you read, but you will likely be fascinated.