News Cities/Informed Citizens; Navigating News Online

The Aspen Institute's Communication and Society Program has issued it's 2010 report, News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities, available at their site for purchase or free download.

From the abstract:

The report includes a description of the continuing difficulties, yet encouraging advances in local journalism, and a series of recommendations to strengthen public media, increase government transparency, encourage public engagement, promote digital and media literacy, and provide universal broadband access.

And while we're talking news, I probably don't need to direct folks to Pew as much as I do but their reports are so useful and data-rich I can't resist. Navigating News Online: Where People Go, How They Get there and What Lures Them Away, by Kenny Olmstead, Amy Mitchell and Tom Rosenstiel looks at online news consumption traffic of the top 25 news sites according to Nielsen data. Actually, they point out, their data set includes only 21 of the top 25 sites. The Wall Street Journal, BBC.com, Bing News, and Reuters are structured in a way that prevents Nielsen from capturing this data. The Report delivers graphs and pie charts of traffic to and from Facebook, influence of Drudge Report on top news sites, Twitter traffic to and from news sites, and news site preferences by gender, and much more.