State of the News Media 2014

It's that time of year again.  Don't forget to check out The Pew Research Center's STATE OF THE NEWS MEDIA 2014. The Pew Center's Journalism Project has been assessing the news media since 1997 and these annual reports, chock-full of data, researchers and students have come to rely on for insight on developing trends in the news media. If you want to compare new findings to previous years click on Datasets for data (in .zip files) from 2008 through 2013.

I've raided the Overview for these six findings you can
read more about in the whole report:

1) Thirty of the largest digital-only news organizations account for about 3,000 jobs and one area of investment is global coverage. 
2) So far, the impact of new money flowing into the industry may be more about fostering new ways of reporting and reaching audience than about building a new, sustainable revenue structure. 
3) Social and mobile developments are doing more than bringing consumers into the process – they are also changing the dynamics of the process itself.
4) New ways of storytelling bring both promise and challenge. 
5) Local television, which reaches about nine in ten U.S. adults, experienced massive change in 2013, change that stayed under the radar of most. 
6) Dramatic changes under way in the makeup of the American population will undoubtedly have an impact on news in the U.S, and in one of the fastest growing demographic groups – Hispanics – we are already seeing shifts. 
One thing that confused me about this year's offering is that there is no single pdf for it. When you go to the link the Report is broken down into separate boxes that add up to the full report. Don't be fooled by the Overview page that has a pdf called Complete Report--it's only the Overview. Go figure. 

Climate Change and the Media

The November 2010 issue of Public Understanding of Science has several articles on climate change and the media. The journal is available from the Penn Libraries e-journals.

Climates of risk: A field analysis of global climate change in US media discourse, 1997-2004, by John Sonnett.

Emotional anchoring and objectification in the media reporting on climate change, by Birgitta Höijer.

To frame is to explain: A deductive frame-analysis of Dutch and French climate change coverage during the annual UN Conferences of the Parties, by Astrid Dirikx and Dave Gelders.

Evaluating the effects of ideology on public understanding of climate change science: How to improve communication across ideological divides? by Asim Zia and Anne Marie Todd.

Research Feature: Press coverage of Michael Vick

Here's a timely bit of research, at least for us folks here in the Philly area. In the Journal of Sports Media you can read Pamela C. Laucella's (Indiana University of Journalism-Indianapolis) findings on media coverage of the Michael Vick dogfighting scandal.

Michael Vick: An Analysis of Press Coverage on Federal Dogfighting Charges, Journal of Sport Media (Volume 5, Number 2, Fall 2010) pp. 35-79. Available at the ASC Library, also as e-journal from the Penn Library homepage.

Abstract: Michael Vick's superstar career as a quarterback in the National Football League seemingly came to an end when he pleaded guilty to dogfighting charges on August 20, 2007. This research studied press coverage of Vick's indictment, arraignment, and guilty plea in Richmond, Virginia by analyzing 243 primary documents from The New York Times, Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and USA Today. It offers a longitudinal examination of the scandal and elucidates the intersecting worlds of sport, media, race, and culture. This research adds to work on the cultural impact of media and sport, reinforces the criminal-athlete discourse, and elucidates the egregious practice of dogfighting.

MITWorld Panel on Disinformation

MIT just posted this event from the past spring. Other programs related to media can be found at the site.

Denialism: Media in the Age of Disinformation

April 27, 2010

A few hundred years after the Enlightenment, western civilization is rushing back to the Dark Ages. The causes are debatable, but, argue these science journalists, the public increasingly rejects the findings of science, from climate change to evolution, and is turning away from rationality and reason in general.

Speakers

Michael Specter

Staff Writer, The New Yorker

Chris Mooney

Blogger, Discover Magazine
2009-2010 Knight Journalism Fellow

Shannon Brownlee

Instructor, The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice
Senior Research Fellow, Economic Growth Program, New America Foundation

Shankar Vedantam

National Science Writer, The Washington Post

The Scope of FBIS and BBC Open-Source Media Coverage, 1979–2008

An excellent piece of content analysis on the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) and the Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB), by Kalev Leetaru (Cline Center for Democracy) from latest issue of Studies in Intelligence (Volume 54, Number 1, March 2010).

The Scope of FBIS and BBC Open Source Media Coverage, 1979–2008

Kalev Leetaru

ABSTRACT
For nearly 70 years, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) monitored the world’s airwaves and other news outlets, transcribing and translating selected contents into English and in the process creating a multi-million page historical archive of the global news media. Yet, FBIS material has not been widely utilized in the academic content analysis community, perhaps because relatively little is known about the scope of the content that is digitally available to researchers in this field. This article, researched and written by a specialist in the field, contains a brief overview of the service — reestablished as the Open Source Center in 2004 — and a statistical examination of the unclassified FBIS material produced from July 1993 through July 2004 — a period during which FBIS produced and distributed CDs of its selected material. Examined are language preferences, distribution of monitored sources, and topical and geographic emphases. The author examines the output of a similar service provided by the British Broadcasting Service (BBC), known as the Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB). Its digital files permit the tracing of coverage trends from January 1979 through December 2008 and invite comparison with FBIS efforts.