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. 

New Televsion News Archive on the horizon

CommPilings posts are usually about resources; this one is about the promise of a resource. According to a recent story in Salon.com, the collecting obsession of a devoted Philadelphia-area librarian, Marion Stokes, may result in the largest television news archive to date--some 140,000 VHS tapes of network, cable, and local news programming between 1977 and 2012.  Librarian Roger Macdonald of the Internet Archive has taken on the collection which will be digitized and indexed for all. Not sure when it's slated for completion but the project has begun and, well, it's the Internet Archive (!) which already delivers a serachable database of the last four years of television news (2010-2013).

Of course the most famous television news archive is the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, a searchable abstracting service for national television network news broadcasts, 1968-present, with CNN and NBC broadcasts available as RealMedia video streams from 1998-present.  Unlike the Internet Archive initiative, it cannot post all of its footage online for free; researchers have to borrow clips on DVD for a small fee.

Communication scholars and historians certainly appreciate all of these archival efforts--it will be interesting to see the vision of Marion Stokes come to fruition, hopefully not too far from now. 

News Site Feature: News Americas

Along the lines of  AllAfrica, NewsAmericas is a news aggregating, producing, and distributing site for Caribbean, South and Central American readers.

From About NewsAmericas:
News Americas aims to be the HuffPo of the Americas! It was created to give writers from this region and with an interest in this region a platform to showcase Top News from this region and their individual countries – including business, sports and entertainment news, as well share independent and radical opinions and lifestyle and travel features.

The site includes links to pertinent articles from outside the region as well (New York Times, Miami Herald). It sports a Breaking News ticker and RSS feed option.

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.

Daedalus Issue on Future of News

Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, flies under the radar when we think of Communications journals but I like to keep an eye on it and this latest issue devoted to the future of news is case in point for doing so. Still another reason is you'll find Professor Kathleen Hall Jamison and PhD candidate Jeffery A. Gottfried in this issue imparting lessons for the news industry from the 2008 Presidential campaign. See the Penn Libraries homepage for e-access to the journal.

Daedalus (Vol. 139, issue 2: April 1, 2010):

Political observatories, databases & news in the emerging ecology of public information, by Michael Schudson
What is happening to news?, by Jack Fuller
The Internet & the future of news, by Paul Sagan and Tom Leighton
The Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education: improving how journalists are educated and how their audiences are informed, by Susan King
Does science fiction-yes, science fiction-suggest futures for news?, by Loren Ghiglione
Are there lessons for the future of news from the 2008 presidential campaign?, by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Jeffrey A. Gottfried
New economic models for U. S. journalism, by Robert H. Giles
Sustaining quality journalism, by Jill Abramson
The future of investigative journalism, by Brant Houston
The future of science news, by Donald Kennedy
International reporting in the age of participatory media, by Ethan Zuckerman
The case for wisdom journalism-and for journalists surrendering the pursuit of news, by Mitchell Stephens
News and the news media in the digital age: implications for democracy, by Herbert J. Gans
Journalism ethics amid structural change, by Jane B. Singer

Introducing Media Cloud

Media Cloud is a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University that provides new and evolving tools to quantitatively examine the news media as an information ecosystem. Newly launched the Project's objectives are ambitious. They are:

• Develop an open database of the topics of all stories from thousands of sources
• Build lightweight, interactive tools that allow casual users to easily ask the database questions
• Publish open APIs that give other researchers full access to the database
• Publish the code for the system under a free software license
• Publish our own research using the database, including studies on media signatures, meme propagation, and geographic attention profiles

From the March 11 press release:

Researching the nature of news, and media information flows, has always faced a difficult challenge: there is so much produced by so many outlets that it is hard to monitor it all. Researchers have used painstaking manual content analysis to understand mass media. On the web, the explosion of citizen media makes such an approach far more difficult and less comprehensive. By automatically downloading, processing, and querying the full text of thousands of outlets, Media Cloud will allow unprecedented quantitative analysis of media
trends.

Today's launch allows a first view into some of what is possible on the Media Cloud platform. At http://www.mediacloud.org you can generate simple charts of media coverage across ources and countries. The actual capabilities of the system are much greater, and the Media
Cloud team is actively looking for other researchers who will bring their own questions as the tools are further developed. Ultimately, Media Cloud will provide open APIs that can support variety of lines of inquiry.

Visit the Media Cloud site, try the visualizations, share your research ideas with the team, and sign up for the Media Cloud mailing list to hear about functionality enhancements and other project developments.

VIP Report Compares Big Three Database News Vendors

A comparative product review of Thomson NewsRoom, LexisNexis and Factiva has just been published by VIP, a digital magazine published monthly for senior-level decision-makers responsible for the purchase of business information products and services. Each issue features in-depth, unbiased reviews of premium content products. To help customers choose among the major vendors, November's issue takes on "the big three" and compares them side-by-side in a detailed 43-page review.

The report compares , Factiva, LexisNexis, and Thomson's Newsroom in terms of news research capabilities--number of sources, analysis by subjects, type of publication, language, geography (including a table comparing numbers of sources for hard-to-find countries); length of archive, number of full-text items, number of abstracts, number of translated items; and timeliness (how long before an item becomes available online), among other factors. The same searches are carried out on all three services, and the results are analysed in terms of overlap, type of publication and more.

Among the key findings of the research are the following [this from the FreePint press release]:

• Language: Factiva is the most multi-lingual of all three services (offering 22 languages) against 16 for LexisNexis and 11 for NewsRoom.
• UK and US coverage: Coverage of UK newspapers is evenly spread across the three services.
• Asia Pacific coverage: Most of the major Asia Pacific newspapers are available across all three services. For some titles, LexisNexis offers a slightly older archive than Factiva.
• Latin American coverage: Factiva has a slight edge over the other two.
• Middle Eastern newspaper coverage: Three out of four sources are not available on NewsRoom. A deeper archive is available on LexisNexis than on Factiva.
• Web content: Web content is available on all three but it is not possible to distinguish web content from other published content on NewsRoom
• Multimedia content: Factiva is the only one of the three to offer multimedia content as part of its prime service.
• Company, industry and market data: Investext reports are no longer being updated on LexisNexis and NewsRoom.
• Indexing and updating: All three services provide detailed indexing but only Factiva and LexisNexis extend their updating to foreign- language documents.
• Language interfaces: Factiva.com offers the same nine language interfaces. NewsRoom offers a greater choice of interface languages than the old TBI service. LexisNexis has extended its number of interface language options and has new customised country interfaces for UK, US and Australia.
• Source lists: LexisNexis and Factiva both enable the user to create custom source lists.
• Search output: De-duplication when searching is a basic option on Factiva and NewsRoom but an irritating omission on Nexis. The ability to display all search results in KWIC format is a big plus for Nexis users, as is the automatic and useful sorting of results by format, subject, company, geography, language and people.

The issue containing the full report is available for purchase online .

Carnegie-Knight Foundation Reports on News in Schools

Mandatory Testing and News in the Schools: Implications for Civic Education is the first of a series of reports from the Carnegie-Knight Task Force whose research arm is based at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The Internet and the Threat It Poses to Local Media: Lessons from News in the Schools is the second report in the series. Both of these reports came out in January 2007. The most recent offering, a more substantial 35 page report, Young People and News (July 2007) based on a national survey of 1,800 teens, young adults, and older adults, examines the amount of daily news consumption by young people. All three reports can be found at the Shorenstein Center site. Look for more reports in the future.

Arbitron Cinema Advertising Study; Pew Reports

The Arbitron Cinema Advertising Study 2007 is the follow-up to Arbitron’s 2003 study which examined the size, characteristics, and behavior of movie theater audiences. In this new report, Arbitron focuses on the moviegoer’s relationship with cinema advertising and evaluate its ability to influence young and affluent consumers.

And from Pew:

Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions What Americans Know: 1989-2007, a report from the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.

A Quarter's Worth of News Coverage A new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism which finds that the four-year-old war in Iraq dwarfed all other topics in the U.S. news media during the first three months of 2007. However, more than 80% of war news focused on Americans -- those shaping policy, fighting or affected at home. Only about one-in-six stories was primarily about Iraqis, whether their government, their lives, or their casualties. The 2008 presidential campaign ranked second in coverage with news focusing primarily on Democratic candidates.

Also from PEJ, don't forget about their annual State of the News Media reports. State of the News Media 2007 has been out since March and is the fourth edition of this reputable report on the health and status of American journalism. (Earlier reports have been highlighted in a previous post.)