Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
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The overall quality of news coverage — including issues ranging from decreased accuracy to increased sensationalism — remains the most important problem area in journalism today, according to the press. But its relative seriousness has plummeted compared to the loss of credibility with the public. When asked about the validity of various criticisms of the […]
Members of the news media — particularly those in the newsroom — feel caught in a pressure cycle. Working journalists say that business pressures undermine quality, which hurts credibility, which in turn causes lost audiences. And that cycles back to added business pressure. Although there are striking differences between news media executives and newsroom journalists […]
Nearly all journalists and media executives say they are proud of what they do for a living, and they express general satisfaction with the values, leadership and ethics programs of their own news organizations. This may reflect some of the common motivations that draw people to journalism: writing, communicating and providing information to the public. […]
In an initiative to find the correlation between quality local television journalism and ratings PEJ brings the practice of benchmarking–identifying models of quality in an industry–to local TV news.
This study was conducted by the Project For Excellence in Journalism, a journalists’ group in Washington D.C. affiliated with Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The scholar team that developed the methodology for measuring newscasts included Lee Ann Brady of Princeton Survey Research Associates; Marion Just, Ph.D., Professor of […]
DESIGN OF THE PRESS SAMPLES Three samples were drawn for the press portion of this survey: a national news media sample, a local news media sample and an Internet sample. Both the national and local samples were divided into two groups: print and television (which includes television and radio). For the national sample, the print […]
By Chris Galdieri Local news may not really look the same everywhere, but newscasts often make the same mistakes. Local news experts and project researchers looked at some of the more in-depth pieces in the study and found that even many of them fell prey to some chronic bad habits. Here is a catalogue of […]
By Marya Jones There is no doubt the name of the game in local TV news is ‘live, local and late-breaking’ more than ‘thorough, thoughtful and timely.’ Is this run-and-gun-style dictated by the nature of the television medium? Or is it a reflection of the resources and staffing companies are devoting to local TV news? […]
In the course of two weeks, the study didn’t find many stories that would win awards. But stations demonstrated a variety of good ideas that local TV newscasters and project researchers found worth noting and emulating. Here are seven storytelling approaches that worked and why: Let People Talk – Local TV reporters often get in […]
“There just has not been a reason to watch local news for a long time.” That sad summary doesn’t come from a critic, but from a longtime television news consultant, Don Fitzpatrick, president of Don Fitzpatrick and Associates, a San Francisco-based consulting firm. While local news is still the most popular form of TV news, […]