Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Senior Writer
In recent years, natural disasters around the world have been chronicled by a new kind of visual journalism, often produced by citizen eyewitnesses and posted to the video sharing site YouTube. These videos represent a way of “crowdsourcing” a dramatic breaking news event, frequently before professional journalists can arrive on the scene.
After an unusual uptick in the overall audience for evening news in 2011, the trend line returned to its normal in 2012. The combined viewership for the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts dropped 2%, to 22.1 million, resuming the downward trajectory of nearly three decades. It now appears that 2011 may have been an outlier, with the bigger audience attributable to an unusual number of major news events that year, including the Arab Spring, the Japanese earthquake and the killing of Osama bin Laden. Even a presidential election couldn’t keep some viewers from deserting network news in 2012.
If the newspaper industry had theme music in 2013, it might use “Been down so long it looks like up to me,” the much-recycled line from a 1920s blues song. For the first time since the deep recession that began in 2007, newspaper organizations have grounds for a modicum of optimism.
The story about how African American-oriented news media coped last year was a difficult one at best.
The news programs that Americans watch on national cable channels and their local television stations have changed significantly in recent years while the network evening newscasts have remained remarkably stable, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center.
What’s the job market like for 2011 mass communication and journalism graduates? According to a new survey from the University of Georgia, there was an uptick in the percentage of bachelor degree recipients who found jobs and, for the first time in years, a small increase in their salaries. But the overall picture is far from rosy.
As the 2012 presidential race shifts from the GOP primary battle to the general election matchup between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, a new PEJ study reveals what the public has been told about the two candidates by the media. It also finds that Mitt Romney emerged as the winner of the media primary weeks before Rick Santorum dropped out.
The faltering U.S. economy was the No. 1 story in the American news media in 2011, with coverage increasing substantially from a year earlier when economic unease helped alter the political landscape in the midterm elections, according to The Year in the News 2011, a new report conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Young adults heard more about the viral video against Joseph Kony and were more likely to learn about it through social media than other sources
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