On Twitter, Still Tough Going for Komen
After the furor over its decision to defund Planned Parenthood, the Susan G. Komen foundation reversed course and a key official resigned.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Senior Writer
Mark Jurkowitz is a senior writer at Pew Research Center and a former associate director of journalism research.
After the furor over its decision to defund Planned Parenthood, the Susan G. Komen foundation reversed course and a key official resigned.
Two weeks into the year, a devastating earthquake struck Haiti and dominated the news in the United States for a month. As coverage began to subside, the climactic legislative battle over remaking the American health care system took on a feverish qualityโand began its own month-long control of the news. In April, an oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico commandeered the mediaโs attention all the way into August. And from Labor Day to Nov. 2, the midterm elections held the mediaโs fascination far beyond anything else.
The 2008 class of journalism and communications graduates is suffering the worst job prospects on record, according to a new report from the University of Georgia. And as those numbers seem to be reflected in growing pessimism about the news industry among degree recipients, it’s forcing many of them to be more flexible about career aspirations.
A new University of Georgia survey of recent degree recipients finds that despite the growing economic ills of the media industry, the job market for 2007 graduates was basically unchanged from a year earlier. And sometimes, the absence of bad news can be good news.
Many people expected Rupert Murdoch to be an activist owner when he bought the Wall Street Journal last year. So what’s happened to the paper under his tenure? A PEJ study of Journal front pages finds that under the new regime, there’s a lot less business and a lot more Beltway.
The tactical success of the surge and the tactical failures of the new Democratic Congress are among the reasons why the five-year-old conflict seems to have disappeared from the headlines. And then there are the competing demands of covering the most intriguing presidential campaign in recent memory.
It wasn’t quite “Dewey Defeats Truman,” but after the Jan. 8 Granite State primary confounded many of the pollsters and pundits, one of the key story lines that emerged in coverage of the McCain and Clinton victories was the media’s proclivity to predict and pre-analyze the results.
The media were busy anointing winners after the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. And the theme of change and surprise also resonated throughout much of the commentary. But a PEJ look at the caucus post-mortems finds that perhaps the most distinct aspect of the coverage was the certainty that something major had occurred that night in Iowa.
The jury has spoken in the perjury and obstruction trial of Scooter Libby that so intimately involved the journalism profession itself. We know the Vice President’s former top aide was found guilty. But who or what else did the media implicate in its post-verdict coverage?
The media landscape has changed dramatically since Harvard’s Shorenstein Center was established 20 years ago. And when journalists and dignitaries assembled there on Oct. 13-14 to evaluate the current role of journalism in our democracy, there was good news and bad. The bad was that new technologies have created credibility concerns and economic problems for mainstream journalists. The good news may be the emergence of the citizen journalist.
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