The Internet as a Resource for News and Information about Science
Fully 87% of online users have at one time used the internet to carry out research on a scientific topic or concept.
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Fully 87% of online users have at one time used the internet to carry out research on a scientific topic or concept.
Suddenly, local ownership of newspapers is making something of a comeback. Since the breakup of Knight Ridder last year, and the threat of more cutbacks in newsrooms, private ownership groups and individuals have emerged in cities from Boston to Los Angeles wanting to buy the local paper. Who are they? A rundown.
How did newspapers play the Nov 7 election on their front page? Did they see an ideological realignment in the country, or some deeper shift? A review of the day-after headlines in 230 newspapers across the country reveals that it was nothing quite so dramatic and many tread closer to Sergeant Joe Friday’s “Just the Facts, Ma’am.”
There was no shortage once again on cable and elsewhere in which pundits were asked how the midterm election would come out, something that of course by its nature was unknowable in advance. The general consensus among political prognosticators was that Nov. 7 was going to bring Democratic gains in Congress. Among a group of the most widely quoted election oracles, no one hit exactly what the final House tally appears likely to come out, but one prognosticator got very close.
The final tally from the mid-term election is in—you know the poll in which people actually vote—and the media polls can now be graded. With each election, there are more media outlets, and more polls. Usually, the polls begin to converge as election day nears. This year, the polls varied widely. How did they stack up against the actual vote?
As 11 p.m. neared on November 7 and the networks were about to sign off, NBC projected the Democrats would take control of the House though the results of many races were still out. It soon had company. In the next 21 minutes, all the networks and cable channels made their calls as well on what was still a fairly fluid map. This was the most the networks would do on a difficult night.
The new numbers released this week were bad enough for a newspaper industry that lost nearly 3% of its circulation in the last year. But when you factor in subscriber discounts, the economic picture gets worse. And the industry’s efforts to compensate for decreasing circulation with increasing online readership may not stand up to scrutiny.
Nielsen Media Research, the gold standard in the TV ratings industry, has announced that it will release numbers in December that show how many people actually sit through commercials on TV. That new yardstick will affect how much advertisers will pay to air those ads and will very possibly alter the economics of the TV marketplace. And not everyone in the TV business is happy about this.
The new numbers for the newspaper industry are out, and they show another disheartening drop of nearly 3% in total average daily circulation. But the picture may be more complicated than the first impression. Not all papers are hurting, and many companies have trimmed questionable circulation. The industry also is boasting that, when online readers are included, overall readership is growing.
After the media complained about lack of access to previous conflicts, hundreds of embedded journalists lived, traveled and reported right alongside US troops at the outset of the Iraq war. Now, three years later, there are barely two dozen embeds left.
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