All You Zombies …

“What were those other 100 reporters doing?”

Category error.

Why startling, Henry? It’s seemed obvious to me for a long time, though I did not put numbers to it. Even before the internet, most US news came from a handful of major newspapers and wire services.

What I find discouraging is the collapse of local reporting.

I have to second The Raven’s observation. In no way is this even a little bit surprising. I would have been surprised if the number of original stories had been higher.

I would like to repeat what chris said.

Value added on the Internets, by category and proportion:

* 14% humor, meta-referential

* 13% snark

* 23% thoughtful commentary from people who know 10x more about the topic than the reporter ever will

* 11% incendiary exchanges (most value added when the topic seems trivial to oneself but apparently of world-shaking consequence to those participating in the exchange)

* 20% locating stuff that would be hard to locate otherwise

* 9% friendly community

These percentages have been computed by the LHC and are not subject to dispute.

There’s a market out there for home-based “journalists” — places like Associated Content (http://www.associatedcontent.com) which pay roughly half-a-cent per word for just about any sort of material which generates eyeballs for advertising. Rewriting news stories is perfect for this — take your quotes from the piece you’re rewriting, vary the lede, add a touch of right wing or left wing or libertarian perspective, stick close to the length and layout of the original piece, and you’re done. 800 words, half an hour, $4.00 income — repeat ten times per day, and you almost have an income.

This doesn’t lend itself to lengthy phone calls to independent observers or academics with relevant experience. It lends itself to blogging filled with one-liners with clickable tags. Which the ‘net is full of, you may have noticed. (Heh!)

One thing I really appreciate about Google News is the effortless ability to search and translate international news. There is simply no way, prior to the web and computerized translation, that I could have gotten the kind of quick, finger-on-the-pulse read of whether a particular event is getting covered in, e.g., major Chinese papers that I can get today.

(N.b. sometimes “covered” means “reprinting Reuters”! Still, that itself is useful to know.)

Another question — and probably a bit unfair to criticize the study — is whether firsthand original reports and recording count as “news stories.” If someone goes to a public hearing in his town, films testimony, and puts it on YouTube, is that reporting? Not exactly, perhaps, but it’s “news” and it’s “original” (especially if his town is too small and/or the topic is too minor to get covered by local media).

Or how about blog posts that flesh out and comment on news stories? I don’t think this blog thinks of itself as a news site in the least; it’s a specialist blog dealing with archeology and related topics. But it’s a perfect example of a locally informed blogger providing depth and texture to existing mainstream news reports.

So it’s not so bleak as some might think.

it’s a rather startling finding

For a few months a couple of years ago, part of my work involved finding news reports on various topics and passing links along. I relied a lot on google news (in fact, there were dozens of alerts/RSS feeds I was assigned to check regularly). I was never seized with the urge to quantify the experience, but I can’t say I’m all that surprised – especially since this was not a local/domestic story (for the English language media).

Look at who the seven original reporting outlets were, according to the Nieman post that Zuckerman links to:

These were produced by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Tech News World, Bloomberg, Xinhua (China), and the Global Times (China).

When you think about who (of those news sources not based in China) still has foreign bureaus, this is even less of a surprise.

As for U.S. based journalism, I actually think the bigger issue, at least for political journalism, is in statewide reporting as opposed to local reporting (acknowledging that sometimes local is meant to include state, and that local reporting is important in its own right). Many local papers are struggling, of course, but they do have a bit of an advantage over more widely-focused papers because they live there, their readers live there, their reporters live there, and many of their advertisers live there. That last fact may be the most important; it could be easier to sell ads when you can pretty much guarantee that a high percentage of your audience is in the market, because few outside the market read your paper. Similar arguments could apply to local online reporting efforts, and might explain why some of them seem to be doing fairly well.[1] If online local reporting can replace print reporting and do it as well or better, that seems like a good thing.

State reporting, on the other hand, might as well be national reporting if you’re a local paper and you’re not in or near the capital. At the very least, you’ve got to deal with all the expenses of having someone in the capital, and a full bureau is going to cost even more. Meanwhile, there’s a good chance your readers, who are not in the capital and may not even know who represents them in the legislature, are going to think of politics as either local (if they pay any attention to non-national politics) or national (because they see it in everyday life through mass media). The state capital might just be that mid-sized town people don’t visit often, although the governor’s race probably still draws interest. Even more difficult is if some of your state’s administrative machinery is not in the capital but also not near your town. It’s too bad, because state governments are still large institutions with significant responsibilities, state economies are non-negligible, and all sorts of stuff happens at the state level (with local and regional effects) that people should know about. The state capital’s local paper probably still covers some of it, and it’s probably free online, but when you think of the need for multiple perspectives that’s just not enough.

[1] Although I guess foundation-funding has helped many of the local online efforts so far; that’s obviously a different model than the advertising one, and another issue. I’m not sure if there have been similar initiatives for state government coverage; it’s been a while since I followed this issue. There has been a movement to get state governments to put at least basic legislative and administrative info online in freely accessible and searchable ways, with bill-tracking features and other stuff like that – a locally-based reporter could combine that with the phone and maybe get somewhere.

This hasn’t gotten the kind of pick-up that it deserves in the broader blogosphere – even if it’s not necessarily a representative sampling (other stories on other kinds of news might very plausibly do better in English language media) – it’s a rather startling finding.

I hope the humor here is at least somewhat intentional. Because doesn’t pick-up just imply exactly this process of everyone regurgitating the same story over and over again? Seven independent sources actually sounds pretty good to me. At that point it all just about distributing those stories and getting commentary on them from people who can add appropriate perspective. And the internet is doing a pretty good job of that, imo.