Wednesday 13 of January 2010
Newspapers, not new media, are still the home of journalism
Traditional media - mainly newspapers - still generate the bulk of the information that reaches the public, according to a research report by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. A study into the 'news ecology' in Baltimore, US, found that new media platforms and services like Twitter mainly repeat information generated elsewhere.
An overview of the research on the Pew Research Center's website reads:
Where does the news come from in today's changing media?Who really reports the news that most people get about their communities? What role do new media, blogs and specialty news websites now play?How, in other words, does the modern news "ecosystem" of a large American city work? And if newspapers were to die -- to the extent that we can infer from the current landscape -- what would that imply for what citizens would know and not know about where they live?The questions are becoming increasingly urgent. As the economic model that has subsidized professional journalism collapses, the number of people gathering news in traditional television, print and radio organizations is shrinking markedly. What, if anything, is taking up that slack?