The Project for Excellence in Journalism says top professional news
organizations' online coverage of the first Democratic primaries didn't
break much ground this year compared to four years ago,
when the project did a similar study. According to the report, How
Online Campaign Coverage Has Changed in Four Years,
the ten sites studied did less original reporting this time and
made
less use of interactivity... but there was some good news,
too.
From the study's summary:
Sites
have come a long way in offering users a chance to compare candidates
on the issues-something almost entirely absent in 2000. They are also
no longer merely morgues for old newspaper stories and provide more
chance for users to manipulate and customize information.
Yet
the major Internet news sites make less use of interactivity, contain
less original reporting, have fewer links to external sites, and offer
fewer chances to see and hear directly from the candidates on their
election front pages than they did four years
ago...
What about weblogs?
I posted an earlier draft of this at my Harvard blog in
hopes of
pointing to it during Thursday night's blog meeting at the Berkman Center. The meeting had a full
agenda without already, but the general issue of big-media's failures (or
biases) in election coverage did get mentioned. So maybe we'll be back
to it next week. By then I may have read the full 31-page report! I've abbreviated the Harvard blog entry and pointed it
here, where I'll post any additions as an update.
The study hit the high points: It included the political front pages and lead stories
of websites by ABC, AOL, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, USA Today, Washington
Post, and Yahoo, chosen for because they were the eight most popular news
sites in Nielsen ratings. Also included were National Review Online and
Salon.
The Project for
Excellence in Journalism's year 2000 and 2004 studies are on
the Web and downloadable as PDF files. The Project itself is
underwritten by the Pew Charitable Trusts and located at the
Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism.
At this point, I still haven't done more than browse the report's summary and skim
the rest to see if
citizen participation in online coverage was mentioned. The only use
of the word "weblog" I noticed was in a quote from National Review on page 18
-- equating blogs with "Deaniacs" in orange ski caps. The study does
mention NYTimes.com's new Times
on the Trail
feature. It calls the time-stamped items, links to competing
publications and candidate press releases "an upgrade," without making
any blog comparisons.
Weblogs & Media
Reform
Thursday's Berkman session didn't get to the Project for Excellence in
Journalism report, but there were enough comments on the failures of
corporate-owned media to inspire me to add a few links here for future
reference.
The
institutions of journalism seem in desperate need of some mechanism for
re-connecting with an alienated public, and they needn't transform
themselves into online publications to do it. An e-mail address on
every reporter's stories would help. And gain journalists countless
news sources as well.
If newspapers are going to invest heavily in anything,
perhaps it ought to be in younger, more talented, more diverse staffs.
The newspaper industry fails to take into account the dreary toll
corporatization and chain ownership - the great fears of online users -
have taken on newspapers' voice, vibrancy, and relevance.
Founded by hell-raisers, papers too often have been
cautious, tepid, and pompous. A century ago, newspapers were markedly
more opinionated, fractious, and provocative than the corporate
chain-produced dailies of
today.
6:10:07 PM 
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