Climate change in the news ecosystem

The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) last week produced a new study on how local news is shared in the changing media environment of the early 21st Century. This study can be found here, and is a good starting point to consider some trends that have been developing in Canada, as well as in the U.S. We plan to look more deeply into some of these trends on this site in coming days, but here are a couple of quick observations based on the study:

• People still seem to be getting a lot of their news from professional reporters, even though they access it using new media on the Internet. According to PEJ, stories containing new information carried by Baltimore, Md. media outlets in one-week period last summer were mostly produced by local newspaper or TV reporters. The new information was accessed by most readers online, sometimes through aggregators, or blog posts. But the information was developed the old-fashioned way, simply because it takes serious, purposeful inquiry to produce useful material. To quote the anchor-people, more on this later.

• What the Internet has done is speed up the delivery of hard news. Breaking developments in a community, which used to take hours to share via local radio and TV, now are disseminated in minutes via blogs and websites, many of which are maintained by mainstream media. The faster pace seems to agree with many readers, who frequently cite this as a reason to abandon newspapers and the evening newscasts. But it is having an impact on the contents of the reporting, and non-journalists are often oblivious to these effects, which include a tendency to exaggerate the significance of new developments, an absence of context and a heavy reliance on official sources. Once again, we will write more about this in a future post.