Findings

England's National Readership Survey reports more people are reading "quality" newspapers like The Times and The Guardian even though their circulation is declining. Readership of mid-market and tabloid newspapers, however, is dropping.

The most recent issue of Journalism Studies focuses on Europe. Articles include:

The Mohammed cartoons crisis in the British and Greek press, by Anna Triandafyllidou

Travel journalism, by Ben Cocking

Reflections on changing patterns of journalism in the new EU countries, by Epp Lauk

Divisions and struggles of the Slovenian journalistic guild, by Primoz Krasovec and Igor Z. Zaga

Exploring the European elite sphere, by Farrel Corcoran and Declan Farrel

An elusive trans-national public sphere?, by Paschal Preston

Europe in crisis, by Michal Krzyzanowski

Please click on 'More' to read article abstracts.

"The corps of journalists covering Washington D.C. at the dawn of the Obama Administration is not so much smaller as it is dramatically transformed," said a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The report used the word shock in describing the degree to which "what we once thought of as the mainstream news media serving a general public has indeed shrunk." But the story is not that simple: "a new sector of niche media has grown in its place, offering more specialized and detailed information than the general media to smaller, elite audiences, often built around narrowly targeted financial, lobbying and political interests."

As an Associated Press report notes the report also said "Washington also has many more foreign reporters covering the U.S. from their perspective" including nearly the same number of journalists working for Arab news channel Al-Jazeera as work for the American CBS News, and adding that "The Canadian Press maintains an office in Washington to cover politics and a range of other issues."

The rest of the world, of course, has a stake in knowing what's going on in Washington. So do Americans -- the surprise should be that they have let their news gathering agencies atrophy.

Some young people who wouldn't be caught dead reading a newspaper today expect they will in the future. That's what doctoral student Seth C. Lewis found when he surveyed students at two U.S. universities. While only 14 per cent of the more than 1,200 students surveyed would openly admit to reading a non-student print product today, 41 per cent said they expected to be newspaper readers five years from now. However, just to put things in perspective, 71 per cent said they expected to be reading online news sites five years from now, compared to the 58 per cent who read online news today. The research was published in the latest issue of Newspaper Research Journal.