Social media, the newest powerhouse phenomenon to spring from the Internet, is the ultimate people’s platform, built on the Internet’s unique characteristic as a many-to-many medium. Some social media sites, like Facebook and Flickr, have established themselves as mainstream players in citizen media; others are little known outside of their own group of users and some…
In an essay published by the Knight Citizen News Network, Clyde H. Bentley of the University of Missouri’s journalism school sympathetically reviews the historical rise of “citizen journalism” but concludes it should not be viewed as a threat by professional journalists. He says citizen news gatherers and commentators are to journalism what militia members are…
More news consumers are “checking in on the news” throughout the day. Social networking sites are not yet a major news source for the young. More than one third of smartphone users get their news from the device. These are just a few of the latest findings from the Pew Research Centre for the People &…
About one in five Americans don’t read, watch or listen to news on a typical day, according to the latest biennial news consumption survey released by the Pew Research Center. For some sectors of the news industry, that could be considered the good news … Here are the 15-year trend lines from survey questions designed…
Northwestern University’s Readership Institute has released results of its 2008 Newspaper Readership tracking study. It shows a small decline in readership overall, with young people accounting for the largest decline. The study also indicates American newspapers are failing to attract many potential readers to their websites: 62 per cent of respondents – skewing toward an…
Community newspapers are not experiencing the same calamitous upheaval that North American dailies are struggling with. In fact, local papers such as those owned by Metroland and Black Press are in the midst of a transformation and Suburban Newspapers of America is going to document the statistics to prove it.
Anyone looking for ideas about how to help newsrooms cope with and adapt to change might find it useful to consult All Eyes Forward, a 164-page report outlining initial results of the American Press Institute’s “Learning Newsroom” program. It describes the first 18 months of a three-year pilot project involving 10 newspaper newsrooms, including the…
As news media becomes increasingly global in reach, should a worldwide standard of media ethics also evolve? This is the focus of Media Ethics Beyond Borders: A Global Perspective, a collection of research papers written by an international group of media scholars. In an article written for J-Source, co-editor Stephen Ward briefly outlines the authors’…
The latest issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication (Vol. 33, No. 2) includes several research articles of interest to the journalism community, including: “Parachute Journalism” in Haiti: Media Sourcing in the 2003-2004 Political Crisis by Isabel Macdonald, York UniversityAbstract: The Canadian media’s reliance on parachute and wire agency journalists during the lead-up to the…
It’s the war the United States started after 9/11 and then forgot – Afghanistan. In fact, coverage of the war in Afghanistan has accounted for less than 1 per cent of American news media content during the past few years, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Index. But U.S. news media noticed…