Baltimore media reporting truly new news. (Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism. Click to enlarge.)

by FERN SHEN

Worried about what’s ailing the American news media, researchers from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at one week of Baltimore news coverage last summer and found traditional media — the Sun, television and the business publications — still do most (61 percent) of the original reporting around here.

But the detailed analysis is pretty embarassing for Charm City’s entire “media ecosystem,” as journalism talking heads now refer to the whole cast of news producers in a city, from newspapers with staffs and real estate to kitchen-table-bloggers.

Government press releases – often just repeated verbatim – drive print and pretty much everyone else’s news coverage, for the most part. Minor crimes, like the kid in Medfield arrested for stealing a scooter, pre-occupy broadcast. “New Media” with their relatively minute output, often ignore what the others are doing or simply link to them, sometimes casting news produced by others as if it were their own.

Depressing? Wait, there’s more. Guess how many fewer stories the Sun did in all of 2009, compared with 1991?

73 percent.

Sun shines less

Cynics might say the picture painted by Pew is nothing new, that the news media has always had a lazy side, and blogs and news websites have just joined in with their press-release-lovin’ elders.

But the authors did look back in time and found at least one thing has measurably deteriorated: output. In 1991, when the Sun had a morning and evening paper, they produced 73 percent more stories on any subject than they did last year. In 1999, they produced 32 percent more stories.

In the Associated Press story on the report, Sun editor J. Montgomery Cook doesn’t reference the diminished coverage but complains that a week is too small to show his organization’s stuff.

Source: Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism ("How News Happens")

Here are some other stories on the report:

New York Times

Poynter Institute