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Mainstream, New Media Getting a Weekly Checkup

Posted on: Tuesday, 2 January 2007, 06:00 CST

By Peter Johnson

Researchers routinely study the coverage of specific media outlets.

With The Tyndall Report, for example, media analyst Andrew Tyndall reports weekly on each of the Big Three networks' evening newscasts. The Center for Media and Public Affairs examines a variety of media fare, analyzing everything from political reporting to the jokes on late-night talk shows.

But no group has ever studied what all forms of media are reporting day to day.

That will change this month when the Project for Excellence in Journalism kicks off an ambitious weekly study of what stories almost three dozen media sources are reporting, what news they view as important and how reporting differs among outlets.

To be analyzed are nine daily newspapers, as diverse as The New York Times and the Austin American-Statesman; morning and evening newscasts on ABC, NBC and CBS; prime-time talk shows on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC; headlines from CBS and ABC Radio; and various Internet bloggers.

Each Tuesday, PEJ will issue a report on its website (journalism.org.) about the media agenda -- what was covered and what wasn't. It will include an index of the top stories each week and a narrative analyzing the twists and turns of the coverage. The report also will include a breakdown of the differences among the media sectors.

The project, which is financed by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, comes as mainstream media outlets are merging and starting up Internet outlets and creating vast sources for news and information.

The study is intended to help consumers see how different media play top stories of the day and could help media outlets better gauge the so-called broccoli-vs.-Twinkie debate, "the line between what they think the public needs to know and what they want to know," PEJ director Tom Rosenstiel says.

"Twenty years ago, measuring media output was a somewhat academic exercise," Rosenstiel says. "But today it is a major issue about our politics, about public knowledge and about how society is changing. Is citizen media telling us something different from establishment media? Are media being unfair? Is the coverage liberal? This will not answer those questions definitively, but it will give us a good deal more knowledge."

PEJ's research will be studied by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which will analyze the public's response to the stories identified and report regularly on public reaction to stories. PEJ researchers hope to discover whether there are gaps between what "mainstream media consider news and what the public thinks is important and what they want to talk about," PEJ associate director Mark Jurkowitz says. "Over time, that will start to show up."

PEJ "has a well-earned reputation for monitoring the news media systematically and rigorously," Harvard media researcher Alex Jones says. "With this broader, deeper and real-time scrutiny, the news will be seen as a pattern of coverage rather than as a jumbled cacophony, which can't help but make us smarter about the media."

But ABC News spokesman Jeff Schneider says ABC News executives often view such studies as problematic since "many stories often defy being easily categorized" -- a necessity in any analysis. That said, "I'm sure they come with the best of intentions."

Similarly, Richard Oppel, editor of the American-Statesman, says that although his front page always includes national news, "when they look at a paper like ours, on any given day they are going to see a fundamentally different front page (from those in national newspapers) because this is, above all, a local/regional newspaper, and for us, that which is news is almost certainly what happens here. But we welcome any review and comment about our work."

E-mail pjohnson@usatoday.com (c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

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