The Media Companies Get Bigger: The Media Gets Smaller

The Big News: Shrinking Reportage

An explosion of media outlets means we now have more coverage and carping about every conceivable event than ever before in history.

But we also have less reporting.

Hundreds of cable and radio commentators, and millions of bloggers, can sound off about the news in real time. But the number of old-fashioned fact-gatherers is dwindling, and will almost certainly continue to shrink.

In the Philadelphia area, for instance, the number of newspaper reporters has fallen from 500 to 220 in the last quarter-century. Most of the local television stations have cut back on traditional news coverage. Five AM radio stations used to cover news; now there are two.

These figures are drawn from a new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism describing what it calls a "seismic transformation" in the media landscape. The good news is that the average consumer can in effect create his own news, picking and choosing from sources he trusts and enjoys rather than being spoon-fed by a handful of big corporations.

But the decline in the number of reporters, especially at newspapers, means less digging into the affairs of government and business. What is "most threatened," says the report, "is the big-city metro paper that came to dominate in the latter part of the 20th century . . . Even if newspapers are not dying, they and other old media are constricting, and so, it appears, is the amount of resources dedicated to original newsgathering."

Newspaper audiences may be growing online, but Web sites don't deliver the kind of revenue that can support large staffs of editors, reporters and photographers, so declining print circulation -- down another 3 percent last year -- could have major consequences. By the project's count, the industry has lost more than 3,500 newsroom professionals since 2000, a drop of 7 percent. The Washington Post said last week it would seek to cut 80 newsroom jobs through voluntary buyouts, the second such offer in just over two years, and attrition.

The quality of news has been declining for the last 30 years. As more and more media giants control the news there is less and less real reporting. Advertising and revenues push the news in a particular direction.... Ultra-conservative loud mouths seem to be drawing the attention of every news organization. Despite claims to the contrary, most media outlets do not offer fair and balanced reporting, do not provide real news analyses, and are pushing for the sensationalized reactions. Even the recent DPW scandal wasn't something the MSM picked up on until the blogosphere pushed the issue.

At least within the blogosphere we are getting some genuine efforts to report the news... it's just that finding it is like sorting ping pong balls according to minor defects only seen with an electron microscope.