The 11th annual State of News Media report for 2014 from the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project is available online, and it includes chapters on U.S. journalism revenue, news video on the web, growth in digital reporting, acquisitions and content sharing shaping local TV news, Hispanic news outlets, and more.
One of the interesting (and somewhat headspinning) trends is journalists migrating from more traditional news outlets to work on experimental online news venues, which sometimes have rather interesting funding. For example, Ezra Klein, formerly a well-known voice at the Washington Post and still affiliated with Bloomburg News and MSNBC, launched Vox.com a few months ago. First Look Media, funded by eBay’s founder, launched in February 2014 with The Intercept, a digital magazine created by a trio of founding editors including Glenn Greenwald, an award-winning journalist formerly of The Guardian US. Nate Silver‘s FiveThirtyEight site (named for the 538 electors in the electoral college–there’s a hint he’s into data journalism), has been around a while, formerly affiliated with the New York Times and relaunched in partnership with ESPN in March 2014 with Silver as the editor-in-chief. BuzzFeed has been beefing up its investigative journalism, hiring people like Mark Schoofs, formerly a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, and the nonprofit ProPublica (tagline, “Journalism in the Public Interest”) and Chris Hamby, another Pulitzer winner hired away from The Center for Public Integrity. Whew!
Interested in learning more? Search for Library’s holdings via Research@UWW to find books such as JournalismNext: A practical guide to digital reporting and publishing (3rd-floor Main Collection, PN4833 .B75 2010) and Online journalism: Principles and practices of news for the Web, or government publications such as the Congressional committee hearing, The Future of Journalism (online or in print, 2nd-floor Federal Documents, Y 4.C 73/7:S.HRG.111-428).
Whoa, Wait. A Congressional committee hearing?? Here’s a quote from then-Senator John Kerry on page 1 of the hearing explaining the interest of legislators:
Some people might ask, sort of, Why the Committee—why is the government interested in this, and what are we looking at? Well, the fact is that we do have a responsibility for the licensing of broadcasts, we have a responsibility for the regulatory oversight of ownership of cable, satellite, other issues with respect to communications. And needless to say, how the American people get their information, what the structure of ownership is, is of enormous interest to all of us, because it is the foundation of our democracy. A brass plaque on a wall at Columbia University’s School of Journalism bears the words of the legendary newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, ‘‘Our republic and its press rise or fall together.’’
If we take seriously this notion that the press is the fourth estate or the fourth branch of government, then we need to examine the future of journalism in the digital information age, what it means to our republic and to our democracy.
Still looking for more? You also can find articles by searching Research@UWW, e.g., “Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Study of How Digitally Native News Nonprofits Are Innovating Online Journalism Practices” (JMM: The International Journal On Media Management, 2013, vol.15:no.1, pp.3-22, doi:10.1080/14241277.2012.732153), “The Life and Death of Political News” (Social Science Computer Review, 2014, vol.32:no.2, pp.170-181), and “Piracy Of Online News: A “Moral Rights” Approach To Protecting a Journalist’s Right of Attribution and Right of Integrity” (Journal Of Art, Technology & Intellectual Property Law, 2014, vol.24:no.2, pp.295-338).
For assistance with finding materials, please ask a librarian.
Andersen Library is a federal and Wisconsin depository library with federal and state government documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in various formats (print, DVD/CD-ROM, online). Check out your government at Andersen Library!
