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'State of Media' Report Offers Valuable Insights for Working Press

Environmental reporters who turn to the newly released "State of the News Media 2004" report with a narrow focus on environmental journalism may be doing themselves a disservice.

The new report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the first in what is to be an annual series, provides little direct grist on environmental coverage or, for that matter, on coverage of any other specific beat. Do a word search on the report on the word "environment," at http://stateofthemedia.org, and you won't exactly come up empty-handed. You'll simply miss the forest in pursuit of the occasional tree.

Forget the word search. Take the time to read the entire document –- or, at the very least, the extensive chapter dealing with your particular medium, newspapers, TV, cable, radio, web, whatever. Read it online for all the search and query benefits that approach clearly provides, and as the Center itself encourages. But also print it out, and read it "the old-fashioned way" too.

The Herculean report, funded substantially by the Pew Charitable Trusts, provides some at-times sobering reading for those who have chosen to make journalism their life's work. For many who have watched trends and patterns closely over past years, the information may be not so much eye-opening as it is, for better or worse, confirming for what they know and sense based on their own experiences.

"Many long-held ideas about journalism are unraveling," the piece opens, with journalism "in the midst of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television. Journalism, however, is not becoming irrelevant. It is becoming more complex."

"Quality news and information," the report continues, "are more available than ever before, but in greater amounts so are the trivial, the one-sided and the false." The journalists' role "as intermediary, editor, verifier, and synthesizer is weakening."

The report details what it sees as eight "major trends":

• More news outlets chasing a static or shrinking audience for news;
• New journalism investments –- mostly for information technology -– going toward dissemination, rather than gathering, of news;
• More providing of the "raw elements of news as the end product," with a tendency toward "a jumbled, chaotic, partial quality," at least in part because of pressures of the 24-hour news cycle;
• Varying journalistic standards, even within a single news organization;
• A "problematic" long-term outlook for many traditional news outlets, with fewer reporters having to cover more bases and shrinking space in newscasts "to make room for ads and promotions."
• A "thinning" of the news product;
• An increased potential that online journalism will converge with, rather than replace, conventional media outlets. "The idea that the medium is the message increasingly will be passé";
• Pressures on journalism stemming more from economic than from technology forces. Increased "leverage" over journalists for those trying to manipulate the media and the public, in part because with fewer reporters trying to cover more terrain, "it becomes a seller's market for information."

The May issue of Environment Writer will provide a medium-by-medium review of the State of the Media report in an effort to provide a deeper understanding of the overall context in which environmental reporting, as a specialty, exists ... and flourishes or flounders.