First of all, as I sow a few digital oats, a word about the title of this blog -- Mobydicknews. We are on a quest for elusive prey. The white whale that lurks on these pages is hunting us as much as we will hunt it.
This is all to say, Mobydicknews is journalistic nirvana.
Call me editor. Let's swim.
Serious Times Call for Serious News
This is all to say, Mobydicknews is journalistic nirvana.
Call me editor. Let's swim.
Serious Times Call for Serious News
TV viewers want more national and international news, less crime and entertainment, researcher says:
8 comments:
Not much on the methodology of the study (beyond "1,000 phone interviews nationwide"). One thing I am learning as I scrutinize the wire content we run as filler in the newspaper is this: methodology in studies means everything. I think we should stop publishing study results with the assumption that they are intrinsically meaningful and start focusing a more critical eye on the how the study was done and by whom. At the very least we should provide leads (hypertext or otherwise) to primary sources about the research so people can find our for themselves whether to trust what is being put out in the press releases. A little more skepticism about bias -- regardless of which pole it slants towards -- would be a great service to our readers.
Ok, I'll buy the telephone survey point. Sloppy science on my part.
Let's see what the readership institute has to say:
This is clipped from justicejournalism.com
For crime reporters, the opportunities for compelling coverage are abundant and the consumer interest in reading, viewing, or listening to it is high. In 2001, the Readership Institute of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University issued the results of an extensive survey of American newspapers and their readers – 37,000 in all. The report showed that police and crime news ranked third in the amount of space newspapers devote to it, behind only politics/government and sports, and ahead of business. Police and crime ranked second in front-page stories, behind politics/government. The rankings were the same across all categories of circulation size. (see http://readership.org for more detail)
When readers were asked about various coverage areas, however, they were not necessarily satisfied with what they get. On police and crime, they wanted more locally generated stories and fewer from other places, fewer photos, and fewer stories generally. This seemed to indicate less reader interest in a police-blotter approach to covering crime, although many small town readers still may expect it.
Crime is even more predominant on local TV news. It has consistently been the number one subject of news coverage in five years of surveys by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, accounting for about one fourth of stories aired. The next highest category, "human interest," comprises only 10 percent. The project also found that crime and courts ranked behind only health and medicine in the prevalence of beat reporting; 38 percent of news directors surveyed said they had reporters assigned to the subject full-time.
Unlike the newspaper study, however, most television viewers seem happy about crime's dominance on local newscasts. A Florida State University survey of more than 2,000 viewers in the Orlando area found a vast majority satisfied with television crime coverage. Indeed, consultants advise local TV news directors to stress crime news, especially if it lends itself to live, daily reports. The theory is that viewers regard their personal safety as a prime concern when they are watching local news reports.
The demand for crime and justice news in all forms of media presents opportunities for journalists to produce stories on subjects like crime trends and successful crime prevention strategies that may be more meaningful to viewers, listeners, and readers than is a string of reports on the latest incidents.
High quality news reporting on crime and justice issues is vital both to inform citizens about life in their communities and to encourage rational public policymaking. This requires thorough reporting on individual cases as well as on trends. Our guide seeks to help reporters and editors do both.
Wasn't trying to rag on you about the survey -- just trying to get some chat going.
Interesting readership results. I know from first-hand experience, though, that the crime logs on a certain notable Delaware Web site are consistently among its most heavily veiwed pages. And no one is forcing people to look at those.
I think whether or not people are interested in crime stories is largely determined by how much they perceive crime to affect them and their communities. If crime is a topic that folks really do care about locally, then we serve them well by reporting it well.
In my mind, the critical point here is giving readers crime news IN CONTEXT. TV never does this, the web has a problem doing this, but newspaper, with the help of delayed introspection, can put criminal incidents in prespective -- going up, down, plaguing one neighborhood or the other, isolated, part of a trend, something parents need to know......
You are now linked to off brothersgentry. One post every month or so will not warrant me giving up that valuable space. Neither will endless debates between you and hippie chick -- errr, stormdawg. Now let's get serious and do some blogging.... Who am I kidding? How can anyone who uses their baby picture use the word serious seriously in a sentence?
Yeah, Mr. Editor, you'd better get some bandwidth-sapping video clips up here and turn this into a real blog...
Bandwidth... What's that?
Nothing against bandwith on these pages. Bandwith is a curious bedfellow, though, a marvelous, miraculous and invisible force driving a new digital age.
Where information flows, are words sure to follow?
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