Study: Years of News Industry Cutbacks Have Had an Impact

Years of news industry cutbacks have had an impact on the quality of online, newspaper and TV news and in how consumers view the material, according to a study out today from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism as its issues its annual State of the News Media Report.

Nearly one-third of those surveyed said they no longer got their news from a particular media outlet because it no longer had what they'd once counted on, either with fewer or less complete stories. Some of what the Pew survey found:

• Newsroom employment at newspapers is down 30 percent since a peak in 2000.
• Government coverage on local TV news has been cut in half since 2005, with sports weather and traffic -- the kind of information that can easily be found elsewhere -- now accounting for 40 percent of its content.
• A growing percentage of cable news is "cable talk," with CNN, for example, having sharply cut back on produced story packages and live event coverage over the past five years.
• During the presidential campaign, more stories were simply reporting verbatim what candidates or partisans were saying, rather than using those statements as a starting point to explore an issue.

AP cited former ABC News president David Westin as saying, however, that with viewership and readership down, the question is whether consumers are leaving prominent news organizations because they aren't getting what they want, or whether these outlets can no longer afford to give them more because consumers are leaving. Amid the money crunch, Pew said that more organizations are experimenting with charging for digital content.

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