The Project for Excellence in Journalism published "A Year in the News" to summarize what the media was up to in 2007. I found it quite shocking. I wasn't too surprised to find most of the attention was given to either the War or to the Presedential Campaign. Even when I was living in Australia last semester, those were the two topics I heard and read the most about. The article seemed to basically keep pointing out how narrowed news coverage has become despite the growing number of media outlets. It's amazing.
While I was reading the statistics that clearly stated coverage on Iraq, Obama, Clinton, Iran and Pakistan, I kept wondering why this was happening. Education, the economy, health and medicince, transportation, and other stories that affect people's daily lives only had a small percentage of American media's coverage. I always figured news was driven by what the people wanted to know versus what they needed to know. According to the article, this is not happening. If journalists working in supposedly dying media like newspapers, you would think they would want to boost their sales and give the people what they want. People do want to know about gas prices. This affects them every single day.
I guess none of this was making sense to me until I went to class today. Apparently, the resources are tapping out. There are not enough journalists and reporters to cover stories in depth or cover these ongoing stories. This is sad. Something needs to be fixed. More people are turning to the internet to gather their news, which doesn't seem to be profitable to do important news coverage justice. Hopefully, someone will think of a solution soon enough. The world is changing and journalism has to change with it. It takes some good innovative ideas to bring on change like this. I'll do some brainstorming and get back to you on that one.
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