For many people – not just journalists but also business and tech writers – the Associated Press’ AP Stylebook is something of a Bible when it comes to adhering to proper presentation of the written English language.
There are other style guides out there – FranklinCovey is another popular resource – but the AP Stylebook has been the “go-to source” for so many decades, it’s hard not to think of it as the ultimate arbiter of what’s considered “proper” in written communications.
This vaunted reputation is why so many people take notice whenever new revisions to the AP Stylebook are released. The most recent ones, published within the past few months – all 991 of them – are in some cases eyebrow-raising.
Reading through them, it appears that the Associated Press has gone all-in on “keeping up with changing times” by tackling a wide range of sometimes-provocative topics. Here are some examples:
AP is weighing in on environmental terminology, contending that “climate change” is a more accurate scientific term than “global warming.”
References to people with disabilities should now exclude descriptions that connote pity, such as “afflicted with,” “battling” or “suffers from.” Moreover, referring to a disability as a “handicap” is no longer appropriate.
The word “mistress” should no longer be used to describe a woman involved in a relationship with a married man (although rendering judgments about “paramour” or “kept man,” common references to the male version of the same, are noticeably absent from the guidelines).
On ethnic/racial topics, the term Black is now preferred over “African American.” What’s more, the term should always be capitalized whenever used. (No similar pronouncement is made about capitalizing the word “white” in the same context.)
When it comes to age demographics, “senior citizen” and “elderly” are no longer appropriate terminology. Instead, the reference should be to “older adult” or “older person.”
But the most extensive new guidelines in the updated AP Stylebook are the 11 paragraphs and 22 specific examples presented under the heading “gender-neutral language.”
Banished are terms like “businessman,” “manpower,” “man-made,” “salesman” and “mankind.” In their place are “businessperson,” “crews,” “human-made,” “salesperson” and “humanity.”
“Freshman” is now also frowned upon – but at least the replacement term isn’t the awkward-sounding “freshperson,” but rather “first-year student.”
While AP is to be commended for attempting to keep current on cultural changes, let’s hope that its efforts don’t devolve into the level of parody; some may think that it already has.
But I do have one question: When will AP finally acknowledge that the entire world is using U.S. Postal Service abbreviations for state names – and has been doing so for well-nigh decades now?
What are your thoughts about the newest AP Stylebook guidelines? Right on the money … or blunt overkill? Please share your views with other readers here.
Companies work to find their place in the changing ecosystem — some more effectively than others.
For those of us who have been active in the marketing communications industry over the past few decades, there’s been a sea change in how the industry operates — not least in the realm of PR and media relations.
One of the underlying reasons for this change is the dramatic shift that’s happened in the field of journalism. Traditional media companies which have long relied on professional reporters and editorial contributors have been dealing with a range of existential threats. Print circulation has sagged while audiences have fragmented over a plethora of digital content publishers — most of which offer news and information free of charge.
At the same time, publishers’ revenues from advertising have plummeted as the media inventory has expanded to encompass the new digital content publishers. The bottom-line impact of these twin developments is that it has become much more difficult for traditional media companies to employ the same number of staff reporters; indeed, many publishers have shrunk their newsrooms while relying increasingly on independent contributors and freelancers to fill in the gaps.
But the situation gets even more complicated thanks to the evolution of digital media and the explosive growth of self-publishing platforms. The reality is that there’s a new class of authors who are increasingly publishing from their own platforms, without being involved with any of the major media outlets.
In such a world, the notion of PR departments simply keeping in close touch with a limited number of key journalists as the most effective way of gaining earned media coverage seems almost quaint.
And it gets even more problematic when considering how much easier it is for businesses to prepare and disseminate PR news. At their best, PR pitches rely on the same tools as marketing in general: profiling the audience; personalizing the news pitch, and so forth.
The problem is, according to the U.S. Bureau of Census, there are now more than six PR pros for every journalist. This means that more PR news releases than ever are hitting the inboxes of far fewer journalists and reporters.
Is it any wonder that PR news released by companies is so often being ignored?
According to a recent survey of ~1,000 journalists by PR Newswire, the following aspects of PR pitches are the most annoying to reporters and journalists:
Too much overt “marketing” in the pitch
Lack of relevant or useful content
Unclear or misleading subject lines on e-emails
Insufficient news detail
On the other hand, some aspects help in a PR pitch, including:
High-resolution photography
Video clips
Infographics
In today’s PR landscape, obtaining earned media is more difficult than ever. These days, not only do you need a great story to tell, you need to craft the perfect narrative. And even then, you might never get the news covered by a so-called “Tier 1” publication.
But missing out on Tier 1 coverage isn’t necessarily the kiss of death. Sometimes the lower tier represents the best targeted audience to receive news from companies. Moreover, by employing low-cost self-publishing tools, a decent social media strategy plus some basic search engine optimization, it’s actually possible to build an audience and garner as many well-targeted readers as those elusive Tier 1 pubs might be able to deliver.
In the new world of PR, the “tried and true” avenues to earned media coverage aren’t getting the job done. But there are more routes than ever to get the news out instead of having to channel your efforts to go through the gate-keepers of yore.
Newspaper revenue trend lines are problematic, to say the least.
The travails of the newspaper industry aren’t anything new or surprising. For the past decade, the business model of America’s newspapers has been under incredible pressures. Among the major causes are these:
The availability of up-to-the-minute, real-time news from alternative (online) sources
the explosion of options people have available to find their news
The ability to consume news free of charge using most of these alternative sources
The decline of newspaper subscriptions and readership, leading to a steep decline in advertising revenues
Exacerbating these challenges is the fact that producing and disseminating a paper-based product is substantially more costly than electronic delivery of news. And with high fixed costs being spread over fewer readers, the problems become even more daunting.
But one relative bright spot in the newspaper segment — at least up until recently — has been local papers. In markets without local TV stations, such papers continued to be a way for the citizenry to read up on local news and events. It’s been the place where they could see their friends and neighbors written about and pictured. And let’s not forget high-school sports and local “human-interest” news items that generally couldn’t be found anywhere else.
Whatever online “community” presence there might be covering these smaller markets — towns ranging from 5,000 to 50,000 population — is all-too-often sub-standard — in some cases embarrassingly bad.
But now it seems that the same problems afflicting the newspaper segment in general have seeped into this last bastion of the business.
It’s particularly ominous in places where daily (or near-daily) newspapers are published, as compared to weekly pubs. A case in point is the local paper in Youngstown, Ohio — a town of 65,000 people. Its daily paper, The Vindicator, has just announced that it will be shutting its doors after 150 years in business.
The same family has owned The Vindicator for four generations (since 1887). It isn’t that the longstanding owners didn’t try mightily to keep the paper going. In a statement to its readers, the family outlined the paper’s recent struggles to come up with a stable business model, including working with employees and unions and investing in new, more efficient presses. Efforts to raise the price of the paper or drive revenue to the digital side of the operation failed to secure sufficient funds, either.
Quoting from management’s statement:
“In spite of our best efforts, advertising and circulation revenues have continued to decline and The Vindicator continues to operate at a loss.
Due to [these] great financial hardships, we spent the last year searching for a buyer to continue to operate The Vindicator and preserve as many jobs as possible, while maintaining the paper’s voice in the community. That search has been unsuccessful.”
Youngstown, Ohio
As a result, the paper will cease publication by the end of the summer. With it the jobs of nearly 150 employees and ~250 paper carriers will disappear. But something else will be lost as well — the sense of community that these home-town newspapers are uncommonly able to foster and deliver.
For a city like Youngstown, which has seen its population decline with the loss of manufacturing jobs, it’s yet another whammy.
Because of the population loss dynamics, it might seem like local conditions are the cause of The Vindicator‘s situation, but some see a bigger story. One such observer is Nieman Journalism Lab’s Joshua Benton, who writes:
“I don’t think this is just a Youngstown story. I fear we’ll look back on this someday as the beginning of an important — and negative — shift in local news in America.”
What do you think? Is this the start of a new, even more dire phase for the newspaper industry? Is there the loss of a newspaper that has his your own community particularly hard? Please share your thoughts with other readers here.
The bad news continues for the publishing industry in 2019.
I’ve blogged before about the employment picture in journalism, which has been pretty ugly for the past decade. And just when it seems that news in the publishing industry couldn’t get much worse … along comes a new study that further underscores the systemic problems the industry faces.
The results from a recent Reuters survey of publishers worldwide point to declines that will only continue in 2019. In fact, Reuters is predicting that the industry will experience its largest wave of layoffs in years, coming off of a decade of already-steadily shrinking numbers.
The main cause is the continuing struggle to attract ad revenues – revenues that have been lost to the 600-lb. gorillas in the field – particularly Facebook, Google and Amazon.
Growing subscription revenue as opposed to a failing attempt to attract advertising dollars is the new focus, but that will be no panacea, according Nic Newman, a senior research associate at Reuters:
“Publishers are looking to subscriptions to make up the difference, but the limits of this are likely to become apparent in 2019.”
In addition to boosting subscription revenue, publishers are looking to display advertising, native advertising and donations to help bankroll their businesses, but advertising is the main focus of revenue generation for only about one in four publishers — a far cry from just a few years ago.
Putting it all together, Reuters predicts that it will lead to the largest wave of publishing job layoffs “in years” – and this in an industry where employment has been shrinking for some time now.
With yet more layoffs on the horizon, it’s little wonder that the same Reuters research finds employee burnout growing among the employees who remain. As Newman states:
“The explosion of content and the intensity of the 24-hour news cycle have put huge pressure on individual journalists over the last few years, with burnout concerns most keenly felt in editorial roles.”
A major reason why: Even more is being asked from the employee who remain – and who are already stretched.
Journalism salaries are middling even in good times – which these certainly are not. How many times can an employee be asked to “do more with less” and actually have it continue to happen?
Even the bragging rights of journalists are being chipped away, with more of them relegated to spending their time “aggregating” or “curating” coverage by other publishers instead of conducting their own first-hand reporting. That translates into perceptions of lower professional status as well.
In such an environment, it isn’t surprising to find editorial quality slipping, contributing to a continuing downward spiral as audiences notice the change — and no doubt some turn elsewhere for news.
Last but not least, there’s the bias perception issue. Whether it’s true or not, some consumers of the news suspect that many publishers and journalists slant their news reporting. This creates even more of a dampening effect, even though in difficult times, the last thing publishers need is to alienate any portion of their audience.
How have your periodical and news reading habits changed in the past few years? Do you continue to “pay” for news delivery or have you joined the legions of others who have migrated to consuming free content in cyberspace?
(For more details from the Reuters research, you can sign up here to access the report.)
The slow death of America’s alt-weeklies can’t help but feel a little disheartening.
Over the years I’ve enjoyed reading the so-called “alternative press.” I’ve found it a fascinating sociological exercise, where certain fringe or controversial topics and points-of-view are often aired long before they enter more mainstream discourse.
But that was before the Internet changed everything.
Before the ubiquity of the Internet, the role that alternative weeklies played was arguably one of consequence. I can recall a time where one could encounter a dozen or more papers freely available in retail establishments such as record stores, coffeehouses and head shops in any medium-sized or larger North American city.
The editorial focus of these alt-weeklies covered the gamut – from alternative music, film and literature to environmental causes, LGBTQ interests and other social action priorities – not to mention various ethnic sub-groups.
Basically, any “ism” or group that was underrepresented in the mainstream press was a prime editorial focus and audience target of the alternative press.
One could chart the fortunes of cultural trends by the tone of the editorial writing in these publications – ranging from optimism and anticipation to depression or even rage – depending on the prevailing sociological or political currents of the day.
One friend of mine called it the “alt-weekly shrill-o-meter” – with the decibel level rising or falling with the fortunes of urban-progressive forces in America.
One of the foundational premises of alt-weeklies was that they should be available free to everyone, and therefore they were given wide distribution everywhere urban-aware people congregated.
The costs of production, printing and distribution were paid for through varied and frequently entertaining (of the voyeur sort) advertising.
Twin Cities-based pop music star Prince on the cover of City Pages (1980s).
Back in the late 1980s I was acquainted with a fellow who sold advertising for one such paper, Minneapolis-based City Pages. He earned a tidy-if-modest living selling advertising space for independent restaurants, funky specialty retailers, dive bars, performance spaces and the myriad music groups that were prevalent on the Twin Cities scene.
Other regular advertisers he relied on were the ones peddling more “questionable” fare like phone chat lines (of whatever persuasion one might prefer) and other services one can euphemistically characterize as “adult.” Some people contend that those advertisers did as much as anything to keep many an alt-weekly publication afloat in the pre-Internet days.
The point is, in their heyday the alternative press served an important purpose in American urban culture – even if it existed on the margins of society and played a somewhat less-than “conventionally upstanding” role in the process.
And another thing: These alt-weeklies reflected the personalities of the cities in which they operated. Despite the inevitable superficial similarities between them, I always recognized distinct aspects of each publication that made it a true product of its place. (Speaking personally, I found this to be the case in Phoenix, Nashville, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Baltimore, where I lived and worked from the 1970s to the 1990s.)
Unfortunately, the past 15 years haven’t been kind at all to this corner of the publishing world. With the rise of the Internet (where “anything goes” editorially is an understatement), coupled with inexorably increasing costs to prepare and distribute a paper-based news product, the business environment has turned into a classic squeeze-play for these alternative papers.
Adding to those problems is the challenge of shrinking advertising revenues. Publishers aren’t facing merely the general decline of revenues from would-be advertisers who can now publicize themselves just as effectively online at a lower cost. It’s also the near-total banishment of adult-oriented advertising, as alt-weeklies have been shamed into dropping those ads due to changing societal attitudes about the objectification and exploitation of women (and men, too).
Because of these dynamics, in recent years the main story about the alternative press has been a predictable (and dreary) one: how these papers have been dropping like flies. Whereas once there were a dozen or more alternative papers published in a typical urban market the size of a St. Louis or Pittsburgh, today there may be just one or two.
In smaller urban markets, there may be none at all.
The April 2, 2009 issue of the Missoula Independent.
Just this past week, the last non-student run alt-weekly publication in the entire state of Montana – the Missoula Independent – shut down for good. Employees received this warm-and-fuzzy communiqué from the publisher, Lake Enterprises:
“This is to give you notice that we are closing the Missoula Independent as of September 11, 2018. As of that time, the offices will be closed and you are not to report to work or come into the building.”
In a now-familiar story line, closing Montana’s last remaining alt-weekly publication came down to a simple calculation of revenues vs. costs. (It probably didn’t help that the magazine’s staff had voted to unionize earlier in the year.) And adding insult to injury, Lake Enterprises has also shuttered the publication’s archives – all 27 years of it.
Suddenly, it’s as if the Missoula Independent never existed.
This alt-weekly publication’s experience is similar to numerous others. Lee Banville, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Montana, had this to say about the Missoula Independent’s fate after the previous owner sold the publication to Lee Enterprises:
“There was – almost immediately – a pretty good chance this was going to happen. Other alt-weeklies that have been purchased by paper chains have been closed.”
Indeed, it’s a scenario that’s been playing out all over the country: An alt-weekly begins to struggle; new owners move in with the objective of saving the publication, only to cut staffing to near-zero or shut down completely when the old (or new) business model cannot be sustained.
The final issue of Baltimore City Paper (November 1, 2017).
During 2017 it was announced that the 40-year-old Baltimore City Paper would be publishing its last issue by the end of that year. That’s exactly what happened — by early November as it turned out.
And in fact, no publication is immune – even an iconic brand like New York City’s The Village Voice.
Earlier this month, the world witnessed the effective demise of that vaunted alt-weekly – a publication that some people consider the best exemplar of the genre.
The March 17, 1992 issue of The Village Voice.
Village Voice publisher Pete Barbey, who acquired the media property in 2015 and turned it into an online-only publication in 2017, has now shuttered the publication completely barely a year later.
“Today is kind of a sucky day,” Barbey reportedly told Village Voice employees in a phone conference call. “Due to, basically, business realities, we’re going to stop publishing new Village Voice material.”
At least in this case, a veritable treasure trove of Village Voice archival material will be digitized and remain available in cyberspace. Approximately half of the publication’s employees are being kept on for a period of time to carry out that mission … but no new Village Voice journalism will ever again be produced.
As anyone who knows me personally can attest, I don’t come out of the “counter-culture” movement – nor would I consider that many of my personal or political views reflect those that are typically espoused by the writers and editors of the alternative press.
And yet … I can’t help but empathize with the comments of freelance writer Melynda Fuller, who has opined:
Melynda Fuller
“The loss of alternative weeklies feels particularly personal. They act as mirrors for the complex lives lived in the cities where they publish. As more outlets are bought up, shut down or prevented from operating at full capacity, a much-needed connection is lost between that city’s culture and its residents.
Media is in the communications business. In a fractured time in our history, every connection counts.”
How about you? Do you feel any sense of nostalgia for the alternative press? Is there a particular favorite publication of yours that hasn’t been able to survive? Please share your thoughts with other readers.
The topic of “fake news” is all over the journalism ecosphere these days. It’s the subject of charges and countercharges tossed back and forth between politicians, industry specialists, the scientific community and the media.
In the current environment, even the slightest mistake in the media – no matter how innocuous – can turn into a contentious social media debate, whereas in the past it might have merited just a quick corrective notation as a follow-up.
These days, more often than not everyone gets sullied in the process – even innocent parties caught in the crossfire. So, it isn’t surprising that as the issue of “fake news” has risen in prominence, fact checking in journalism has taken on more importance than ever.
An IFCN global summit conference held in Madrid Spain in July 2017.
In 2015, the Poynter Institute established its International Fact-Checking Network to support initiatives aimed at ensuring better accuracy and journalistic best practices. In addition, over the past year the New York Times and several other prominent newspapers have brought more fact checkers on board – not merely to verify the information being reported, but also to work in “real time” with journalists – checking breaking news stories for accuracy as they are being produced.
These new fact-checking resources have been added without a lot of fanfare, but it’s a quiet acknowledgement that the “fake news” controversy is one that strikes at the heart of the press’s reputation.
But there’s a significant shortcoming: The new emphasis on fact-checking is consequential in just one corner of the news universe. The arena of “news” now extends well beyond traditional outlets to also encompass social media platforms, blogs and a myriad of informational websites that frequently offer a distinct “point of view” in their reporting.
So, while the fact-checking resurgence may help buttress the reputation of “legacy” news organizations such as high-profile newspapers, national TV networks and marquee online news sites, that doesn’t mean it’s reaching into the many other places where people encounter and consume news.
I suspect that the “fake news” phenomenon is going to be with us for the foreseeable future, despite all of the good-faith efforts to keep it in check.
When people stop reporting statistics on an industry, it could be a sign of increasing irrelevance.
Unfortunately, that seems to be what’s happening in the newspaper and print magazine segment, slowly but surely. Over the past few years, there’s been a steady decline in the number of benchmark reports being published about the industry.
In 2014, Publishers Information Bureau, the longstanding publisher of annual statistics on print advertising pages and ad revenues for magazine titles, ceased providing such data after migrating to a digital audience reporting format.
A year later, the Newspaper Association of America (aka the News Media Alliance) stopped reporting annual revenue figures for the newspaper industry.
Its counterpart in the radio media segment – the Radio Advertising Bureau – has done the same thing as well.
No longer reporting on advertising and revenues is one thing. But now the American Society of News Editors has stopped publishing annual estimates on the total number of journalists working in the newsrooms of America.
For years, those statistics have been a proxy for gauging the overall health of American journalism. And in recent years, what the stats were showing was something pretty ugly.
Between 2001 and 2015, ASNE’s statistics showed a decline in the number of journalists of more than 40%, with the total head count dropping from ~56,400 to ~32,900 over the period.
Perhaps it’s understandable that the news industry doesn’t want to chronicle the continuing decline of a once-vibrant and vaunted profession. But stopping the reporting of stats on it may be sending the wrong message – or adding to the implosion.
At a time of heightened incidences of “fake news” in the media, and when the business model for traditional journalism is increasingly precarious, to take the “real facts” of what’s happening and shove them under the carpet seems short-sighted at best.
By averting our eyes to what’s happening, it could well be exacerbating the trend lines. And then at some point, it won’t be that much of a stretch to think of journalism as a quaint, historical concept that is irrelevant in today’s world.
I hope we never get there. But at the rate we’re going, it’s looking more and more like the “great disappearing journalism.”
The panelists included Ted Koppel, former anchor of ABC News’ Nightline, Howard Kurtz, host of FAX News’ Media Buzz, and Judy Woodruff, co-anchor and managing editor of the PBS NewsHour show.
During the discussion, Ted Koppel expressed his dismay over the decline of journalism as a professional discipline, noting that the rise of social media and blogging have created an environment where news and information are no longer “vetted” by professional news-gatherers.
One can agree or disagree with Koppel about whether the “democratization” of media represents regression rather than progress, but one thing that cannot be denied is that the rise of “mobile media” has sparked a decline in the overall number of professional media jobs.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics can quantify the trend pretty convincingly. As summarized in a report published in the American Consumers Newsletter, until the introduction of smartphones in 2007, the effect of the Internet on jobs in traditional media, newspapers, magazines and book had been, on balance, rather slight.
To wit, between 1993 and 2007, U.S. employment changes in the following segments looked like this:
Book Industry: Net increase of ~700 jobs
Magazines: Net decline of ~300 jobs
Newspapers: Net decline of ~79,000 jobs
True, the newspaper industry had been hard hit, but other segments not nearly so much, and indeed there had been net increases charted also in radio, film and TV.
But with the advent of the smartphone, Internet and media access underwent a transformation into something personal and portable. Look how that has impacted on jobs in the same media categories when comparing 2007 to 2016 employment:
Book Industry: Net loss of ~20,700 jobs
Magazines: Net loss of ~48,400 jobs
Newspapers: Net loss of ~168,200 jobs
Of course, new types of media jobs have sprung up during this period, particularly in Internet publishing and broadcasting. But those haven’t begun to make up for the losses noted in the segments above.
According to BLS statistics, Internet media employment grew by ~125,300 between 2007 and 2016 — but that’s less than half the losses charted elsewhere.
All told, factoring in the impact of TV, radio and film, there has been a net loss of nearly 160,000 U.S. media jobs since 2007.
You’d be hard-pressed to find any other industry in the United States that has sustained such steep net losses over the past decade or so.
Much to the chagrin of old-school journalists, newspaper readership has plummeted in recent years — and with it newspaper advertising revenues (both classified and display).
The change in behavior is across the board, but it’s particularly age-based. These usage figures tell it all:
In 2007, ~33% of Americans age 18 to 34 read a daily newspaper … today it’s just 16%.
Even among Americans age 45 to 64, more than 50% read a daily newspaper in 2007 … today’s it’s around one third.
And among seniors age 65 and up, whereas two-thirds read a daily paper in 2007, today it’s just 50%.
With trends like that, the bigger question is how traditional media have been able to hang in there as long as they have. Because if it were simply dollars and cents being considered, the job losses would have been even steeper.
Perhaps we should take people like Jeff Bezos — who purchased the Washington Post newspaper not so long ago — at their word: Maybe they do wish to see traditional journalism maintain its relevance even as the world around it is changing rapidly.
Pew studies news reporting today ... and who's crafting it.You don’t have to be over 50 years old to be concerned about where the world might be heading when it comes to the generation of news stories and how they are vetted. As newspapers and other publishers have cut the size of their reporting and editorial staffs, the quality and consistency of news reporting has suffered in the eyes of many.
Recently, the Pew Research Center’sProject for Excellence in Journalism decided to take a look at this issue to see how it’s playing out on the ground by studying the “news ecosystem” of a single geographic region. The market chosen for the study – Baltimore, Maryland – just happens to be in my backyard, so I’ve been able to review the results with a good understanding of the dynamics of the region in question.
Pew’s Baltimore study evaluated the news environment during the summer of 2009 and came to some interesting conclusions. While the regional media landscape – print, web, radio and TV – has broadened considerably to include 53 separate outlets that regularly produce and broadcast some form of news content, much of what is truly “new news” came from the traditional news outlets and not from other media resources.
Six major local/regional news threads were studied, ranging from the Maryland state budget situation to crime trends, issues affecting the metro transit system, and the sale of the Senator Theater, a local historical landmark. An analysis of those news threads found that:
More than 80% of the news stories were repetitive – just rehashes of someone else’s original news content that contained no new information.
Of the ~20% of the news stories that did include new information, nearly all of the content came from traditional media, published either in conventional format (e.g., print) or in digital.
General-audience newspapers like the Baltimore Sun produced roughly half of the news stories, followed by local TV stations such as WBAL-TV contributing ~30% of the reporting.
Specialty business or legal newspaper outlets such as the Baltimore Business Journal and the Daily Record contributed just under of 15% of the news items, with the remaining news reporting coming primarily from local radio stations such as WYPR-FM.
Interestingly, about one-third of the news coverage generated by newspaper publishers appeared on the Internet rather than in their print editions.
Thus, the Pew study demonstrates that “new news” is coming from the same sources as before, led by the local papers. But another clear picture to emerge from the Baltimore profile is that the scaling back of editorial staffs has resulted in less original reporting, with much heavier reliance on simply republishing stories that have appeared elsewhere.
At the same time, new interactive capabilities are giving “we the people” an unparalleled broadcast platform via the ability to post feedback and commentary, not to mention utilizing Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms as a megaphone.
In today’s “everyone’s an editor because they can write” environment, no one can stop us from broadcasting our own opinions and analysis to the world. But that’s not the same thing as a properly sourced, properly vetted news story. And that’s what Pew sees falling away.
For many people – not just journalists but also business and tech writers – the Associated Press’ AP Stylebook is something of a Bible when it comes to adhering to proper presentation of the written English language.
Nones Notes 