Survey Indicates Public Journalism Progress, But…
Fewer journalists today see the press as too cynical. And, compared with five years ago, fewer also see journalists as out of touch with their audiences.
Both of these are areas that reform movements such as public journalism–which was concerned with trying to reconnect journalists and the public–focused on.
That’s a direct quote from commentary addressing the Journalist Survey conducted for the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the News Media 2004 report. More than 500 national and local reporters, editors and executives were surveyed.
However, here is the downside of the survey:
The percentage of national journalists who have a great deal of confidence in the ability of the American public to make good decisions has declined by more than 20 points since 1999. Confidence among local journalists has fallen as well.
The commentary writers, Bill Kovach, Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell, found this troubling, adding:
A cynical view of the public becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that leads journalists to produce a shallower product because they think the public cannot handle anything else.
They end their commentary with this rather pessimistic insight:
If five years ago we saw the seeds of change, today we see a trend toward fragmentation among all players involved – journalists, executives and the public.
Not only do they disagree on solutions, they seem further apart on identifying the problems.
I have only concentrated here on the survey as it plays to public journalism. There is much more worth reading. For example, this about the Internet:
the Internet should be a glimmer of hope, and in many ways it is. The State of the News Media 2004 report found that the Internet was one of the few places where news audiences were growing. Just as importantly, young people sought out news online in the same percentages as older people. Privately, some of the country’s top newspaper executives report that they now have more readers on the web than they do in print…Yet the survey points to something troubling here that online journalists are privately frustrated by. The Internet is the most likely place in journalism to be suffering staff cuts (62%).
