PJNet

Here is the press release from a new study just released by The Project for Excellence in Journalism entitled: “Extra! Extra!”

The study found that readers of the new commuter tabloids will be more likely get a basic outline of the news about a broader range of topics during their subway ride to work than they would from reading the section fronts of the
broadsheets.

Yet readers of the tabloids would be hard pressed to get much in the way of sourcing, impact or even more than one side of the story-even on the top stories of the day. And despite their supposed youth orientation, the new tabs do surprisingly little to pioneer making news events more relevant to new audiences-fewer than one in ten stories even tried, basically the same percentage found in the section-front stories in the broadsheets.

Among the PEJ study’s findings:

–The tabs offer little for anyone who wanted to learn about their own community. Only 22% dealt with their hometown-compared with 53% of the broadsheets’ section fronts.

–And only 17% of the tabloid stories, indeed, were even original reporting. The vast majority of stories were wire copy-72%. That compares with 93% original reporting in the broadsheet section-front stories.

–Not only are the new youth oriented tabloids light on tailoring their narratives to the young, only 16% of the stories in the youth-oriented tabloids are about the coveted 18-35 year-olds-and most of those are about celebrities.

–The Washington, DC Examiner, independently owned and aimed more at traditional newspaper readers, is something of a hybrid. It puts a higher emphasis on local news than the youth oriented tabs and offers more original copy and longer stories. Still, its content does not contain much more in the way of sourcing, context or multiple viewpoints than the youth tabloids.

“These papers frankly did less than some might have expected to make the news more relevant to a younger generation,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project.

“But the new breed of tabloids also may have created something to help newsrooms struggling with smaller staffs and fewer resources. Combining the broader news summary of the tabloids with the depth of the broadsheets on the key stories of the day may point to a way to still cover the waterfront and perhaps serve their readers even better.”

This entry was posted on Monday, December 12th, 2005 at 11:22 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.