Report: U.S. Media Focus Narrows

U.S. news organizations, with shrinking revenue and growing competition, may be foregoing broad reporting for the ultra-local, a watchdog group said Monday.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism said the struggle to maintain a recognizable brand drives this so-called hyper-local coverage in newspapers, encourages citizen journalism on the Internet and fosters opinion-driven television personalities, the Los Angeles Times said.

"The consequences of this narrowing of focus involve more risk than we sense the business has considered," said the report by the project, an arm of the Washington-based Pew Research Center. "Concepts like hyper-localism, pursued in the most literal sense, can be marketing speak for simply doing less."

Traditional newsrooms remain the primary information pipeline. The report suggested that news organizations be more aggressive about mining revenue for work, such as forming consortiums to force Internet "aggregators," which compile content from other sources, to pay licensing fees for news and information, the report said.

The report said the approximately 4,000 newspaper journalism jobs lost since 2000, coupled with a smaller number of pages devoted to news, would "suggest that American newspapers have reduced their ambitions."

11:43 PM, March 12th 2007

*QUESTINS FOR DISCUSSION

How do you think that the "narrowing" of US news affects citizens?

Can you think of examples that you have seen that show that US news is becoming more local and opinionated as opposed to broad and objective?

If US Citizens get to choose where they get their news, and the television news is driven by opinionated television personalities, do you think that Americans will get an adequate objective viewpoint to make decisions for themselves, or will they simply watch the news that best fits their pre-conceived opinion on things?