State of the News Media

The economy — and more specifically the Occupy Wall Street protests — reclaimed the top spot as the most-covered news story last week, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The PEJ found 22% of last week’s newshole — on TV, radio, newspapers and websites — focused on the economy; a third of that on Occupy Wall Street.

The 2012 election was the next most-covered story, followed by the death of Steve Jobs and the acquittal of Amanda Knox.

If you can answer that question — via a video — then this is for you.

The Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School is calling on aspiring journalists, filmmakers and media consumers to help them think about the future of news. Create a video of no more than two minutes that answers the question, “What is the future of news?”

The winner gets $2,000 plus an awesome weekend at Harvard, attending the 25th anniversary gala of the Shorenstein Center.

But beware, the judges are tough: they include Rick Kaplan, former CBS, MSNBC, and CNN executive, now EP of “This Week with Christiane Amanpour,” and Mark Whitaker, the former Newsweek and NBC News executive, now EVP and ME at CNN.

Here’s more on the contest, the rules and deadlines.

Only in America would an elected official call a press conference to confirm the identity of his penis.

And then have that penis knock Katie Couric off the news cycle.

After 10 consecutive days of ‘Weinergate’ coverage, I am convinced that its importance lies not with what it says about Rep. Anthony Weiner’s genitals but with what is says about us.

When the Democrat from New York yesterday manned up and admitted it was his underwear-encased, tumescent penis pictured in the notorious tweet, it gave new meaning to the phrase “member of Congress.” As he walks softly through those corridors of power, he carries a big stick.

Shooting fish in a barrel, I admit. But has there ever been such an unfortunate pairing of surname and scandal? How could anyone not gorge on double-entendres when the perp’s name is a euphemism for the very source of the imbroglio?

Simple answer: You can’t.

Weiner’s fall from grace, while titillating, reeks of pathos. Was anything noble rescued from the

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The world of cable news was healthy financially, even as ratings slipped from 2010, according to Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism 2011 “State of the Media” report, which was released today.

The PEJ report on cable news channels is worth reading in full, but here are some of the key takeaways.

The biggest takeaway is that while ratings were down across the board in 2010 for the big three cable news channels, revenues and profits were up.

Compere this chart showing overall primetime viewers for the channels:

To this one showing profits at the channels:

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2010 was an important year for the broadcast network news organizations, with radical transformations made to ensure some level as economic stability, while most of the key programs continued to see declines in viewership. That is the takeaway from the 2011 “State of the Media” report from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

PEJ’s network news report discusses at some length the efforts by ABC News and CBS News to streamline their operations in the face of a troubled economy. ABC and CBS both had substantial layoffs in their news divisions last year.

The report also looks at the evening newscasts, network morning shows and newsmagazines, and finds than nearly all were down in most measures compared to the previous year.

As the report notes, that is part of a trend going back 30 years, with the evening newscasts facing the most precipitous decline:

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The Atlantic has a long piece about the current state of journalism from James Fallows. Encompassing all forms of media, Fallows examines a bit of the history of journalism, and where he thinks it is going.

Television news is a major part of it, not surprisingly. Fox News Channel CEO Roger Ailes exemplifies where Fallows believes journalism may be going in the future:

But the new culture also creates positive opportunities—as, it’s worth saying again, every previous disruption has. An odd symbol of the new possibilities is Roger Ailes, the guiding force behind Fox News since its start.

To people who are worried about journalism’s future, Ailes would seem a perverse symbol of anything positive. The “news” system he has created is correctly understood to be a political rather than a journalistic operation, and to be free of inner conflict about “getting it right” or “going too far.” (Here’s the thought-experiment test: What assertion from Glenn Beck on his broadcasts would finally lead Ailes or his producers to say, “Glenn, are you sure?” “Real” news operations don’t always get the right answer to that question, but asking it is how they can think of themselves as journalists rather than propagandists.) But to me, Ailes is an instructive example because of what he shows about the way discourse will be conducted in the coming journalistic era…

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Former CBS Marketwatch CEO Larry Kramer blogs about MSNBC and Fox News on his blog, C-Scape. In a nutshell, Kramer argues that today’s busy media consumer, lacking the time to dig in to issues themselves, instead relies on cognitive shortcuts to familiarize themselves with what the “correct” opinions are, based on their preexisting ideology.

In Kramer’s opinion, Fox News and MSNBC are at the heart of this problem, which he says is “a bad thing for democracy” and leads to a “less-informed but more opinionated public.”

It is, frankly, easier for someone to turn on either Fox News or MSNBC, listen to the frequent opinion expressed, right or left, and benchmark themselves against that opinion rather than forming their own opinion based on independent thinking.

So if a new Supreme Court Justice was named tomorrow, more people would check out what Fox and MSNBC said about him or her, and then quickly decide whether or not they were in favor or opposed to approving the candidate. “If Fox (or MSNBC) like him, so do I,” a viewer can decide, (or the opposite) based totally on that viewer’s political stance and how it relates to Fox or MSNBC.

Kramer is an incredibly smart and well-respected TV executive, but in this case he seems to miss the mark in at least two ways:

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Mashable’s Vadim Lavrusik makes 10 predictions for the news media in 2011. It’s a compelling list anyone who works in TV news should read. No. 6 jumped out at us:

6. The Death of the ‘Foreign Correspondent’

Lavrusik, who is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s journalism school, argues that news organizations will rely “heavily on stringers and, in many cases, social content uploaded by the citizenry.” Of course, we’re seeing that happen already. Over the past few years the U.S. network have either cut back, combined resources, joined with foreign partners or, if they are expanding, networks are doing it by capitalizing on digital technology with one-person operations.

And it’s interesting to note that these predictions come as NBC’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel is in the U.S. filling in for NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell on her daytime MSNBC show. It’s a holiday fill-in to be sure, and a respite for Engel who’s been NBC’s man in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and beyond going on 9 years. But, what will become of the foreign correspondent in 2011? We’ll take a look next Dec. 30.

NYT’s Brian Stelter expands on the updated Project for Excellence in Journalism report about how much — or how little — coverage the war in Afghanistan is getting. The Pew Research Center’s PEJ report found major news outlets have been devoting 4% of the news to the war, so far this year.

One senior foreign correspondent for television, when told of the 4 percent coverage figure, said he was impressed — given the relatively small contingent of foreign journalists in Afghanistan.

“There are like seven of us there,” remarked the correspondent, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to call into question his network’s commitment to the war.

Stelter talked with executives from several TV news networks who echo a familiar refrain:

“Inside the United States, you’ve got audiences that are beginning to suffer from war fatigue,” said Tony Maddox, who oversees international coverage for CNN.

Mr. Maddox said CNN had “worked very hard” to make the war resonate with viewers, sometimes through human interest stories. “It’s always the eternal challenge in terms of international coverage: making the important interesting,” he said.

On Friday we shared Ted Koppel‘s WaPo op-ed with you, in which the former “Nightline” anchor wrote:

We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of [Keith] Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly – individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.

Tonight, at least one of those hosts, Olbermann, will respond. He Tweeted yesterday:

FYI Special Comment tomorrow night: Koppel, False Equivalence, and his part in the real “death of news”