PEJ Study: Newspapers, Broadcast Outlets Still Account For Most New Information

95% of local stories with "significant new information" from traditional media

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 1/11/2010 10:41:01 AM

For all talk of divergent local media sources online, almost all of the news that contains actual new information continues to come from newspapers and broadcast outlets, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

PEJ looked at all the news reported in the City of Baltimore over one week and found 53 different news outlets that regularly produced local news, including blogs and independent news sites. It then drilled down into six key storylines

Of those, 95% of the stories with "significant new information" came from traditional media, most of them newspapers (including specialty papers).  TV and radio earned a combined 35%. The other new media outlets combined produced just 7% of the enterprise reporting.

But even though the sources may have been traditional, the delivery often wasn't. A third of TV and radio stories came from their online incarnations, and almost half the print stories were from their digital side.

According to the study, there were two stories broken by new media, one from a police Twitter feed, and another when a local blog reported on a plan to bug buses to discourage crime, though a newspaper's pick-up of the blog story led to the plan being tabled, according to PEJ.