Link to the full Pew Research Center study

As the charts in my previous post don't all display properly, here's a link to the full article by the Pew Research Center: http://journalism.org/analysis_report/new_washington_press_corps

Journalism jobs going and coming

Pew Research Center
Project for Excellence in Journalism

The New Face of Washington's Press Corps

As Mainstream Media Decline, Niche and Foreign Outlets Grow

February 11, 2009

From: To:

Read the headlines and it would be easy to conclude that as the new Obama administration takes power, facing an array of domestic and international crises, it will be monitored by a substantially depleted Washington press corps.

It isn't exactly so.

The corps of journalists covering Washington D.C. at the dawn of the Obama administration is not so much smaller as it is dramatically transformed. And that transformation will markedly alter what Americans know and not know about the new government, as well as who will know it and who will not.

A careful accounting of the numbers, plus detailed interviews with journalists, lawmakers, press association executives and government officials, reveals that what we once thought of as the mainstream news media serving a general public have indeed shrunk -- perhaps far more than many would imagine. A roll call of the numbers may shock.

But as the mainstream media have shrunk, a new sector of niche media has grown in its place, offering more specialized and detailed information than the general media to smaller, elite audiences, often built around narrowly targeted financial, lobbying and political interests. Some of these niche outlets are financed by an economic model of high-priced subscriptions, others by image advertising from big companies like defense contractors, oil companies and mobile phone alliances trying to influence policy makers.

In addition, the contingent of foreign reporters in Washington has grown to nearly 10 times the size it was a generation ago. And the picture they are sending abroad of the country is a far different one than the world received when the information came mainly via American based wire services and cable news.

Consider a few examples:

ClimateWire, an on-line newsletter launched less than a year ago to cover the climate policy debate for a small, high-end audience, deploys more than twice the reporting power around Capitol Hill as does the Hearst News Service, which provides Washington news for the chain's 16 daily newspapers.

The Washington bureau of Mother Jones, a San Francisco-based, left-leaning non-profit magazine, which had no reporters permanently assigned to the nation's capital a decade ago, today has seven, about the same size as the now-reduced Time magazine bureau.

The Washington bureau of the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera, which opened a modest bureau when George W. Bush took office eight years ago, now has 105 staff members in its various services accredited to cover Congress, a staff similar in size to that of CBS News -- both radio and television -- at 129.

Or consider that the organization with the largest number of journalists accredited to the press galleries Congress is CQ, a news operation that produces an array of on-line and print publications with names like CQ Budget Tracker and CQ Senate Watch. Its 149 reporters eclipse the number of Hill-accredited journalists at the Associated Press (134), and congressional staffers dealing with accreditation say CQ has since surpassed even the hometown Washington Post in numbers. A decade ago, CQ had 40.

Collectively, the implications of these changes are considerable. For those who participate in the American democracy, the "balance of information" has been tilted away from voters along Main Streets thousands of miles away to issue-based groups that jostle for influence daily in the corridors of power.

In 2008, newspapers from only 23 states had reporters based in Washington covering the federal government, according to the listings of Hudson's Washington News Media Contacts Directory. That is down by a third from 35 states listed in the directory's 1985 edition -- and that was before a host of further cutbacks late in 2008.

As New York Times Washington Bureau Chief Dean Baquet put it, "It concentrates knowledge in the hands of those who want to influence votes. It means [for example] the lobbyist knows more about Senator [Richard] Shelby than the people of Alabama. That's not good for democracy."

These are the conclusions of a three-month study conducted by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and journalist Tyler Marshall on the scale, scope and nature of the Washington press corps at the beginning of the new administration. Marshall conducted the research and reporting. The report was written by the Project and Marshall jointly.

Among the findings:

• A significant decline in the reporting power of mainstream media. The poster child of this trend is the daily newspaper, historically the backbone of American journalism, whose robust Washington presence and aggressive reporting has uncovered scandals that toppled a president, sent members of Congress to jail and does the daily job of covering congressional delegations and federal agencies. Since the 1980s, the number of newspapers accredited to cover Congress has fallen by two-thirds. The number claiming a presence in Washington generally, according to capitol directories, has fallen by more than half.



• The decline in mainstream press has been nearly matched by a sharp growth among more narrowly focused special interest or niche media. The number of specialty newspapers, magazines and newsletters has risen by half since the mid-1980s. Newsletters alone are up nearly two-thirds.
• A marked jump in foreign media now represented in Washington. When the U.S. State Department first opened a Foreign Press Center for representatives of non-U.S. media in 1968, there were about 160 foreign correspondents reporting from Washington. In October, 2008, there were nearly 10 times as many. With some notable exceptions, this growth has been more a broadening than a deepening of coverage to international audiences. Foreign journalists tend to fare poorly in the fight for access to key federal government decision-makers and consequently, they break few important stories. Still, their presence in such large numbers has changed the way the world gets its news from Washington, and the implications of their presence for America's image in the world are considerable.

The shift from media aimed at a general public toward one serving more specialized and elite interests also comes as important parts of the federal government -- most notably arms of the executive branch -- have become more circumspect, more secretive, and more combative in their dealings with the media. As a result, the traditional -- and natural -- adversarial relationship between the media and the federal government has hardened perceptibly at a time when the mainstream Washington-based media have weakened. Symbolic of the state of this relationship, George W. Bush is the first president since Theodore Roosevelt not to address the National Press Club during his years in office.

Read the full report at journalism.org

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1. As of January 2009, Time had eight in its Washington bureau, down from more than 30 in the mid-1980s.

2. This means accredited to cover the 110^th Congress, whose term concluded at the end of 2008.

MIT Tops Rankings of University Web Sites

The Cybermetrics Lab, a research group based in Spain, has released the latest edition of its biannual Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, which seeks to measure “the performance and impact of universities through their Web presence.”

According to the group’s Web site, the rankings—which Cybermetrics began publishing in 2004—were originally conceived as a way of promoting open access to academic materials online. It comes as no surprise, then, that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose OpenCourseWare project boasts the world’s largest collection of free teaching materials, tops the list.

Wordle of Senate Stimulus

Thought you'd enjoy this. Click here for a larger version. It's from the summary of the Senate version of the stimulus bill out of the Senate Appropriations Committee. I went to http://www.wordle.net/ to create it. You can find the full version of the Senate bill here and a wordle of that here.

World of Warcraft and Your Resume

Well, maybe not yours, but there's a piece in The Washington Post today by Darren Gladstone from PC World that discusses the transferable skills from World of Warcraft (WoW) and other multiplayer online video games. At last year's NACE, I heard a story about a guy applying for a job at Yahoo who had a terrible resume, but included his rank in WoW. A sympathetic hiring manager brought him in for an interview and he got the job.

Organized and led my 50-member guild through three successful back-to-back Nexus runs." You don't see that written on anyone's résumé, but apparently some folks do list the level and class of their World of Warcraft characters. This might seem a little far-fetched, but associate professor--and director of MIT's Education Arcade Program--Eric Klopfer says that a number of recent studies have examined what practical skills a person can pick up by playing electronic games. Can you legitimately learn something from WoW besides efficient techniques for slinging fireballs at foes? Klopfer points to Constance Steinkeuhler's work at UW Wisconsin. She is "showing that people are developing and applying all kinds of useful skills in World of Warcraft--data collection and analysis, collaboration, planning, resource management and even team management." Remove the "WoW" identification from the place of employment, and all of these accomplishments look fantastic on a résumé.

Transferable skills are transferable skills!

Photo by Christian Labarca.