Newsworthiness

NEW YORK -- Americans say the media is to blame for the saturation of celebrity coverage on TV, a new survey finds. The Pew Research Center for People & the Press said Thursday that 87% of respondents said celebrity scandals get way too much ink and airtime. Only 8% think the media gets the balance between celebrity and serious news right, while 2% told the surveyors that there wasn't enough...

The victims of last year's war between Hezbollah and Israel –on both sides– were treated as statistics not people. Although human victims of the war were mentioned in one out of every five articles, they were mostly covered as mere facts and figures. Almost 91 per cent of the articles covered killed and wounded civilians in a very or somewhat impersonal manner, a new study has found. Civilian...

As a science journalist I know of several important science stories that will soon make headlines but I can't tell you about them. Just like thousands of science journalists all over the world I have agreed to put aside my instincts to get the story out as soon as possible, preferably before anyone else, and sit on them, sometimes for over a week. This is because many, though not all, journals...

On Friday, journalists at the Glasgow-based Herald, Sunday Herald and Evening Times newspapers walked out, launching the first Scottish newspaper strike since the bitter Aberdeen Journals dispute of 1989-90. Officially, owner Newsquest's desire for compulsory redundancies provided the grounds for action, but supporters of the strike say this is a battle for the soul of The Herald and part of a...

Today's news world is a political junkie's oyster. Cable TV offers CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and C-SPAN. The Washington Post, BBC online, The Note and many, many more news Web sites are only a click away. But that's where they remain for many Americans. Decades into the "information age," the public is as uninformed as before the rise of cable television and the Internet. Greater access to media...

The hype about MySpace, YouTube, and Internet campaigning is turning out to be just that — hype. Social networking, blogs and political parties' websites are affecting voter opinion in the United States far less than the recent buzz would suggest. Few people use them for political information, and even fewer trust them. According to a recent Nucleus survey, traditional print media is far more...

With their grit and drive, they could be making headlines. But this group of women from Uttar Pradesh write them instead in their fortnightly newspaper Khabar Lahariya that goes to 200 villages and represents the best in journalistic courage and ethics. Meera, Shanti, Kavita, Mithilesh... from the Chitrakoot and Banda districts in the heart of India's most populous state are award-winning...

Most of America’s teens and young adults do not follow the daily news closely, a new report has revealed. Younger Americans are relatively more attuned to soft news stories (such as the death of Anna Nicole Smith) than to hard news stories (such as the congressional vote on the troop surge in Iraq). In many cases, teens and young adults learned of soft news stories through another person rather...

NEW YORK: Harvard University has released a study that concludes that 60 percent of American teenagers pay little attention to daily news, Reuters reports. After interviewing 1,800 people from January through March, researchers at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government found that 28 percent of Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 said they pay “almost no attention” to daily news...

A lighter and paper shredder helped make Mika Brzezinski the symbol of television journalism's guilt trip about Paris Hilton. Brzezinski used both to destroy a script calling for her to read about Hilton's release from jail on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program recently. Part serious, part an act, it has become an Internet sensation. More than 2 million people have watched a clip of the incident...