Newsworthiness

NEW YORK: When The New York Times on July 16 broke the story of a 2003 State Department memo that had become a key element in the Valerie Plame leak investigation, the paper scored a major exclusive. But when The Washington Post hit newsstands that very same Saturday, it had its own version of the same story. It even credited the Times for the same-day scoop. Welcome to life under the Washington...

CBS News has launched Public Eye, an unprecendented effort to bring transparency to the editorial operations of a major news network, and part of CBS News' attempt to regain the trust of the public after last year's "Memogate." Public Eye is built around a blog format, in which the journalists who make the editorial decisions at CBS News and CBSNews.com will now be asked to explain and answer...

NEW DELHI, September 12: It's time for some bad news for politics-centric newspapers. Indians prefer news about entertainment to that about current affairs. Worse, even sports is preferred more. Still worse, Indians prefer speed of news delivery to depth of analysis as far as news is concerned. According to a study by leading global market research company, Synovate, 61 per cent consumers in India...

Imagine, if you will, James Cameron reporting from the Berlin Airlift today. There he is in a bar, about to order another whisky, when his phone rings. "James, desk here, Bild website are saying flights are due to start. Can you re-nose your piece?" Or William Russell in the Crimea, receiving yet another email from the office: "Bill, Sky coverage of Charge pretty thorough. Can you stick to the...

NEW DELHI, September 8: A new report has provided compelling evidence of a link between media consolidation and broadcast indecency in the US. As leading broadcasters such as Clear Channel Communications and Viacom Inc’s Infinity Broadcasting have bought more stations, they have frequently replaced local programming with shock jocks such as Howard Stern and Bubba the Love Sponge, which are prone...

NEW YORK (AP): What do you call people who have been driven from their homes with only the clothes on their backs, unsure if they will ever be able to return, and forced to build a new life in a strange place? News organizations are struggling for the right word. Many, including The Associated Press, have used "refugee" to describe those displaced by the wrath of Hurricane Katrina. But the choice...

NEW DELHI, August 29: The sports sections of America’s newspapers are a passive and reactive space, one dominated by game previews and recaps with little room for enterprise reportage, a new study of the sports section fronts has found. The definition of "sports" on the section fronts of America’s newspapers is a narrow one, focused less on breaking new ground and seeking new topics than on mining...

NEW DELHI, August 29: Despite rising numbers of women in the workforce and in journalism schools, the news of the day still largely comes from a male perspective even in a country like the United States, according to a new study of press coverage in that country. A broad look across the American news media over the course of nine months revealed that men are relied on as sources in the news more...

British journalism is in decline and newspapers and journalists have only themselves to blame. For the decline – in newspaper circulations and profitability – to be arrested, journalists and the media outlets for which they write must, somehow, regain the trust of their readers. But, given what is published on a daily basis, this is going to be very difficult to achieve. These may sound like the...

NEW YORK: The American public may be more interested in national security than ever, but they feel that the media and the U.S. military keep them poorly informed about what they need to know. At least that's what a new poll shows, which finds that 60% of Americans believe they do not get enough information about military matters to make educated decisions. A McCormick Tribune Foundation/Gallup...