The show Frontline on PBS brought up some interesting topics in its “News War” segment. One of the first things I noticed was the level of newsworthiness among current news anchors and news outlets. On local television channels there is a fair amount of solid journalism and reporting, but on major national outlets, there has been an obvious switch to more opinion-based programming. People want to watch news with people who share their opinions and now, with so many different outlets, they can find exactly what they want.
Another interesting thing to me was the loss revenue from classified ads for newspapers as people switch to online sources like Craigslist. Craigslist offers better exposure, free advertising to a larger audience, than a traditional newspaper’s classified ad that charges people who place ads by lines or characters. It has led to a significant shift to online sources because it just makes more sense to advertise for free if you can. A side affect of this is other advertisers switching where they spend their money. Instead of placing ads with newspapers in their classified ads or in other sections, advertisers can reach more people if they buy space on Monster.com, Craigslist or other similar web sites.
The most important topic I saw was the conglomeration of newspapers. It doesn’t make sense to me that only a few major corporations own a significant majority of the newspapers in the United States. Local ownership makes so much more sense because a local owner will have the community and the individual paper’s best interest in mind when making decisions. A large corporation who owns papers in Florida, California and Illinois can’t always have each paper’s best interests in mind when making decisions because each paper has much different needs.
In all, there are many significant problems with the way news is presented and if news coverage continues on the same path, it will only make bigger and more problems.
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