b’more & the local news
Next American City just posted a quick review I wrote about a recent Project for the Excellence in Journalism report on the local news media in Baltimore. You can check out my post here. (Thanks to NAC for the nifty picture to the left, btw…)
The PEJ report is an interesting piece of work. Basically, it is a very ambitious attempt at taking a week-long holistic cross-section of all the local news media in Baltimore. It has limitations, outlined in a couple detailed blog posts a commenter referenced on NAC, but it’s still a useful piece of work. Put simply, for all the opinionating done by old- and new-media folks about the fate of local news, nobody ever takes the time to do real, empirical research. At least, that’s what I’ve been saying for years now…and now PEJ has at least tried to do so. I have to admit, I’m a little peeved – the PEJ report sort of steals some of my dissertation (and very, very slowly impending publication) thunder. This article – drawn from my dissertation and now in press with Information, Communication & Society – is sort of my take on the same ground that PEJ is covering, but in Philadelphia. My assessment of new media is a little more sanguine…