{"id":3598,"date":"2010-03-15T23:59:22","date_gmt":"2010-03-16T03:59:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/?p=3598"},"modified":"2010-03-16T00:59:35","modified_gmt":"2010-03-16T04:59:35","slug":"a-thought-on-news-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/15\/a-thought-on-news-content\/","title":{"rendered":"A Thought On News Content"},"content":{"rendered":"

I smiled cynically at the news this morning that around 55% of the editorial content in newspapers–actually the results are only for Aussie papers, but I’m willing to believe they’re representative of The West in general–is actually repurposed PR<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I say cynically for two reasons: 1) because the article has a tone of shock, as if this fact weren’t something that anyone who’s paid any attention didn’t already know, and 2) because that number, 55%, is the percentage of editorial content, not the percentage of the paper’s content–people like me who were exposed to the best documentary ever made in Canada<\/a>You can totally watch it all online<\/a>. Except for Lachlan, since it may give him an aneurysm.<\/footnote> at the right age will never hear any statistics about percent content of anything in a newspaper without a constant awareness that editorial content is the smaller part of the content<\/a> even in the Serious Papers. (Think “100% of the meat in our burgers is beef”–it sounds good, but it doesn’t say anything about what percentage of the burger is meat<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

So, at best 40% of the paper is editorial content. That 40% is 55% (or more) rewritten press releases–so you’ve got 22% of the paper composed of unlabelled PR and no way for the casual reader to determine the actual source of it or the agenda of the source. You’ve got 18% of the paper left that could theoretically represent ‘reporting’. Now, bear in mind that this includes all that lifestyle garbage, all the sports results, etc, and think about how much of a paper is actually something you can reasonably call “news”. (And that’s without even getting into the follow-on question of how much of that news is just reprinted AP wire stuff, or follow-on from that about and how that whole syndicated model is rendered ridiculous by the Internet.)<\/p>\n

Of course, in defense of newspapers, as bad as those numbers are, I suspect they’re better than TV news.<\/p>\n

(This is where I would get all nerd triumphalist about the Internet as news source, if I weren’t so depressed about the polarizing and bias-reinforcing effect of user-selected news sources.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I smiled cynically at the news this morning that around 55% of the editorial content in newspapers–actually the results are only for Aussie papers, but I’m willing to believe they’re representative of The West in general–is actually repurposed PR. I say cynically for two reasons: 1) because the article has a tone of shock, as if this fact weren’t something… Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[391,377],"class_list":["post-3598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-one-and-done","tag-chomsky","tag-newspapers","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-W2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3598"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3605,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3598\/revisions\/3605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}