Anchored to paper

By ERIC DEGGANS, Times TV/Media Critic
Published October 28, 2007

Critics dissecting Reality Show, the new book by Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz on the network anchor wars, have lighted on a host of issues.

Whether the book is relevant in the digital news universe. Gossipy scoops like the news that NBC anchor Brian Williams was once offered Dan Rather's job at CBS during a covert meeting in the Harvard Club. And the catty observation that one scoop - Rather threatened to leak his infamous story on President Bush's National Guard service to the New York Times to force its broadcast on 60 Minutes II - was previously featured in a 2004 book on the venerated newsmagazine.

But this media critic's eye was caught by a different tale: the extent to which the nightly newscasts are influenced by the biggest newspapers and wire services.

It's hardly news to most journalists that TV operations, which generally have less reporting manpower than newspapers, often use newspaper stories to spark their own reporting efforts.

But Kurtz documents with relentless detail how big stories from the New York Times, Associated Press, USA Today, Washington Post and other big newspapers and wire services were often repeated by the network newscasts days later, with no credit given to the original reports.

On March 8, 2006, Kurtz noted stories on the medication Ambien causing "sleep driving" on CBS and NBC's newscasts, a story the New York Times had featured that morning. Two days later, ABC featured another story from the March 8 New York Times - how technical problems with the SAT exams left thousands of students with unfairly low scores.

Through the rest of that month, Kurtz documents about 10 other stories reported by the networks which had been prominently featured in national newspapers beforehand - from the rise of the publicly developed online encyclopedia Wikipedia to the rising price of some cancer drugs.

"In siphoning news from the morning papers without attribution, the newscasts were trying to give the impression that they were more far-ranging and imaginative than was in fact the case," Kurtz wrote. "The anchors were professional copycats, always on the lookout for opportunities."

While some fear that the shrinking staffs of news outlets around the country will doom the newspaper business, I fear the opposite.

Even in a world exploding with digital media, the nation's biggest newspapers and wire services may set the country's news agenda more completely than they have in a long time.

Consider, for example, the trend known as hyperlocalism.

A buzzword gaining steam in newspapers over recent years, hyperlocalism involves news outlets narrowing their focus to extremely local concerns - issues presumably no one can cover better than the local newspaper.

With shrinking advertising revenues and increasing economic pressures, regional newspapers such as the Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News and Philadelphia Inquirer have adopted this mantra. It dovetails with a principle that author Chris Anderson The Long Tail calls the "Vanishing Point Theory of News": news audiences care less about an event as its distance increases from them.

Forget about sending reporters to Myanmar or even having a movie critic who writes about big national films. Instead, hyperlocal news outlets focus on more parochial concerns, assuming that consumers are getting their national news from outlets that still make money providing it, such as the big national newspapers and TV networks.

We've even seen the trend touch down here in Florida. On Monday, the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale eliminated its national/foreign desk, dispersing staffers to other parts of the news operation.

That news follows tales of job cuts this year at the Orlando Sentinel, Tampa Tribune and Sarasota Herald Tribune. Even here at the St. Petersburg Times, though we maintain a Washington bureau, a Latin America correspondent and a senior international correspondent, we have lost a national reporter while facing the same economic pressures as every other newspaper.

"With fundamentals shifting, we sense the news business entering a new phase heading into 2007 - a phase of more limited ambition," wrote the Project for Excellence in Journalism in its annual State of the News Media study released earlier this year. "Rather than try to manage decline, many news organizations have taken the next step of starting to redefine their appeal and their purpose based on diminished capacity."

Paradoxically, this shrinkage only increases the influence of big newspapers and information providers such as Reuters, the Associated Press, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Indeed, former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll told PBS's Frontline that an estimated 85 percent of original reporting done in the United States is done first by newspapers.

Increasingly, it falls to these news organizations to provide the data foundation supporting a host of other information outlets - from blogs to radio programs, TV newscasts and regional newspaper pages.

The danger is that quality smaller news organizations, which may see national events with a different eye, can be squeezed out of the nation's news equation. Case in point: Knight Ridder's Washington bureau, credited with spot-on skeptical reporting regarding weapons of mass destruction in prewar Iraq before their parent company's purchase by McClatchy Newspapers last year.

Some experts fear the trend may only worsen, amid rumors the Federal Communications Commission may loosen rules limiting consolidation of big media - targeting a law barring companies from owning a newspaper and TV station in the same market.

Andrew Tyndall, an analyst of network news broadcasts in New York, suggested consumers may just have to look elsewhere for this information.

"Many global news sources are becoming available that you couldn't get before," Tyndall said, citing the British Broadcasting Corporation's newscasts on PBS and BBC America, along with online access to foreign newspapers and the Arab-centered TV newschannel Al Jazeera.

"Maybe it's not a question of things disappearing," he said, "but material moving around to new places. Now the news media just has to make it easy for people to navigate the new structure."

But the Project for Excellence in Journalism's Tom Rosenstiel worried more about what may not be covered at all - from local government meetings to lesser-known departments in the federal system.

"The dirty secret of the information revolution is that much of it is about repackaging other people's stories," he said. "We probably have more reporters crowded around smaller subjects. Which means MSNBC and CNBC and Fox News may all have someone at the White House, but who's covering the Department of Agriculture?"

Eric Deggans can be reached at (727) 893-8521 or deggans@sptimes.com See his blog at blogs.tampabay.com/media.

[Last modified October 27, 2007, 20:11:03]