• AP/BusinessWeek, Monday, March 13, 2006 11:30 AM

This falls into the We-Suspected-As-Much-All-Along Department: The Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington, DC-based think tank, says in a just-released report that the dissemination of news is characterized more than ever by breadth, not depth. The availability of news from various sources--TV, cable, the Internet, newspapers--is impressive, but there's just not a lot of actual news there. It's not a new trend, either, but a continuing one. One explanation for the dearth of in-depth news is that journalism organizations on both the national and local levels have been cutting the size of their staffs. "It's the illusion of more information," said Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director, "but it's actually a lot of repetition." Extract traffic, weather, and sports, and half of local television news is filled with crime and accident stories, the Project for Excellence observed. For radio stations that offered news, only 14 percent of airtime was filled with stories by reporters out in the field. "The onus is increasingly on the news consumer to seek out what they should be interested in, rather than being passive and saying 'I'll watch CNN and this will tell me what I need to know,'" Rosenstiel said. The project said the audience growth for news online seemed to reach a plateau in 2005, although people who go online appear to be using it more often.

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