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A method for measuring investigative journalism in local newspapers
Major changes to the operation of local newsrooms—ownership restructuring, layoffs, and a reorientation away from print advertising—have become commonplace in the last few decades. However, there have been few systematic attempts to characterize the impact of these changes on the types of reporting...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
National Academy of Sciences
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8325361/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34282020 http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2105155118 |
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author | Turkel, Eray Saha, Anish Owen, Rhett Carson Martin, Gregory J. Vasserman, Shoshana |
author_facet | Turkel, Eray Saha, Anish Owen, Rhett Carson Martin, Gregory J. Vasserman, Shoshana |
author_sort | Turkel, Eray |
collection | PubMed |
description | Major changes to the operation of local newsrooms—ownership restructuring, layoffs, and a reorientation away from print advertising—have become commonplace in the last few decades. However, there have been few systematic attempts to characterize the impact of these changes on the types of reporting that local newsrooms produce. In this paper, we propose a method to measure the investigative content of news articles based on article text and influence on subsequent articles. We use our method to examine over-time and cross-sectional patterns in news production by local newspapers in the United States over the past decade. We find surprising stability in the quantity of investigative articles produced over most of the time period examined, but a notable decline in the last 2 y of the decade, corresponding to a recent wave of newsroom layoffs. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8325361 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | National Academy of Sciences |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-83253612021-08-13 A method for measuring investigative journalism in local newspapers Turkel, Eray Saha, Anish Owen, Rhett Carson Martin, Gregory J. Vasserman, Shoshana Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A Social Sciences Major changes to the operation of local newsrooms—ownership restructuring, layoffs, and a reorientation away from print advertising—have become commonplace in the last few decades. However, there have been few systematic attempts to characterize the impact of these changes on the types of reporting that local newsrooms produce. In this paper, we propose a method to measure the investigative content of news articles based on article text and influence on subsequent articles. We use our method to examine over-time and cross-sectional patterns in news production by local newspapers in the United States over the past decade. We find surprising stability in the quantity of investigative articles produced over most of the time period examined, but a notable decline in the last 2 y of the decade, corresponding to a recent wave of newsroom layoffs. National Academy of Sciences 2021-07-27 2021-07-19 /pmc/articles/PMC8325361/ /pubmed/34282020 http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2105155118 Text en Copyright © 2021 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Social Sciences Turkel, Eray Saha, Anish Owen, Rhett Carson Martin, Gregory J. Vasserman, Shoshana A method for measuring investigative journalism in local newspapers |
title | A method for measuring investigative journalism in local newspapers |
title_full | A method for measuring investigative journalism in local newspapers |
title_fullStr | A method for measuring investigative journalism in local newspapers |
title_full_unstemmed | A method for measuring investigative journalism in local newspapers |
title_short | A method for measuring investigative journalism in local newspapers |
title_sort | method for measuring investigative journalism in local newspapers |
topic | Social Sciences |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8325361/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34282020 http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2105155118 |
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