by Debbie Galant

The state of the news business is lousy.  A week after the much-revered Boston Phoenix threw in the towel that’s hardly surprising news, but a new report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism is packed with statistics showing a weakened journalism profession that is losing reporting power, revenue and audience.

–Some 31 percent of respondents have reported deserting a news source because its quality has degenerated.
–Sports, weather and traffic now account for 40 percent of local TV news.
–Local TV news viewership among adults under 30 fell from 42 percent in 2006 to 28 percent in 2012.
–Mobile digital display is one of the fastest-growing ad markets, but news organizations aren’t getting much of a share. Some 72 percent of that market goes to six companies, including Facebook and Google.
–Some 63 percent of the public has little or no idea of the financial pressures facing news companies.
–At CNN, which invented the 24-hour TV news cycle, the number of produced story packages was cut in half between 2007 and 2012.

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By DEBBIE GALANT

Back when I was in graduate school in the early 1980s, before Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and even before blogs, I spent one semester studying the concept of news diffusion. It’s been 30 years, and it was only one class, but as I remember it, news diffusion spoke to the unofficial channels by which major events were communicated. If you were old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination well then, how did you learn about it? Likely as not, you didn’t hear it on TV or on the radio. Somebody told you.  That was news diffusion: the study of how news spread.

I think about news diffusion every few years, when there’s a story so big that it spreads from mouth to mouth, and I thought about it again recently in the beauty parlor, when I overheard a hairdresser and a customer discussing damage from Superstorm Sandy. Hairdressers are, of course, mighty vectors of information. What is there to do between color and cut but talk?  The information I learned the weekend after Thanksgiving was vague and incidental — a wedding palace somewhere down the shore had been totally destroyed by the storm and Rt. 35 north of Ortley Beach had been closed — yet I listened intently, lest some prime bit of storm or recovery news should pass my ears.

I thought back to the two momentous days of the storm, and to the days immediately before and after, both when Hurricane Sandy was an enormous cloud formation hovering out in the Atlantic Ocean, and in the early hours of Tuesday, Oct. 30 when the first photos of the damage began to trickle in. As it happened, during that period, I was operating a news diffusion machine of my own making. Using a live blogging platform called ScribbleLive, and with the active help of about a dozen members of the NJ News Commons, I pulled in tweets, photos, news reports and video under the hashtag #NJSandy. This #NJSandy feed was, in turn, embedded by about 10 sites, and it drew more than 200,000 page views during the week of the storm. For six days, from the Saturday before the storm until the Thursday after, I did virtually nothing but manage this feed, and those days are a complete blur. But I can tell you that the flow of information — which came at me fast and hard and then faster and harder — formed its own kind of storm surge, peaking around midnight on Monday Oct. 29. And that information surge included contributions both from traditional news sources and from the informal ones my old professors would have referred to as “word of mouth.” (more…)