Newspaper Content, A Day in the Life

By the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Rick Edmonds of The Poynter Institute

How did May 11 look in print?

The challenge and opportunity for newspapers is time. With ink on paper, the news is delivered the following day. The only way newspapers can bring new information is by concentrating on “exclusives” or by taking advantage of the extra time to make more calls, gather more information and weigh more arguments to add new dimensions to their reporting.

So what did consumers get by waiting until the morning of May 12 to learn about May 11 that they could not have found on radio or TV or online earlier — beyond the tactile pleasure some claim from holding the paper in their hands over morning coffee?

Based on a close examination of this day:

• Newspaper readers on balance learn about the widest range of topics and get the deepest sourcing and the most angles on the news among consumers of all media studied except one.
• That exception, the Internet, in turn, still relies for the heart of its content on print journalism, and if papers were to vanish it is hard to see what might replace them.
• Most of the local news we found in newspapers was absent from local television.
• The local metro dailies remain committed to offering a complete menu of news — national and international as well as local. They are not becoming niche products.
• The degree to which citizens could have gotten news sooner from the online version of the paper varied from one paper to the next, but for the most part, the print version remains the papers’ primary outlet.
• One lurking question is whether the breadth and depth offered requires a day’s delay or can be realized in more immediate reporting online.

This close look also revealed some differences among the papers. In a local metro daily rather than a big national paper, government was less important and crime much more important, as were issues not tied to government. And if their newspaper was suburban, government and community issues dominated, but crime, foreign affairs and national defense were not much of a concern. Yet despite the predictable distinctions, big national papers like the New York Times and smaller metropolitan papers like the Bend Bulletin in Oregon shared far more with each other than they did with other media, and perhaps more than many people might expect .

In previous years, our content studies of newspapers, conducted over 28 randomly selected days, gave a general picture of print: Readers of newspapers get a more traditional mix of hard and soft news than in other media as well as coverage more focused on powerful institutions. Newspaper stories generally are more deeply and clearly sourced, though they also rely more on anonymous sources.

By the numbers, May 11 held true to that form.

In addition to more and deeper sourcing on major stories, newspaper stories also scored higher on our index that measured how many contextual elements stories explored to make them more relevant and useful to readers. And here print actually scored higher than online.

On May 12, newspapers, again, also tended to rely more on anonymous sourcing than other media, except national Web sites.

Depth of News Coverage Across All Media

Percentage of all Major Stories

Yet beyond the numbers, what did the coverage of a day in the news feel like in print? What could one learn? What was missing? If newspapers are shrinking, or if the big metro papers are suffering most, what would their erosion cost us?

We examined three national papers, as well as the local papers in three cities: the New York Times, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times at the national level, and the Houston Chronicle, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Bend Bulletin in Oregon . We also examined two suburban dailies, the Baytown Sun outside of Houston and the Waukesha Freeman outside of Milwaukee, and discuss them separately in Suburban Dailies. We analyzed every story that day in the front section, and the front pages of the local and business sections.

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