Analysis: Our Studies, Commentaries and Backgrounders

This section of the State of the News Media 2004 report details the results of a survey of more than 500 national and local reporters, editors and executives. The survey was conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in collaboration with the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

In a year when the nation was changed by the war on terrorism, a recession and financial scandals, the Project for Excellence in Journalism's fifth annual study found that local television news remained largely unchanged. The study was published in the November/December 2002 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Local newsrooms beset by sponsor interference, budget cuts, layoffs, and added programming.

Quality sells, but commitment — and viewership — continue to erode.

For all the "I-Team" graphics and driving music, enterprise reporting -- the serious, proactive journalism that local TV so heavily promotes -- is dropping precipitously.

In an initiative to find the correlation between quality local television journalism and ratings PEJ brings the practice of benchmarking--identifying models of quality in an industry--to local TV news.