Three media-related stories of note for Friday, March 1, 2013:

The exhaustive dispute between Google and Germany reached the end of another chapter Friday when legislation was finalized to bring about a compromise on the degree of information the search engine could reveal. Google will be permitted to show snippets. Publishers had been arguing that Google should pay fees to produce those results. Spiegel Online reports that the permitted length of these snippets is still unclear.

Keith Somerville, a senior research fellow at the Commonwealth Institute and veteran journalist, provides a primer in Mmegi Online on the framing of two recent African stories to fit Western perceptions. He examines the South African Crime frame to discuss the Oscar Pistorius case and the War on Terror frame to discuss violence in Mali, and he notes how both suit the Western audiences but only tell small parts of the stories. While frames are not necessarily wrong, he says, journalists need to provide more context to help readers understand what led to the events.

A new survey from Rasmussen Reports discusses American sources of news and finds that cable TV ranks first (32 per cent use it). But the major change is in the rise of the Internet (25 per cent) over network television (24). Newspapers (10) and radio (7) were well back. Trust among all was quite low. While 56 per cent found media somewhat trustworthy, only six per cent found them quite trustworthy.
 
 
The New York Times' Media Decoder notes that American editors did not list the overseas wars among the top stories of the year. Nor did the Pew Center's research on public interest in stories.

A New York Times correspondent in China has been forced to leave the country when his visa was not renewed. The Times is awaiting visa renewal on its bureau chief.  This follows recent reports on the personal wealth of Chinese leadership. The Atlantic Wire explores what China's Internet crackdown involves.

Now that Newsweek no longer publishes a print edition, The Spectator Magazine examines what killed it.


 
 
The Gallup organization said Friday that U.S. media distrust has reached a new high --- or, put another way, media trust has reached a new low.

Some 60 per cent of Americans surveyed said they had little or no trust in the mass media to report accurately, fairly or fully. There has been a slow rate of growth in the level of distrust in the last decade from a rate in the mid- to high-forties. Trust in the media was more positive than negative until 2004.

Gallup notes the pattern in presidential election years for media distrust to peak. Republicans most distrust the media, but more than half of Independents do, too. Democrats are more trusting. While Americans pay more attention to political news in an election year, Gallup notes they are paying less attention in 2012 than they did in 2008.

The poll was conducted in early September.

"On a broad level, Americans' high level of distrust in the media poses a challenge to democracy and to creating a fully engaged citizenry," Gallup concludes. "Media sources must clearly do more to earn the trust of Americans, the majority of whom see the media as biased one way or the other. At the same time, there is an opportunity for others outside the 'mass media' to serve as information sources that Americans do trust."

Romenesko.com has a strong analysis of the findings here.



 
 

There is much potential in the newly announced MediaCloud project from ThomsonReuters and Harvard's Berkman Center for Media and Society. It will track the flow of online media.

Among other things, the tool will examine which stories are created by whom, what attracts attention, how user comments affect coverage, and how mainstream and blogosphere coverage differs and resembles. It will produce visual results that identify patterns in coverage and their origins.

Among its driving questions in the early going:
Do bloggers introduce storylines into mainstream media or the other way around?
What parts of the world are being covered or ignored by different media sources?
Where do stories begin?
How are competing terms for the same event used in different publications?
Can we characterize the overall mix of coverage for a given source?
How do patterns differ between local and national news coverage?
Can we track news cycles for specific issues?
Do online comments shape the news?

MediaCloud is still in a formative stage at the moment but is soliciting research ideas as it develops.

 
 

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has started to chronicle the coverage of bloggers and the mainstream media  --- I suspect it's in order to determine the differences.

The second edition finds quite the variance. The mainstream focused on the economy, while the blogosphere had three principal stories --- the economy, President Obama's criticism of Rush Limbaugh, and a road sign that had been redone to suggest a zombie attack was coming.

The New Media Index promises to be a highlight of media assessment.


 

DA25E68FDEC14EAFA7B2A27D26C48058