It has been an interesting few days to view the combination of retraction, accusation and misinformation over stories in three American media outlets.

The most prominent involved This American Life and its January episode on the Foxconn plant in China that manufactures Apple products. The episode was based on a one-man theatrical production, but the program has lately discovered that elements of the show were more theatre than journalism.

There was a front-page column this week in the New Hampshire Eagle Times asserting that its rival, the Compass, had essentially plagiarized a sports column about a basketball game. The writer in question wasn't at the game, but liberally used material from the Eagle Times to appear to have been.

Then there was the matter of an obituary in The Oregonian of its editorial page editor. A "family friend" (actually, another editor in the newsroom) said police discovered the man in a parked car and rushed him to hospital. In fact, he died in the apartment of a woman with whom he'd been in a relationship for a year. The editor who was the source of the information was fired. She had misinformed the paper out of sympathy for the man's wife. The paper ran an extensive account of the matter later in the week, but did not note it fired the editor.

The new annual Gallup poll on institutional trust suggests U.S. media are regaining (albeit slightly) the ground lost.

Its poll of trust in newspapers and television found growth after years of all-time lows. Some 28% said they had a great deal or quite a lot of trust in newspapers and 27% said the same about television.

That number, though, lags considerably behind numbers as recent as 2003.

The biggest gains in approval came from 35- to 49-year-olds. Younger Americans expressed greater trust in television and less trust in newspapers. While Gallup says the new numbers are good indicators, it points to the volatility of young trust as a precursor of possible difficulties.

Newspapers and TV ranked 10th and 11th of the 16 institutions assessed.

The Washington Post has acknowledged copy-and-paste plagiarism from The Arizona Republic and suspended a Pulitzer-winning reporter for three months for publishing other's material as her own.

Sari Horwitz, a veteran investigative reporter, was suspended following stories on legal proceedings against Jared Lee Loughner, indicted on dozens of charges in the recent Tucson shootings of a Congresswoman and a state judge, among others.

The Post was alerted to the plagiarism by The Republic this week and took little time to act. It determined that two paragraphs from one story and 10 from another first appeared in The Republic. They were copied and pasted into a Word document with other notes and later filed the paragraphs for the Web as if they were original.

The news organization has apologized, as has Horwitz, and noted in the online stories that they contained reproduced material.

The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism has issued its eight annual State of the News Media report today. It's a definitive look at American media, with some implications for media outside the U.S. in trends and practices.

The report concludes that, with the exception of newspapers, media operated better in 2010 than in 2009 on many frontiers. Some new business models began to blossom, for instance.
But the report says that the problems aren't involving audiences or even the new models.

"It may be that in the digital realm the news industry is no longer in control of its own destiny," the executive summary of the report concludes. New intermediaries are adding layers to the relationship between consumers and advertisers, whether they are software manufacturers or platform creators, and their share of the revenue and data pose new challenges.

Among major trends: executives from outside, some willingness to pay, untapped local news opportunities, a new media economy of smaller entities,  and assistance to media via the car bailout.

The report looks at newspapers, online, television networks, cable television, ethnic and alternative press, magazines, audio and some special reports on, among other things, international newspaper  economics and the online experiments in Seattle.

In a post on the PBS MediaShift site, newspaper consultant Neil Heyside argues for the need of more free citizen-generated content to help newspapers deal with editorial economic challenges.

Heyside, part of the CRG Partners firm, suggests a pronounced shift to free or near-free content in certain areas (and not in certain areas) to deal with costs and preserve quality. "It's high time for a content sourcing change in this industry," he concludes.

To do that, Heyside creates a couple of business models that include about 10 per cent citizen-generated content to demonstrate significant editorial savings. He suggests it's wrong to believe that free or near-free content from experts diminishes the quality of the publication.

New British research suggests there is no correlation between a media outlet's Internet success and print decline. Indeed, as goes one, so goes the other, for better and worse.

British media analyst Jim Chisholm has found that newspapers that do well on the Web are also doing well in print circulation.  "Understandably worried traditional journalists should know that the internet is not a threat," he told the Guardian.

Chisholm argues that the real issue isn't traffic but frequency of visits and loyalty as repeat consumers.

Nearly two-thirds of American Internet users have spent time on a newspaper website in the last month. New data released Thursday from the Newspaper Association of America argues that newspaper-based websites are thriving and have coveted audiences.

The NAA data from the comScore agency indicates U.S. newspaper sites had 4.1 billion page views, 3.3 billion minutes spent and 102.8 million unique visitors in September. One in four newspaper website visitors come from households earning more than $100,000 annually, compared to about one in five Internet users overall.

The visitors were in much higher proportion than those who used the Yahoo network, CNN or MSNBC, the NAA said.

A new report from Scarborough Research indicates e-reader owners and prospective owners stand to benefit the newspaper business. There are nine million of them in the United States alone and they are avid newspaper consumers.

Some 78 per cent of e-reader households read a paper in the last day or week. Some 41 per cent did so in the last month --- compared to 27 per cent of households overall.

Scarborough says the arrival of e-readers offers excellent opportunities for monetization of content and a loyal audience for it.