With shorter stories and scarce coverage of politics and government, local television newscasts in the United States, like local newspapers before them, are suffering from “shrinking pains,” according to the Pew Research Center.

The diagnosis comes in the center’s 10th annual State of the News Media report, which will be published on Monday. The report, covering 2012, describes cutbacks in the reporting ranks of newspapers and television networks and a surge in efforts by politicians, corporations and others to tell their own stories.

“This adds up to a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands,” the report’s main author, Amy Mitchell, wrote in an introduction.

The report also highlighted the results of a new Pew survey that asked Americans whether they had heard much about the financial challenges that the news industry faces, like the steep decline in newspaper advertising revenue.

Sixty percent of the respondents said they had heard little or nothing, indicating that “awareness of the industry’s financial struggles is limited,” the report said. But some have sensed the results: 31 percent of respondents said they “have stopped turning to a news outlet because it no longer provided them with the news they were accustomed to getting.”

The report’s authors did find, as in prior years, a robust public appetite for news. Digital news sources are now used daily by 50 percent of Americans, according to Pew’s survey, making the Internet nearly as important a source as television. Mobile phones and tablets were mostly responsible for the surge in digital news consumption.

Computers and mobile phones, of course, redistribute news from television, radio and newspapers. But cutbacks at many of these traditional sources continued in 2012, Pew found.

The report’s authors cited an estimate from Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at The Poynter Institute, of newspaper newsroom employment that dipped below 40,000 last year, to the industry’s lowest level since 1978. They decided to dig deep into television news coverage, partly because it has escaped the scrutiny focused on newspapers in recent years. They found that local television stations have increased their reliance on three main topics — weather, traffic and sports.

The researchers sampled the newscasts in four markets (Bend, Ore.; Houston; Milwaukee; and Pittsburgh) and compared their findings with a similar study of three of the markets in 2005. Back then, there were more taped stories and interviews; now there are more live reports from reporters in the field. The report called this a sign that “there is less in-depth journalism being produced.”

Only 20 percent of the stories in the 2012 sample were more than a minute long. Segments about weather, traffic and sports ate up 40 percent of local newscasts’ time, up from 32 percent in 2005, even though this kind of information “is now available on demand in a variety of digital platforms,” the report said.

Stories about government and politics in the markets that were sampled fell by more than half, to 3 percent of the broadcasts from 7 percent in 2005. There was also a marked decline in the percentage of stories about crime, to 17 percent from 29 percent. The volume of economic stories rose to 8 percent, from 3 percent, perhaps, the report’s authors said, because of the fragile state of the economy.

Nielsen ratings show that the audiences for local television newscasts in 2012 declined, albeit slightly, versus the prior year. The medium remains a top source of news overall, though.

Pew’s researchers didn’t find the same kinds of changes to network news programming that it found locally; in fact, they were struck by how little had changed about the big three network nightly newscasts since 2007, the last time they studied them. However, a lot had changed on the three major cable news channels, which have become more politically oriented in the last five years, the study found. Daytime programs on cable news increasingly resembled prime-time talk shows, the report said, adding that “interview segments are now as prominent in daytime cable as they are in prime time.”

As for newspapers, Pew followed up on a prediction in last year’s report that more news organizations would require customers to pay for full access to their Web sites. The number of daily newspapers doing so has more than doubled since then, according to Monday’s report, to about 450. (That figure, out of 1,380 daily newspapers across the country, included the newspapers that have announced such plans as well as the ones that have actually started.)

“This is already helping rebalance the print industry’s heavy reliance on advertising over subscription revenue,” the report said, adding that digital advertising for newspapers “grew only at an anemic 3 percent rate in 2012.”

The report also identified a split in digital advertising. While the news industry “continues to lose out,” it said, “on the bulk of new digital advertising,” some outlets are seeing growth from sponsored content. An online twist on “advertorials” of old, these ad units appear within a publication’s Web page and are often called “native ads.”

“Traditional publications such as The Atlantic and Forbes, as well as digital publications BuzzFeed and Gawker, have relied on native ads to quickly build digital ad revenues, and their use is expected to spread,” the report said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/business/media/local-tv-news-is-following-prints-path-study-says.html?partner=rss&emc=rss