Media changed by audience
Changing audience forces media to change their waysIt's no secret. During the past 40 years, the trust that was once invested in the media has slowly declined. In a poll conducted by the Gallup Organization in November 2000, journalists and reporters were given an average to low rating for honesty and ethical standards. Professions ranked lower than newspaper reporters in this poll were insurance salesmen, advertising practitioners and car salesmen.Those who think that the media have become bias and partisan also believe that the lack of journalistic objectivity caused the decrease in the media's audience. However, a study conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Medill News Service Washington Bureau suggests that it was the diminishing audience that caused a change in the style of journalistic writing. According to David Mindich in his book 'Just the Facts: How 'Objectivity' Came to Define American Journalism,' "objectivity" has been an issue since 1690. Although it may not have applied to journalism before the 20th century, "objectivity" was alive and well when Benjamin Harris declared in Publick Occurrences, North Am
Network newscasts viewership peaked at 41 percent of households in 1980-81 and fell to 28 percent in 1994-95. In the early 1970s, newspaper readership dipped considerably. " American newspapers did not unhinge from their formal party ties, Katz says, until the 1830s. The journalism profession needed to re-evaluate its guidelines in order to compensate for the volume of readers, viewers and listeners it was losing. " Even as households increased from 63 million in 1970 to 97 million in 1994, newspaper circulation fell from 62 million to 60 million, according to the Newspaper Association of America. According to the study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Medill News Service Washington Bureau, it wasn't until after 1977 that the emphasis on news coverage shifted from mostly straight, objective news stories (52 percent) to human-interest stories and "news you can use. The general public was beginning to see television as a means of entertainment, not an information source. After the 1980s, broadcast media was no longer adding to their audience; it was a matter of maintaining the audience they had. This was a blow from which the newspaper industry still has not fully recovered. Print and broadcast media had to change their reporting formulas in order to maintain the audience they had, and, they hoped, retrieve readers, viewers and listeners they had lost and attract new ones. According to the current trend, newspaper circulation will continue to rise until another invention modifies the public's attitudes again. Newspaper websites have been increasing overall newspaper readership since 1998. According to the "Leveraging Newspaper Assets" study that was conducted by the Newspaper Association of America in November 2000, as the percentage of straight "objective" news stories has decreased since 1977, newspaper believability and accuracy has begun to increase.
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