A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that most original reporting still came from traditional outlets: newspapers accounted for two-thirds of new information, television for 28 per cent and radio for 7 per cent, with digital-only outlets producing just 4 per cent of original pieces of reporting.
The reading offered here was that the result would only have been remarkable had it come out the other way. Digital media was in its infancy while established media had a century of structural and organisational advantage. Early newspapers looked rather like the web does now: as Leonard Downie Jr and Michael Schudson wrote in The Reconstruction of American Journalism, those first American papers were four-page weeklies produced by a single proprietor-printer-editor, carrying more foreign than local news reprinted from London papers received in the mail, much as web aggregators do today, and what local news they had came in as unverified bits of intelligence from readers.
Two limits were noted. The study covered the Baltimore area only, which raises the question of how far it travels; the New York Times pointed to online start-ups in San Diego and Minneapolis doing original reporting, and in British Columbia The Tyee and the Vancouver Observer were digital-only outlets covering local news.
The genuinely worrying finding had nothing to do with the internet: most of the journalism produced by mainstream media was driven by government statements rather than by reporters’ own work.