A year in the news...or a year in news-lacking?

By far, the piece I found most interesting in The Project for Excellence in Journalism's report was the section comparing the Public Interests vs. Actual Media Coverage. In media's defense, we do often say that our coverage of stories is based on what the audience what's to hear. Today the link between media and consumer of news is stronger than ever before, with users now being able to further investigate a story, respond to news coverage and even contribute certain types of material. I believe in South Carolina a few years back, one television station even put out an online poll asking viewers to pick the top ten stories of the day. Most of their choices included celebrity info-tainment stories. It was a revolutionary move, but one that severly affected the way the station went about it's broadcast, and added to the common belief that those are the types of stories our views are interested in.

So I found it very surprsing that the media was in fact so out of touch with stories its consumers wanted to hear about considering they were in fact important issues. One would initially believe that gas prices, winter weather and the events happening in Iraq were adequately covered, yet the scanners/viewers/users in the audience strongly disagreed, according to PEJ's report. I was surpised by this finding because I felt that most local mainstream media outlets, as well as the national, do spend a great deal of time talking about the nuts and bolts issues concerning out daily lives. But the people feel these are issues the media simply overlook. So then what does this mean for the future of global journalism? Perhaps a more narrow focus, concerning only the lives of Americans? Only time will tell.