Bad news for news media

Tidbits from Howard Kurtz's story in the Washington Post on a new report card on the media from the Project for Excellence in Journalism:

"Americans think journalists are sloppier, less professional, less caring, more biased, less honest about their mistakes and generally more harmful to democracy than they did in the 1980s."...

Newspapers have 2,200 fewer employees than in 1990. The number of network correspondents has dropped by a third since the 1980s, and the number of TV foreign bureaus is down by half. The number of full-time radio news employees dropped 44 percent between 1994 and 2001, the report says.

Corporate dominance? In newspapers, 22 companies control 70 percent of the circulation. In local television, 10 companies own the stations that reach 85 percent of the United States. On the Web, more than half the 20 most popular news sites are owned by one of the 20 biggest media companies...

The three major newsmagazines have gone soft, with a 25 percent decline in pages devoted to national affairs and a doubling of entertainment and celebrity stories. (Such infotainment stuff accounted for 37 percent of Newsweek's content, 31 percent at Time and 6 percent at U.S. News & World Report.) The number of health pieces more than quadrupled. Readership is also down, by 13 percent at Time and U.S. News & World Report (from 1998 to 2003) and by 3 percent at Newsweek...

National Public Radio's audience has doubled in the past 10 years. Circulation for Spanish-language newspapers nearly quadrupled between 1990 and 2002.