Today, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism issued a new report, How News Happens: A Study of the News Ecosystem of One American City. Here in Connecticut, Rick Green posted about it on his CT Confidential blog at the Hartford Courant, Where does news come from? From the NEWSpaper. He highlighted:

Fully eight out of ten stories studied simply repeated or repackaged previously published information.

To this, I added the following comment:

It is a fascinating report. Good job for repeating or repackaging it! Your decision to repeat it, shows, I believe, that repeating other reports is important.

That said, the report has other very interesting aspects. The LATimes repackaging of the Pew report includes this:

About two-thirds of articles that did break new ground came from newspapers. Television news accounted for about 28% of the stories that offered new information, with radio providing 7%. The study included websites affiliated with these traditional media sources.

Digital-only outlets accounted for just 4% of original pieces of reporting: One report came from a local blog, and the other was breaking news disseminated by a police Twitter feed.

My concern is that with newspapers accounting for the breaking of most stories, what happens as newspapers cut back staff, or spend more time repackaging stories? The public will know less, and that is bad for democracy, unless something else can come and fill in the gap.

Personally, I think volunteer local citizen journalism may be an important part of this. That's why I set up the Woodbridge Citizen this weekend, to get people in my small town to start writing about things that the newspapers are missing.

I also find it interesting that one of the examples of breaking news came from a police department Twitter feed. Today, the Hartford Police added me as a friend on Facebook. It is great to see them making good use of online media to better get their message out.

They have also recently agreed to start sending their press releases to the CT News Wire, a Google Group that I set up where community spokespeople can send press releases and media advisories to bloggers and citizen journalists. Tools like the CTNewsWire can also help with the repeating of important stories.

All of this brings me back to a discussion on the Journalism That Matters mailing list. Recently, Clyde Bentley, an associate professor in Print and Digital Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism, and fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute wrote a comment on the list which he expanded into the blog post Journalism’s dreamers must keep their eyes on the statistics. He suggested

The issue here is how to tweak a media system — a massive, interconnected system of information providers, marketers, Main Street merchants, and just plain people.

The Pew Report and the various reactions to this help illustrate Clyde’s comments and I encourage you to go out and read his whole blog post. Newspapers, police Facebook pages, mailing lists and citizen journalism sites are all important parts of the massive interconnected media system. It is a vibrant system that is constantly changing, and those that care about media and democracy need to join together in the efforts to keep tweaking the system so that we do not lose access to important breaking information.

Thoughts?