More than one third of newspapers are giving less space to business news now than they were three years ago, according to a study released by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Seventeen percent of newspapers have increased the space given to business news, the study found.
In addition, the study found that 30 percent of papers are giving business news fewer reporting resources than three years ago, compared to 19 percent that have given business news more reporters.
Only foreign news and national news has been cut more, and received fewer reporting resources, than business news in the past three years, according to the study.
The report stated, “At another level, this shrinkage of specialized beats reduces the marketplace of ideas and interpretations as more newspapers decide to cut plum (and thus, expensive) jobs because they can ‘buy the content elsewhere.’ Such a process concentrates the power and the responsibility that goes with reporting these areas into the hands of those organizations that still provide such coverage.”
This believed to be the most comprehensive attempt yet to identify, amid bad news about the news business, what precisely is being lost, and what is being gained, in what citizens receive from American newspapers.
Read the study here.
