Nature’s food chain features a lot of living things playing different roles: Predators like lions eat smaller game like deer. The deer eat grass. When animals die, their bodies decompose, nourishing the soil.
The grass, as the primary producer of energy, is the largest entity and plays the most important role. If the lion is wiped out, there are other predators eager to take its place. Same for the many herbivores out there. Yet if the earth fails to produce greenery, everything will die in short order.
Extend this analogy to our current news environment: The soil is what’s happening in the our world — the news. Newspapers are the grass because they are working the ground, doing the primary work of producing stories by having reporters on the streets and editors checking facts. Other news media like TV and digital outlets are the deer, who get their nourishment (ideas about what to report on) from reading stories by the reporters who actually originate the news at the newspapers.
Readers are the predators, who devour information from the middle layer and often don’t realize that it’s really the newspapers producing what they consume on other media.
I’m not making this up: Duke University published a study in August that confirms my point. The study took 100 randomly selected communities and identified all of the local news outlets in them, coming up with 663 outlets in four categories: radio, TV, newspaper and online only.
It then measured the quantity and quality of their local news output by measuring stories that were original, local and addressed a critical information need.
The findings included:
• Local newspapers account for roughly 25 percent of the outlets, but nearly 50 percent of the original news stories and nearly 60 percent of the local news stories. That means newspapers far outpunched their weight in how many stories they produce.
• Local newspapers account for nearly 60 percent of the stories that meet all three criteria (original, local, addresses a critical information need), outweighing all of the other categories combined. That means newspapers dominated on quality as well.
So, in honor of National Newspaper Week, why not become a news vegetarian, feeding on nutrient-rich newspapers rather than the regurgitated junk on TV and online?
