Pew Report: 92% of newspapers have cut staff

Image credit: iirraa

Earlier this week, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released the results of a survey of newspaper and broadcast executives that revealed their attitudes toward the changing news landscape. As newsrooms have cut staff over the past few years, newspapers are “clarifying their mission” and focusing on covering certain areas in-depth, versus broad coverage of many topics.

Here are some of the most striking findings:

• 92% of newspaper executives reported making staff cuts in the last three years. More than 75% of these newspaper executives reported the cuts of 10% or higher.
• 59% of broadcast media executives reported making staff cuts in the last three years.
• 66% of all those surveyed think their newsroom staff is leaner than ideal, and 20% believe their staff is too small to do more than the bare minimum of reporting.
• 56% of newspaper executives and 31% of broadcast executives think staff cuts have hurt their ability to cover the news.

The summary report is at Pew.org and the full results, with charts and graphs, are at journalism.org.

Dwindling newsrooms staffs means that organizations won’t make the news unless they are proactive about getting their story out. For locally-focused PR professionals, providing newsrooms with timely, relevant information about your organization is a way to help short-staffed media outlets discover stories and topics that matter to their audience.

A well-crafted press release and follow-up pitch to a reporter or editor that covers the who, what, when, where and, most importantly, the why of your story or event can be of tremendous value to time-strapped journalists who are now doing the work of three or four people. Adding multimedia like photo, video, presentations or documentation to your release enhances the story and gives the reporter even more to work with.

Organizations are becoming their own beat reporters now: finding, writing and publishing unique and interesting news releases about what’s happening and in turn helping the media discover what’s relevant in their coverage area.