A message about PEJ’s News Coverage Index on the largest effort ever to measure and analyze U.S. news media from Bill Kovach, Chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists:
Today, CCJ’s old office mates from the Project for Excellence in Journalism posted on their website the second report on how America’s press has covered the week’s news. Everyone who cares about the state of journalism will find the report not only interesting but an invaluable measure of press performance.
Tom Rosenstiel and his staff at PEJ have created the most intensive effort to track and analyze the performance of American news media in real time. Each week they will post the News Coverage Index that describes and analyzes how 48 news outlets in the country---print, network TV, cable, online and radio---covered the news in the previous week.
Tune it in: http://www.journalism.org/news_index. If you do I suspect you’ll bookmark it for it is certain to become one of the most important tools out there to determine just how the American press is performing its stated goal to provide citizens the information they need to make the informed decisions of a self governing people.
During the conversations 10 years ago that lead to the creation of CCJ one of the metaphors we used to capture our hopes for the organization was a dam. Someday, we hoped, we could provide a place to gather the combined experience, energy and commitment of journalists (past, present and future), journalism educators and concerned citizens.
The dam metaphor shaped our thinking further for it suggested that such a reservoir required more critical thinking about how journalism is practiced so that the experience, energy and commitment gathered by such an organization could effectively inform and influence the industry’s future.
This, in turn, led to the decision that the CCJ’s first step would be journalistic. A reporting exercise to inform ourselves with a deeper understanding of the purpose of journalism; what separates it from the other forms of information; and why the public should give a damn that journalism survive in a world flooded with information.
Information gathered from several thousand journalists and concerned citizens during this exercise provided the material for CCJ’s Traveling Curriculum designed to help journalists think more critically about how they did their work in order to serve the purpose they claim as their value to the public. This training has helped to create a deeper understanding of the value of a conscious process of verification for thousands of journalists, almost universal acceptance of the need for more transparency in their work, and a new urgency to the idea of the public as a partner in their work and not just an audience.
Now Tom and his staff at PEJ offer all of us another invaluable tool for critical understanding of how we as an industry are discharging our responsibility to the public. As he and Mark Jurkowitz and others organize and analyze the data week by week, all of us will be empowered to search for new ways to adjust, improve, challenge and defend journalism. Empowered with hard demonstrable facts---not opinion---we’ll be better able to see the world as it is, not as we wish it would be.
Although CCJ and PEJ no longer share offices, the Internet makes all this data, the insights they will draw, and the insights you will draw from it available at our fingertips. I hope you will use the new PEJ site and share your insights with the rest of us through the CCJ’s website.
The Weekly News Coverage Index could prove to be a critical tool in our continual search for a way to broaden and deepen CCJ’s reservoir of journalistic understanding and energy in order to assure journalism’s future.