The New Long Journalism Project takes measurements of news media content, including news reports and their visual presentation, to track the long-term trends in what journalists produce and what “news” means. The changes documented so far include more than 100 years of newspaper reporting, 25 years of network evening newscasts, 20 years of National Public Radio news programming, an a decade of internet newspaper sites.
Return to Main Page.
During the current crisis in American journalism, news organizations are laying off workers and moving online. The pressures from competition and changing technologies would seem to make news stories more brief and focused on people, on events close-to-home, and so on through the five Ws. But that quintessential American news has turned into a myth. Over the past century, American news stories have grown longer and more distant, abstract, and depopulated, just the opposite of expectations. Rather than a sudden shift in response to the internet, the changes have emerged over decades. Mainstream journalists in print, broadcast, and the web think they are producing one kind of news, the mythic kind, but the stories they disseminate are just the opposite. Read on . . .
Chapter 1. Long: The Length of News (View as HTML)
Chapter 2. Who: People in the News (View as HTML)
Chapter 3. What: Events in the News (View as HTML)
Chapter 4. Where: Locations in the News (View as HTML)
Chapter 5. When: Time in the News (View as HTML)
Chapter 6. Why: Explanations in News (in progress)
Postscript. How U.S. Journalism Forgot its Public (Two Stories)
News Ideology in the Twentieth Century. In Diffusion of the News Paradigm, 1850–2000, pp. 239–62. Ed. Svennik Høyer (University of Oslo) and Horst Pöttker (University of Dortmund). Gothenburg, Sweden: Nordicom, 2005.
The Great
American Newspaper. American Scholar 60 (Winter 1991): 106–112.
The Form of Reports on US Newspaper Internet Sites, An update. Journalism Studies 11.4 (August 2010): 555–66.
The Internet and news: Changes in Content on Newspaper Websites. Paper delivered to the Political Communication Division, International Communication Association, Chicago, May 24, 2009.
News Geography & Monopoly: The Form of Reports on U.S. Newspaper Internet Sites. Journalism Studies 3.4 (November 2002): 477–89.
The Makers of Meaning: National Public Radio and the New Long Journalism, 1980 – 2000. Political Communication 20.1 (January–March 2003): 1–22.
Queer Political News: Election-year Coverage of the LGBT Communities on National
Public Radio, 1992 – 2000. Journalism Theory,
Practice & Criticism 4.1 (February 2003): 5–28.
Second author with Richard Doherty. Controlling Nature: Weathercasts on Local Television News. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 53.2 (June 2009), 1–16.
With Catherine A. Steele. Image Bite News: The Coverage of Elections on U.S. Television, 1968 – 1992. Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 2.1 (February 1997): 40–58.
Second author
with Catherine A. Steele. The Journalism of Opinion: Network Coverage in U.S.
Presidential Campaigns, 1968 – 1988. Critical Studies in Mass Communication
13.3 (September 1996): 187–209.
With John Nerone. The President Is Dead: American News Photography & the New Long Journalism. In Pictures in the Public Sphere, 60–92. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
With Diana C. Mutz. American Journalism and the Decline of Event-Centered Reporting. Journal of Communication 47.4 (Autumn 1997): 27–53.
Second author with John Nerone. Visual Mapping & Cultural Authority: Design Change in U.S. Newspapers, 1920 – 1940. Journal of Communication 45.2 (Spring 1995): 9–43.
With John C. Nerone. Design Changes in U.S. Front Pages, 1885 – 1985. Journalism Quarterly 68 (Winter 1991): 796–804.
Write
Your input is welcome. Please use the link below or write to Kevin G. Barnhurst, Department of Communication (MC-132), 1007 W. Harrison St. BSB 1148A, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL 60607-7137.