Flat Earth News

When you think of a journalist, you might get a very traditional image: someone rushing to the site of an event, jotting down what they’re seeing, interviewing people, getting the scoop. But, these days, journalists rarely work like this.

Fewer and fewer journalists are out in the field investigating their own stories. Instead, they now tend to rehash stories that were originally issued by large wire agencies or in press releases.

When the University of Cardiff examined 2,207 stories from the most respected British media outlets, they found that 60 percent of these stories simply echoed previous wire-agency reports or press releases, adding hardly any new information. A mere 12 percent of stories, they found, were based on the personal research of reporters.

Journalists in national media simply don’t have the time to provide in-depth investigations.

This is the upshot of national media corporations’ cutting costs and reducing the number of employees, leaving the remaining journalists with the burden of shouldering the work of former colleagues. Journalists now typically write around ten stories per day, which adds up to less than one hour per story on an average workday!

No wonder the average reporter has little time to leave the office and investigate a story or speak face-to-face with an actual witness.

What’s more, these cutbacks have drastically reduced the number of regional reporters.

Journalists in national newsrooms once relied on regional reporters across the country to help investigate stories; these days, however, many local newspapers have been bought out by large, profit-minded corporations that lay off most of the regional journalists to save money.

All these cutbacks have left the newsrooms with very few reporters who can actually investigate stories in the field.

A typical journalist today must search the internet for reports from wire agencies, looking for material out of which to produce as many stories as possible.