Traditional media is, as they say, in transition - a term that means “watching its business model explode and trying not to be killed by the shrapnel” - and lots of cool journalism is being created (like this blog). But to nobody’s surprise, a study done by a journalism think tank finds that virtually all news still starts with “legacy media” - i.e., newspapers and local TV stations.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism found (in a week-long analysis of Baltimore news) that most local news is still generated by legacy media, with both the quantity and quality of the journalism diminished from years past.

That last sentence makes me shudder, but it’s true. The number of full-time working journalists in New Hampshire has, I would guess, been reduced by one-third in the past four years. There was waste and laziness and pointless repetition in the industry, for sure, but I’m afraid we’ve gone way beyond fixing that.

General interest newspapers produced 48 percent of the new material, followed by 28 percent from local TV, 13 percent by specialty newspapers, 7 percent from radio station Web sites and 4 percent from new media outlets.

Tags: media