As Mainstream Media Decline, Niche and Foreign Outlets Grow

The New Washington Press Corps
PEW - February 11, 2009
As Mainstream Media Decline, Niche and Foreign Outlets Grow

Read the headlines and it would be easy to conclude that as the new Obama Administration takes power, facing an array of domestic and international crises, it will be monitored by a substantially depleted Washington press corps.

It isn’t exactly so.

The corps of journalists covering Washington D.C. at the dawn of the Obama Administration is not so much smaller as it is dramatically transformed. And that transformation will markedly alter what Americans know and not know about the new government, as well as who will know it and who will not.

A careful accounting of the numbers, plus detailed interviews with journalists, lawmakers, press association executives and government officials, reveals that what we once thought of as the mainstream news media serving a general public has indeed shrunk"perhaps far more than many would imagine. A roll call of the numbers may shock.

Read Report:
http://www.journalism.org./analysis_report/new_washington_press_corps