http://connecttheworld.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/09/s...

As for Bingley's fate, that'll depend on how big a brat he is on the day of the Chinese takeover.

I was pleasantly surprised by the comments on BoingBoing, most of which were of the "I could never eat cat or dog myself, but it's a different culture, what's the big deal?" variety.

And I look forward to the day when China takes over and rescues us all from frozen and processed food. As long as I can get tanks of fresh fish in every restaurant, char siu bao for breakfast, dongpo pork and beggar's chicken, I welcome our red overlords with open arms (just as long as they don't make me eat Bingley!).

Samuel

– Phone calls/text messages: School calls parents to pick up their kids early b/c it's snowing. That phone call is reporting the news of the school closure.

– E-mails: Whether it's someone posting the tally from yesterday's fundraiser to a listserv or a friend e-mailing me to tell me our favorite restaurant just closed, a lot of news is still transmitted via this medium. In one of the storylines in the PEJ study, I can easily see someone involved in the University of Maryland's flu vaccine operations sending out e-mails to colleagues to announce the good news well before it's publicly announced, hence reporting it to a significant segment of the university community before the news hits Twitter.

– The bulletin board outside my office is covered with flyers announcing upcoming seminars. The same info is on our Web site, but b/c our Web site's main target audience isn't our students, I'd wager more of them find out about the seminars by walking past the bulletin board between classes than by going to our site. So that bulletin board itself — or the people who post the flyers on it — is a news source.

So because our hypothetical study doesn't include those sources, and who knows how many other ways in which we get news, it therefore cannot claim to be a study of a news ecosystem. It is, at best, a study of the aggregate of professional journalism outlets, government sources, people who are on Twitter, and people who blog. As a study of a news ecosystem, however, it has no value.

That last graf is obviously meant to be sarcastic. Of course such a study would have value, in the same way the PEJ study has value — it adds to our pool of data for understanding an entity of enormous proportions. A news ecosystem stretches so wide and encompasses so much in our daily lives that it would be impossible to for any one study to look at the entire ecosystem. Any such study must invariably look at portions of it, and whatever parameters you use to decide which sources to include and which to omit, there will always be debatable decisions. It may be obvious that Astrogirl should've been included, but what if it was a little-read blog that generally doesn't report any news but on one occasion it reported something. What about someone who usually only blogs about cartoon shows wrote a couple posts about his eye witness account of an accident? Should those be included? The PEJ study's title and description perhaps could have been more concise, but that doesn't mean its findings had no value. And if PEJ had withheld the part about what percentage of news is reported by which sources, would you say the rest of its findings, such as the part about how most reporting is repetitive or how a majority of the news originates from the government, has no value?

You're right that traditional media can't move forward when it's in denial, but I don't think the study was an exercise in denial. A lot of traditional media's reaction to its findings may be denial, but not the study itself.

Also, most disturbingly, the data did not include blogs by non-journalists. I documented in a subsequent blog post (http://bit.ly/6wjLYq) that the data excluded a blogger (of whom PEJ was aware) who posted six times in the week studied by PEJ, writing about one of the six story lines in question. She provided first-hand text and video accounts of news events and I documented four occasions (not all in that week, but all in that month) in which traditional media cited her blog. So she was clearly a part of the ecosystem. But PEJ deliberately did not include her in the quantitative aspect of the study, so we don't know how much she was following the traditional media or whether they were recycling news she had already reported. She had an opinion and an affiliation with a newsmaker (not as strong an affiliation as the Baltimore PD Twitter feed, though), so PEJ excluded her.

The best you can say of the PEJ study is that it provided a snapshot of professional journalism in Baltimore. It certainly didn't study the news ecosystem. So in my second post, I amended my original view that the study had some value. In my case at least, Homer thought the parking was inadequate.

I also should add that I consider myself part of old media. I just don't think we can innovate and find the path to a prosperous future when we engage in denial and the PEJ study is an exercise in denial.

I was once such a huge fan of Steve Buttry, and still do admire so much of what he is trying tto do. I was an even bigger fan of Jay Rosen when I first stumbled into his Press Think – possibly before 2004. Now I so often feel disillusioned, by an endless stream of ego-centric Twitter posts, predictable in their reactions to things.

I think the work the PEJ does is excellent. Of course it has flaws, but I wish we would unite to take what's in there and work to fix what so ails the news industry. The new and the old media both need each other; and we, the people, need them both.

Don't give up entirely on the journosphere. Your voice is needed!