Nieman Reports Continued

I've continued reading the Nieman Reports from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard...and came across the following two interesting quotes:

Indeed, slick production has become so closely associated in their minds with cynical storytelling that they now prefer video reports with a more amateur feel. And something similar is happening in print media; there, readers fear they aren’t getting the “real” story from professional reporters who aren’t allowed to draw conclusions and “tell them the truth.” Instead, they prefer bloggers and those who join in discussions online who are not constrained by “fairness” from calling a liar just that, especially when those writers follow their passion to develop the expertise necessary to make such calls. - Robert Niles in Passion Replaces the Dullness of an Overused Journalistic Formula

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News consumption fares no better, according to a small but in-depth recent study of 18- to 34-year-olds commissioned by The Associated Press. The 18 participants, who were tracked by ethnographers for days, consumed a “steady diet of bite-size pieces of news,” almost always while multitasking. Their news consumption was often “shallow and erratic,” even as they yearned to go beyond the brief and often repetitive headlines and updates that barraged them daily. Participants “appeared debilitated by information overload and unsatisfying news experiences,” researchers observed. Moreover, “when the news wore them down, participants in the study showed a tendency to passively receive versus actively seek news.”

This is a disturbing portrait: multitasking consumers uneasily “snacking” on headlines, stuck on the surface of the news, unable to turn information into knowledge.
(cited by Maggie Jackson in Distracted: The New News World and the Fate of Attention)