The Romenesko Indicator

Many of us watch Romenesko to keep tabs of the news business. The venerable media blog, which is published by the Poynter Institute, is great for giving a sense of where the industry is at.

I’ve yet to see anyone use Romenesko for research. (Have I missed it?) But I wonder if a careful analysis of all the media news that gets pumped through Jim Romenesko’s filters would turn up some trends. One I would expect to find is an increasing pessimism by traditional news organizations, and an increase in stories about news company cutbacks, layoffs, stock price falls, circulation dips, etc. — increasing over time.

For fun, I did a quick and completely unscientific survey of what was in the latest Romenesko e-mail, which covers the last 4 days of blog entries. Here’s what I found. (Note: If you tried this, you might categorize things differently. But here’s my attempt. Some stories got counted in more than one category.)

• 26 – News personnel (announcements, awards, changes, deaths, profiles, etc.)
• 13 – Demise/decline of newspapers
• 10 – Ethics-related
• 9 – Bad news about industry stock prices, real estate sales, acquisitions
• 6 – Transition of media, online trends, user interaction, etc.
• 6 – “Inside baseball” stuff (that only true industry geeks care about)
• 6 – Journalism craft news
• 5 – News about the news business (excluding the “The End Is Near” coverage)
• 4 – College journalism, academia, research
• 4 – Oddball stuff
• 3 – Labor news
• 3 – New publications, websites, programs announced
• 2 – Stories with mixed good-bad news about news industry
• 2 – Credentials and access issues
• 2 – Objectivity in journalism
• 2 – Gossip
• 2 – Events, conferences
• 1 – Negative stories about Internet, blogs, user content, etc.
• 1 – Media law
• 1 – Audience, circulation news

Perhaps someone with more time on their hands than me can find interesting Romenesko trends over time.