The Philadelphia Inquirer fell well below its goal of reducing its workforce by 10% with its latest round of buyouts. All of their suggestions were adopted. Friedland et al. Certainly, I do not believe I ever wrote anything for The Inquirer which violated my own professional integrity.. The Philadelphia Inquirer is a public-benefit corporation that publishes a news website (Inquirer.com) and two daily newspapers (The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News) that serve the Philadelphia metropolitan area of the United States. 2006). (Fraudit may be a more accurate term.). Interpretations of correlation strength vary; our interpretations are based on Akoglu (2018). Urban media systems such as Philadelphia, home to one of the largest designated media markets in the United States, also have been affected by declining news resources, which can exacerbate inequalities in news provision (Rafsky, 2020). In terms of unambiguity, the level of information required to clearly understand COVID-19 may be higher, especially as official advice for staying well and reducing viral transmission develops and changes. Transforming an institution toward antiracism when many BIPOC staff have experienced and continue to experience trauma as a result of that institutions culture of whiteness and structural racism is extremely difficult. A lot remains to be done and there are likely challenges ahead that we cant anticipate, Hughes says. The new code required staff members to report potential conflicts to their managers and to take action to remove any conflict, by changing beats, for example. Most of the Inquirers community-engagement efforts remain in the planning stage. Robert L. Mooney/The Philadelphia Inquirer By Katharine Q. Seelye Published July 23, 2021 Updated July 26, 2021 Laura Foreman, a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1970s, was. Higher levels of attention to COVID-19 coverage are positively correlated with income, education, and age indices, with bivariate correlations of 0.545 (p=.07), 0.21 (p=.54), and 0.854 (p=.003), respectively for these indices and COVID-to-crime coverage ratios.5 Correlations for income and age are considered moderate to strong, and the correlation with education is weak.6. The politician, State Senator Henry J. Cianfrani, who was known as Buddy, went to jail on unrelated charges of corruption. We received five responses (13% response rate), four of which provided information that either validated our existing data, corrected that information, or added new information to our analysis. and is the same edition as the printed copy available at the newsstand. Established By Sarah Scire @SarahScire Feb. 16, 2021, 10:50 a.m. A report commissioned by The Philadelphia Inquirer found that its coverage overwhelmingly featured people who were white and male. School of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester, Astley Clarke Building, Leicester LE1 7RH. Strangers rallied to help. PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER AND DAILY NEWS 1.3 Million read the Sunday Inquirer (630,390+ Daily) 384,813 read the Daily News Avg. Dr. Oz claims the Philadelphia Inquirer is trying to silence him by using his real name Morgan Keith Dec 13, 2021, 6:09 PM Dr. Mehmet Oz, Professor of Surgery, Columbia University speaks. I dont believe I have done anything wrong, Ms. Foreman told The Inquirer in a statement. Marketing Automotive Awards(April 5, 2023, NYC), Creative Media Awards(February 2, 2023, NYC), Agency of the Year(January 25, 2023, NYC), MediaPost All Stars(January 25, 2023, NYC), Lauren N. Williams Named Deputy Editor for Race at Guardian US, Musk Settles Defamation Case Over Claim Made In An Email, Former USA Today EIC Nicole Carroll To Launch Local News Initiative, Lee Enterprises Plans To Reduce Print To Three Days A Week: Report, Keep up-to-date with media, marketing and advertising news, Invitations to exclusive industry events and research. Large, commercial news organizations such as newspapers and TV affiliates continue to be dominant providers of news coverage in U.S. metropolitan areas (Pew Research Center, 2010). Anyone can read what you share. The newspaper asked her to resign eight months later over her conduct in her previous job, at The Philadelphia Inquirer. As our content analysis does not involve human coding, precision is the most important measurement for assessing our database search strings (Stryker et al. independent audit that resulted in a. Corresponding author: Timothy Neff, School of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester, Astley Clarke Building, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK. Some progress was made in leadership hires and several desks surpassed the goal of at least 25% BIPOC journalists, though others did not. But she was among the first to have that romance, with a powerful politician, blow up into a public scandal. They have power. (2012) identify eight categories of such critical information needs: Emergencies and public safety; health; education; transportation; environment and planning; economic development; civic life; political life. For example, a short item (292 words) published August 18, 2021, reports on a shooting death and notes in the final paragraph that Philadelphia and other cities have seen spikes in homicides and shootings (McCarthy, 2021). This includes the Delaware County Times, Metro (Philadelphia), and digital-only Philadelphia Patch, but not Philadelphia Tribune, which largely serves Philadelphias Black community. Forgot? However, a multi-dimensional analysis of the media system taking account of the relative weight of different outlets (staffing levels and audience size) and different formats (digital-only vs. outlets combining print, broadcast, and digital formats) raises further concerns about the degree to which Philadelphia audiences are equitably served. Nearly two years and several extraordinary measures later, they identified 33 of the 43 people who had set off from West Africa. Mr. Roberts soon asked the managing editor, Gene Foreman no relation to Laura to prepare a comprehensive ethics code, something few newspapers had in that era. Passengers held up phones during Philadelphia SEPTA rape - New York Post But a lot can be learned from the substantial volume of work they have already done, as well as the challenges they have encountered. Nonetheless, the article noted, editors had examined her past work and had found it to be fair and accurate. If the Inquirer is to avoid these pitfalls, it must grapple with some of journalisms existential questions along the way namely who is its journalism for, how to pay for it, and what values guide it. False claims about election fraud remain a problem, spreading in various places online, voting and media experts said. When I learned over the weekend about what the Inquirer was doing, I couldnt help but think about the deeply flawed media coverage that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Our research builds on this work by assessing Philadelphias media system, with a focus on the multi-dimensional influence of different factorsdifferent forms of media ownership, audience size and socioeconomics, and news formaton the production of critical news and information for the citys marginalized communities. For example, Chadwicks concept of the hybrid media system emphasizes the flow of news across platforms, such as print, broadcast, and the Internet, and different media production logics. Our study focuses on the structural drivers of systemic news gaps, rather than news flows. As ad-industry executives gathered for the event, activist groups flew a banner that read Musk Is Bad For Business: #StopToxicTwitter., for your rights to connect and communicate, The Philadelphia Inquirer Is Working to Transform Its Newsroom. However, these outlets generally do not have the same journalistic resources in terms of staffing levels as Philadelphias dominant news sources. She went to The Times in January 1977, arriving in Washington with the new Carter administration. Digital-only outlets included in Table2 are Billy Penn, Catholic Philly, Passyunk Post, Philly Voice, and West Philly Local. News Voices; Media 2070; Save The Internet; Voices for Internet Freedom . Such decisions carry weight. Public media organization WHYY and its digital-only publication Billy Penn show either higher than average or nearly average ratios of pandemic to crime coverage (ratios of 4.7 and 20.4, respectively). Major television affiliates for ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox also wield significant journalistic resources, but data on the composition of their audiences are unavailable. Like No one expected the Inquirer to undo the influence of generations of structural racism in a few months. Public media organization WHYY has a television audience education index (102) close to the Philadelphia average, based on a media kit citing 20132014 figures (WHYY, n.d.). While some managers suggested that it was expected that talent would be poached because the Inquirer was no longer viewed by some as a destination newspaper, other staff suggested more needed to be done to create a working environment in which BIPOC journalists felt their life experiences were acknowledged and welcomed. Among outlets included in our content analysis, audiences that are more affluent, more educated (though correlations with education indices are borderline weak/negligible), and older receive proportionally more COVID-19 pandemic coverage while audiences that are less wealthy, less educated, and younger receive news coverage with a stronger focus on often individualized, breaking-news crime. The system on average also produces news for older audiences, with an age index of 109. While some noted the Inquirer was swapping out staff as fast as we can, others suggested change may be limited so long as the top level stays exactly the same. While several staffers shared this sentiment, the masthead has seen considerable change since the start of 2020, and white men are now in the minority. Eric Mitchell Obituary (2021) - Media, PA - The Philadelphia Inquirer That amounts to 23% of the 210 people who started 2021 in the newsroom. Final search string for COVID-19 coverage: (headline=(covid* OR coronavirus* OR pandemic* OR vaccin* OR virus* OR Wuhan OR Hubei OR CDC* OR quarantin*) OR lead=(covid* OR coronavirus* OR pandemic* OR vaccin* OR virus* OR Wuhan OR Hubei OR CDC* OR quarantin*)) NOT (headline=(Eagles OR Flyers OR Phillies OR Sixers OR 76ers OR NCAA OR MLB OR NHL OR MLS OR NFL OR soccer federation OR minor league OR major league OR happy valley OR PSU OR golf OR soccer OR football OR Penn Relays OR Owls OR auto racing OR NASCAR) OR lead=(Eagles OR Flyers OR Phillies OR Sixers OR 76ers OR NCAA OR MLB OR NHL OR MLS OR NFL OR soccer federation OR minor league OR major league OR happy valley OR PSU OR golf OR soccer OR football OR Penn Relays OR Owls OR auto racing OR NASCAR) OR obituaries OR sound off OR letters to the editor OR clarifications OR clearing the record OR Dear Abby), ((police said OR police spokesperson OR detectives said OR investigators said OR authorities said OR according to investigators OR according to police OR according to the police OR prosecutors said OR was charged with OR is charged with OR arrested and charged or was accused of OR is accused of or was arrested for or on charges of or cops id or police id) OR headline=(stabbing* OR stabbed OR aggravated assault OR assault* OR murder* OR manslaughter OR rape* OR robbery OR robbed OR killer OR attacker OR shooting* OR gunshot OR gun shot OR knife or burglar* OR vandal* OR detectives OR embezzle* OR theft OR stole* OR slain OR homicide* OR felon* OR misdemeanor*)) NOT ((Eagles OR Flyers OR Phillies OR Sixers OR 76ers OR NCAA OR MLB OR NHL OR MLS OR NFL OR soccer federation OR drown* OR thunderstorm OR tornado OR house fire OR sound off OR college basketball OR letters to the editor OR police brutality OR Black Lives Matter OR George Floyd OR Breonna Taylor OR Daunte Wright OR Rayshard Brooks OR Daniel Prude OR Walter Wallace OR clarifications OR legislat* OR editorial OR live life love OR politics OR sports OR Dear Abby OR capitol OR tear gas OR *plane crash OR President Trump OR Donald Trump) OR headline=(coronavirus OR covid OR virus OR vaccin*)), Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. Excluding their ratios, Philadelphias media system has a weighted average ratio of 4.8 (3.9 excluding Jewish Exponent and Philadelphia Magazine, as well). For example, based on 2019 Census calculations for its coverage area, Delaware County Daily Times audience has a (weighted average) median household income (HHI) of $78,106. Various kinds of media subsidies could increase staffing levels at outlets serving marginalized communities, both across the city and at the hyperlocal, neighborhood level, and increase the racial and gender diversity of staffing at dominant news organizations. Ms. Foreman, who at one point supervised a staff of about 20 people at Time-Life, also freelanced for Discovery Publishing, which produced illustrated books to accompany television specials, and for other publishers. 10/week for 3 months. The Inquirer newsroom lost 48 writers and other newsroom employees last year, including about 20 veteran writers and others who took a buyout. By the time the affair was disclosed and The Inquirer learned that the politician had given her more than $20,000 worth of gifts, including jewelry, furniture and a fur coat, and helped her buy a 1964 Morgan sports car she was working in the Washington bureau of The New York Times. A 2020 diversity audit found that the Philadelphia Inquirer, the dominant print and online news outlet in the citys media system, underrepresents people of color in its content and that its staff is overwhelmingly white (74.3% of newsroom staff; Monroe & Wenzel, 2021, p. 22). Here's What It's Done in a Year, Net Neutrality: What You Need to Know Now, Where Does My Representative Stand on Net Neutrality, Where Does My Senator Stand on Net Neutrality, A Philadelphia Inquirer Headline Sparked Outrage and a Newsroom Audit. Philadelphia Inquirer - Muck Rack under pressure to appear patriotic in the aftermath of the attacks. The next year he named her the papers political writer, the first woman to hold that title in The Inquirers 145-year history. Our study, which builds and applies a multi-dimensional framework for analyzing local media systems, shows that news gaps can arise when some news outlets produce substantial coverage for some audiences while neglecting others and when they provide overall inadequate coverage of vitally important issues related to public health and other critical information needs. The study was an article that reviewed studies. While covering the South, she crossed paths with Eugene L. Roberts Jr., then the chief Southern and civil rights correspondent for The Times. Assessed as raw percentages, there is an inverse correlation between COVID news and education indices (0.378, p = .23), though this assessment excludes three outlets with high-income indices for which we lack audience education data. These include, among other things, creating a community desk, developing community engagement goals for performance reviews, creating a community advisory council, and holding accountability conversations with external community stakeholders. There's a simple but powerful idea behind the Philadelphia Inquirer's recent decision not to use the word "audit" when referring to an effort by the state GOP to investigate the 2020 . In subsequent years, the press used euphemisms like enhanced interrogation techniques when they should have said torture. Or they called suspected terrorists at Guantnamo Bay detainees, as if they were being sent to the principals office rather than serving what amounted to a prison term of many years. Inequities in news provision in Philadelphias media system have been noted by prior researchers. Acknowledging this power and being transparent about those choices is exactly what the Inquirer did the other day when it embedded within a news story a bit of explanatory text, under the headline: Why Were Not Calling It an Audit., In clear language, the paper explained that its because theres no indication that this effort, which follows months of demands from Donald Trump alleging baselessly that the election was rigged, would follow the best practices or the common understanding of an audit among nonpartisan experts.. "Commenting on Inquirer.com was. Our research questions are: RQ1: To what extent are socioeconomically and demographically differentiated (by income, education, and age) audiences served by Philadelphias media system? Sourcing and editing practices that catered to an imaginary print reader were at least partially to blame. Overcoming Joel Embiids absence, Sixers take Game 1, 119-115, behind James Hardens 45 points, Ed Snider Youth Hockey & Education, the Flyers, and Flyers Charities open new street hockey rink in Kensington, Police Commissioner Outlaw is back to full duty after she was injured in a car crash, Sixers head coach Doc Rivers reflects on his time in Boston, embraces new role as 'arch enemy'. The conversations focused on crime and justice coverage with the hopes of informing the Inquirers newsroom guidelines and building relationships with impacted communities. This is a cause for concern and further research regardless of any assessment of how different news topics represent critical information needs. One other effort may offer even more fundamental potential for transforming the day-to-day work of journalism. After its infamous Buildings Matter, Too headline, the paper launched its Inquirer for All project to rebuild to be inclusive and antiracist. It also banned the widespread practice of accepting freebies from sources and others in their news coverage. This article was published more than1 year ago. But her promising start at The Times exploded eight months later. While Philadelphia appears to have a thriving news market and has experimented with new funding models to sustain news provision (Rieder, 2017; Schaffer, 2010; Wolfson & Funke, 2014), it remains unclear to what degree these recent interventions ensure that the information needs of all residents are equitably met. Laura Foreman in 1976 at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Mo., as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Reporting on rising homicide rates arguably meets a communitys critical information needs, but in this case and in many others the focus remains on short, breaking news-style coverage of crime incidents rather than on larger structural issues of inequality and justice, even as the Inquirer has attempted to move away from brief, ledger style crime coverage (Monroe & Wenzel, 2021). JESSICA GRIFFIN / Philadelphia Inquirer HARRISBURG Two Philadelphia addiction treatment providers face criminal charges for allegedly bribing recovery homes for referrals and forcing patients into substandard care, prompting renewed calls from state lawmakers to strengthen oversight. Accordingly, this study builds a multi-dimensional framework for studying the complex structures of local media systems and uses it to assess Philadelphias news media landscape with a particular focus on identifying potential news gaps, especially in the citys most marginalized communities. . Pandemic coverage need not always be spectacular to meet a critical information need, especially given audience surveys that find a clear desire for usable information that can be put to use in the day-to-day life of a community (Delli Carpini et al., 2018). Philadelphia also has significant levels of socioeconomic and racial inequality (Shields & Siddique, 2020), raising the question of whether the citys news outlets equitably serve its most marginalized communities. Instead of hiring the most qualified people for the job they will lower those standards for having a better mix of skin color in the newsroom. She is survived by Mr. Cianfranis daughters and grandchildren. (, Wenzel A. D., Nadler A., Valle M., Hill M. L. (. So is racially tinged. Or pro-life. Or torture.. RQ4: How do different forms of media ownership affect the provision of news coverage that meets communities critical information needs? Cared about the people under him. Mr. Roberts later became the editor of The Inquirer, where he hired Ms. Foreman as a features reporter in 1973. Search strings were developed through a rigorous testing process (for details of methodology, see appendix), but these subsamples enable us to conduct additional assessments of the relevance of items returned by our search results. A final reliability test on 300 stories published by our outlets from the Factiva and NewsBank databases and including two coders (co-authors) resulted in strong intercoder agreement scores for COVID-19 stories (0.907 Holstis method; 0.812 Krippendorffs alpha) and for crime stories (0.947 Holstis; 0.837 Krippendorffs). As digital forms of news distribution emerged in the 2000s, a new wave of research found gaps in public affairs reporting, but also traced networks of emergent digital-only news outlets that potentially could fill some of these gaps (Anderson, 2013; Schaffer, 2010). (2012) refer to as critical information needs. From information about public emergencies to coverage of local politics, journalism that fulfills these needs is essential to community cohesion, self-determination and, more broadly, to a functioning democracy. Most television stations have far lower than average ratios of COVID to crime coverage, though WPVI/ABC6s ratio of 3.3 exceeds ratios at most of Philadelphias larger outlets. The Inquirer hired 47 for newsroom positions during the year. The Afghan debacle lasted two decades. Though these findings are limited to a small number of digital-only outlets due to data availability issues, they raise a concern, deserving of further research, for what might be termed digital news deserts in which online-only outlets devote their already small staffs to reaching the same higher socioeconomic audiences served by large, legacy outlets and online-only outlets reaching lower socioeconomic audiences lack the capacity to significantly change this broader trend. Philadelphia Inquirer kills comments section on most stories However, news outlets supply news that fulfills critical information needs in ways that are related to audience demographics: Among outlets included in our content analysis, wealthier, more educated, and older audiences are associated with a stronger news focus on COVID-19 pandemic versus crime. However, nationally and internationally produced or focused items can include critical information about the pandemic, as in the case of national recommendations for wearing masks or receive vaccinations. Our final, closed search string for crime stories achieved 91% precision and 87% recall. Household Income: $90,594 Average Age: 51 50% Female / 50% Male. She and Mr. Cianfrani later went their separate ways, but were still married when he died in 2002 at 79. However, researchers have found demographic differences among audiences for different news formats: Local television news viewership appears to lean older and lower income and education; Internet use leans somewhat younger and male, as well as higher income and education; newspaper readership leans older and higher income and education (Althaus & Tewksbury, 2007; Althaus et al., 2009; Bucy, 2001; Gaziano & McGrath, 1987; Prior, 2007). Indeed, in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, news-starved residents turned to Facebook alerts for their news needs, which fueled the rapid spread of fear, exaggerations, and falsehoods (Zadrozny, 2021). Findings indicate that multiple dimensions of Philadelphias news media systemaudience size and socioeconomics, staffing levels, forms of ownership, and platform effectswork together to underserve communities with lower levels of income and education and that this structural gap generates a measurable gap in the provision of news content meeting the critical information needs of these communities.
