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Content analysis ranks our team low

By Mark Obbie

The Project for Excellence in Journalism ranks reporting on courts and the legal system among the least covered domestic issues, occupying four-tenths of a percent of the annual newshole in all media last year. That doesn't ring true. I'd like to see how the researchers define terms, for starters. With crime ranking so highly (fourth-most covered, including foreign topics, at just under 8 percent of the newshole), and with what I see in the major national papers daily, I have to wonder if they're only counting stories on the justice system, or if they're counting every story that has a court angle or reporting comes from court hearings and records. Isn't every crime story a story about the legal system? Is that steroids-scandal story just about sports, or is it partly about the courts? So how were stories put in those respective buckets? Until I understand that, I'm not willing to concede that legal journalism is such a castoff.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on March 18, 2008 (boomark / email).