As publishers pump out repetitive content, quality reporting suffers

According to figures provided by media analytics company Newswhip, The Washington Post published 10,580 individual things in May of this year, including wire stories, graphics, and other miscellania. CNN published 9,430, The New York Times 5,984, The Wall Street Journal 4,898, and NPR 2,254. Similar numbers are not available for the pre-smartphone era, but the print edition of the Post on June 26 —a decent analogue for the numbers in the print-driven era—included 135 stories, less than half the daily web total. Many stories are either repetitive or seek to aggregate or comment on publicly available information—because it’s simply impossible for any quantity of journalists, no matter how industrious, to find 10,000 original things to publish in a month. And most newsrooms have either reduced the numbers of reporters and editors, or fought to keep it roughly static. The net effect is to speed up and amplify the groupthink that has always plagued journalists. And to deny audiences something they crave in a world that is changing fast: context.