As David Brauer points out (with analysis),Bennett Gordon of the Utne Reader has gone ahead and physically weighed the Star Tribune to determine how much content is created locally: The paper fared better than the Columbia Daily Tribune, the paper tested by Shirky, where two-thirds of the news was acquired and only one-third was created. Still, out of more than 16 ounces of newspaper, just 2.3 were news created by the Star Tribune.
Weighing the Star Tribune
Oct 8 2009 — 8:31am
1 Reader Comment
8:44 am
How would the results today compare with a ’60s or ’80s era edition of Strib? There has always been a lot of non-local news published in the daily papers. (How much does the NY Times “weigh” by comparison?) Back in the day, there were many more independently-owned suburban newspapers that actively covered their communities (e.g. the weekly Richfield News, of which I was a carrier until 1970), so I doubt the Star, the Tribune, the Dispatch or the Pioneer Press (the four daily morning/afternoon newspapers from my youth) bothered to cover as much suburban news in the ’60s or ’70s as they do today.
Local dailies back then certainly didn’t send correspondents overseas to cover local angles to world news, as became the fashion in the ’80s and ’90s. Aside from having a Washington, D.C.-based reporter to reprot back on how local legislators were faring in Congress, a lot of what was published came from wire services and syndicators.