{
  "slug": "context",
  "title": "What this record is about: journalism, facts and the attention economy",
  "markdown": "# What this record is about: journalism, facts and the attention economy\n\nThe War On News is a record of one thing: pressure on journalism, the practice of verified, fact-based reporting. That framing belongs to this site's publisher. It is carried here as a sourced record, never as a finding about any government, and every figure below is attributed to the organization that published it, with a date and a link.\n\n## What journalism means here\n\nJournalism, as this record uses the word, is reporting that is verified before publication, sourced to named people and documents, and corrected in the open when it is wrong. The Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics states the standard: \"Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough,\" and journalists should \"take responsibility for the accuracy of their work\" and \"verify information before releasing it\" [Society of Professional Journalists, 2014](https://www.spj.org/spj-code-of-ethics/). Thomson Reuters states a related principle for its own wire service: \"the integrity, independence, and freedom from bias of Thomson Reuters shall at all times be fully preserved\" [Thomson Reuters, 2008](https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/about-us/trust-principles.html). Not everything published as news meets that standard, and this record does not attempt to sort outlets or individual stories by whether they do. It documents what happens to the practice itself.\n\n## Two pressures on that practice\n\nThe publisher's premise is that verified reporting is under pressure from two directions at once.\n\nThe first is government action that limits journalists' access, credentials, funding or legal standing. That is the subject of this site's dated record, organized by [country](/united-states), by [tactic](/tactics/funding_and_ownership_pressure) and by [chronology](/ladders), with each entry resting on primary documents or reporting and a verbatim quotation. Rather than characterize any single action here, this page links to the record itself; the [coverage](/coverage) page sets out what has been catalogued and where gaps remain.\n\nThe second pressure is economic, and it runs in the opposite direction from the first: producing verified reporting is slow and costly, while unverified and misleading content can be produced cheaply and often earns more attention and advertising revenue. Newsroom employment in the United States fell 26% between 2008 and 2020, with newspaper newsrooms alone shrinking 57%, from roughly 71,000 jobs to about 31,000 [Pew Research Center, 2021](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/13/u-s-newsroom-employment-has-fallen-26-since-2008/). Newspaper advertising revenue fell from about $49.4 billion in 2005 to roughly $9.8 billion in 2022, a decline of about 80%, while daily circulation, print and digital combined, was down to 20.9 million [Pew Research Center, 2023](https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/). Close to 3,500 US newspapers have closed since 2005, leaving 213 counties as news deserts with no local news outlet at all, and some 50 million Americans live in counties with either no local source or only one [Medill Local News Initiative, 2025](https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2025/report/).\n\nAudiences have moved with the money. Global trust in the news held at 40% in 2025, and 40% of people said they sometimes or often avoid it, while in the United States social media and video networks overtook both television news and news websites as a news source for the first time [Reuters Institute, 2025](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2025). That shift rewards what spreads, not necessarily what is verified: a study of Twitter cascades found that false stories reached 1,500 people about six times faster than true ones did [Science (Vosoughi, Roy and Aral), 2018](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559), and a 2022 industry analysis estimated that programmatic advertisers directed about $2.6 billion a year worldwide to sites publishing misinformation and disinformation [NewsGuard, with Comscore, 2022](https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-reports/brands-send-billions-to-misinformation-websites-newsguard-comscore-report/).\n\nSome of that misleading material originates inside the United States; some is produced abroad and circulates to American audiences. In September 2024, the US Department of Justice announced the seizure of 32 internet domains used in a Russian government-directed influence campaign that had impersonated US news sites [US Department of Justice, 2024](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-covert-russian-government-sponsored-foreign-malign-influence), and the US intelligence community's 2025 assessment describes Russian information operations aimed at sowing doubt in US democratic processes, alongside comparable Chinese and Iranian activity [Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2025](https://archive.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-2025-Unclassified-Report.pdf).\n\nAgainst that backdrop, the kind of reporting this record treats as journalism remains expensive to produce. ProPublica's Local Reporting Network reimburses a partner newsroom for a reporter's full salary, up to $80,000 for 2026 and $82,500 for 2027 plus benefits, to fund a single yearlong investigation [ProPublica, 2025](https://www.propublica.org/how-to-apply/local-reporting-network). The United States government's own actions affecting journalism, the subject of this site's [dated record](/united-states), have occurred throughout this same period; the record, not this page, sets out what happened, when and on what authority.\n\n## What this record does not do\n\nThis site does not rate news outlets, and it does not adjudicate whether any individual story is true, false or misleading. It is not a fact-checking service and takes no position on pending disputes between outlets, platforms or governments. Its scope is narrower and more specific: documented government actions that have limited journalists' ability to report, set beside the economic and informational conditions, described above and sourced above, in which that reporting takes place.\n\n## How the record is kept\n\nEvery entry in this record rests on primary documents or established reporting, shown with a verbatim quotation, a named source and a date, under the rules set out in [Sources and standards](/sources-and-standards).\n",
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    "name": "CC BY 4.0",
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