Poynter on the Record

News organizations don't say how much they pay to commission a poll. But in almost all news coverage, following the money trail is a near obsession. Some stories on media-generated polls offer a link to the questions asked, others don't.

"I think there are certain cautions that need to be addressed when you commission a poll," said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, the nation's leading journalism think tank.

But Kelly McBride, who teaches at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said journalists should not be labeled as star-struck for reporting on the "mania" surrounding Obama.

"It's a surprise in some ways for Conde Nast, which has been the premiere magazine company in the U.S. for a long time," said John Fennell, a professor of magazine journalism at the University of Missouri. "Everybody's running a bit scared."

"It's going to take a couple of years ... to learn whether some of these losses are cyclical or whether they're permanent," said Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists. "Until then, I think you're going to see all such institutions exercising as much fiscal discipline as possible. You just hope that they can do it without hurting the product and perhaps driving away readers."

Circulation has been dropping for decades, a trend hastened by readers shifting to the Internet. Newspapers also have lost advertising because of the Internet, and that decline accelerated this summer as the weak economy prompted advertisers to pull back on spending.

To boost revenue, many papers also have increased prices, causing small circulation drops.

This year's sharpening drop also appears to result in part from the way papers are responding to losing ad revenue, said Rick Edmonds, media analyst at the journalism think tank Poynter Institute.

At the same time, the Free Press has devoted more staff time to freep.com and other ways of delivering digital information.

Rick Edmonds, an industry analyst with the nonprofit Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., said the worst isn't over.

Clark deftly leads us through the indicative, interrogative and impertive moods before moving on to subjunctive. It's a wonderful, clear explanation for anyone who knows that good writing starts with a strong structural foundation. If your structure (grammar) is bad, the readers will notice, even if they can't tell exactly what's wrong. 

Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, said it's tough to draw too many conclusions from the Monitor's decision because it is so unusual: It's owned by the church, has a small but national circulation and sells relatively little advertising.

Still, the industry will be watching, he said.

I took the "tanking" issue to Keith Woods, dean of faculty at the respected Poynter Institute, St. Petersburg, Fla., a 33-year-old school dedicated to improving journalism.

"I don't agree," he told me, likening perceived Obama bias to the reaction to media coverage of child disappearances, in that some get intensive coverage and most get none.

Jill Geisler, who teaches ethics and management at the Poynter Institute journalism school, said West has a right to ask any question she wants. "Depending on where you sit, you may say, 'Somebody finally asked the question I had,' " Geisler said. "Others would say it's loaded language."

Geisler found some of West's language "hyperbolic" and described the anchor as coming from a point of view similar to talk radio hosts Sean Hannity's or Rush Limbaugh's.