According to an article published in USA Today, quoting from a 500-page Project for Excellence in Journalism report, titled “The State of the News Media in 2004” …
The news business is “in the middle of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television,” say the report writers. “Journalism is not becoming irrelevant. It is becoming more complex.”
The report suggests things don’t look good for newspapers and network television, and only three out of eight media sectors (ethnic, alternative and online media) are seeing audience growth.

R. Foster Winans — who did time for misdeeds while an employee at The Wall Street Journal — advises Martha Stewart not to pay someone else to do her prison tasks. “Immerse yourself in humility. It’s good for the soul.”
Additional advice: “Offer to host or appear on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Your situation, in the context of all the horrible things that can happen to people, is a tempest in a teaspoon. Poke fun at yourself.”

Titling their article “Unembedded, unintimidated”, Salon today announced the appointment of veteran journalist and ex-Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal to their new Washington D.C. bureau. “The country wants and needs unintimidated news,” says Blumenthal. “The Bush administration has put enormous political pressure on the press not to probe its radical policies and their consequences. Salon intends to be fearless.”
Former New York, and Spy, magazine editor-in-chief Kurt Andersen — whose work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Architectural Record, among other publications, and who was also co-founder of the lost and lamented Inside.com — will return to New York magazine as a regular contributor, explaining his decision thusly: “I wrote occasionally at the The New York Times magazine for Adam Moss [who now edits New York magazine], and that was always a very pleasant experience. He called me last week and had this good idea and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to have you in my first issue?’, and I agreed.”

It’s good for columnists not to live in Washington, says Boston Globe syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman (available as a link, to your left, under Politics / United States). “There are too many insiders there; they go to dinner with each other, talk to each other and then have breakfast with each other. So, in professional terms, they’re all talking to each other.”
Goodman tells Anthony Violanti, of the Buffalo News, that political talk shows “are, by and large, men screaming at other men in front of a male audience. I get annoyed with these shows and I think most women do. Women in general have had quite enough angry men in their lives.”