28 October 2016
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"More than half of all local newspaper editors acknowledge that the courts are not being adequately covered in their own papers, according to new research by the Justice Gap. The study also reports a 40% drop off in the number of court stories on a single day this year compared to the same date four years ago.
For the second issue of Proof magazine to be published next month, Brian Thornton, a senior journalism lecturer at Winchester University, has updated a study carried out by Professor Leslie Moran from Birkbeck law school which looked at the coverage of the courts in the national and regional papers on one day (February 16 2012).
Thornton analyzed the same newspapers on the same day four years later. The results were compared across eight national papers (Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Guardian, Independent, Sun and Times) and five local titles (Birmingham Mail, London Evening Standard, Manchester Evening News, South Wales Echo, and Western Mail).
In 2012 there was a total of 82 court stories in the national and regional newspapers compared to just 57 court stories which represented a fall of (30%). The word count for the 82 stories in 2012 was 27,225 and that fell to 18,954 in 2016, also a decrease of 30%."
See: More than half of local newspapers don’t have a court reporter (The Justice Gap, link)
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