Connecting The Links In The News Food Chain

Ah, woe is the newspaper industry. Yes, there's been quite a bit of huffing and puffing about the decline of the newspaper industry lately. We've already mentioned columnist Georgie Ann Geyer's lament that no one has any idea what's going on in the world anymore because they don't read newspapers enough. The Philadelphia Inquirer's Tanya Barrientos chimed in recently too, wondering if the days of young reporters being inspired by the likes of Woodward and Bernstein were over, as newspaper journalism is now encumbered by a market that "demands budget cuts, and layoffs, and corporate takeovers."

But amid all this talk of a seeming newspaper apocalypse, there was one voice that seemed to inject an interesting bit of reasoning about the realities of the news food chain. While it was that of an obviously biased source – the Washington Post's Ben Bradlee – one of his quotes in an interview with Editor & Publisher seemed particularly relevant betwixt a deluge of newspaper death knells (and it fit quite nicely into the purview of Public Eye.) E&P writes that Bradlee "claims newspapers are not dying, as many have predicted for decades"… "He points out that the newspaper 'has been and will continue to be the main source of news for television, if you really study it. They process newspapers until they get their own reporters into the story.'"

To examine that maxim, let's take the trajectory of one story that has been getting plenty of attention lately – the (somewhat odd) side-effects that appear to be associated with the country's best-selling prescription sleeping pill, Ambien. If you haven't heard the terms "Ambien driver" and "sleep-eating," you haven't been watching, reading or listening to much news lately. While you've probably heard about either phenomenon on television, radio, online or even in a newspaper (probably not -- nobody reads that crap anymore), you might not know where the story broke. Well, actually it was in that doomed and useless of all mediums—the newspaper (The New York Times, to be exact.)

It started with a piece by Stephanie Saul on March 8 in The Times – not a front pager, but in the business section. That same morning, the CBS "Early Show" mentioned the Times' report that Ambien "could impair driving, and Ambien-related driving arrests are on the rise." On the CBS "Evening News" that night, Trish Regan did a segment on the story. She spoke with two people quoted in The Times' piece -- a forensic scientist who studied Ambien traffic cases, Laura Liddicoat, as well as Sean Joyce, a British painting contractor who became an "Incredible Hulk" of sorts after taking Ambien and getting on a plane.

Liddicoat popped up again on NBC "Nightly News" that evening, along with another expert from The Times' piece, Dr. Mark Mahowald, who was also researching sleep-driving and Ambien at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center. The following evening the story appeared on ABC's "World News Tonight," where Lloyd Boyer, the lawyer of a Denver woman who had a sleep-driving episode that she blamed on the drug, spoke with Lisa Stark. Where did ABC find Boyer? Probably paragraph 16 of The Times' story. But Stark also spoke to two sources who weren't quoted in that Times story – Dr. Michael Cramer-Bornemann, another researcher from the Minnesota Center and another Ambien user, Judie Evans, to reveal this nugget of information:

LISA STARK: Some doctors say the sleep-driving phenomenon is not surprising. It's already known that some Ambien users eat in their sleep.

LISA STARK: That happened to Judy Evans.

JUDIE EVANS: My son came to stay with me and found me up in the middle of the night frying eggs and bacon.

It was only after that piece that the three networks followed up on the Ambien/sleep eating phenomenon. On the 15th, CBS' "Early Show" featured a segment on sleep-eating and Ambien, which included interviews with two more of those quoted in The Times' second story -- Mahowald, one of the researchers on the sleep-eating study, and Ambien user Brenda Pobre. NBC's "Today" show was also on the story a day after The Times– interviewing Helen Cary, another Ambien user featured in The Times' March 14th story.

Even ABC didn't seem to recall its own reporting from Lisa Stark days earlier. On the 15th, "Good Morning America's" Charlie Gibson introduced a segment on sleep eating and Ambien (also featuring Mahowald and Pobre) as such:

Last week, we reported on people driving in their sleep and getting into accidents after taking the drug. But now we're hearing about sleep eating.

That said, it's fair to say that The Times owned this story and their coverage clearly drove how and when the networks played it. But if this example emphasizes any one contention, it is that the more news outlets we have within the news food chain, the better. Obviously many of the same people will be interviewed for a related story – the same doctors in this story came up again and again in various outlets because they are conducting the research on the drug in question. But it's clear that as more outlets become involved in the reporting process, more (and different) people are interviewed and more information is revealed. It certainly looks like Lisa Stark discovered the sleep-eating phenomenon before anyone else did – but ABC (and everyone else) seemed to wait for a cue from The Times to highlight it. The newspaper industry might be adjusting, but it certainly isn't dying – it's too vital a link in the chain.