"A year in the news" by The Project for Excellence in Journalism

The report's main idea seems stems from narrowness of the news in 2007, where the media only covered two or three big stories throughout the year. The media fell short of being able to responsibly cover what was going on due to lack of resources, especially in relation to the U.S. interests abroad. The U.S. is known for not covering international stories like other countries do and the report showed that the media missed out on stories that were of direct U.S. interest. The biggest is example of this occuring is with Afghanistan, which received 1% of the coverage, despite the fact there are still U.S. troops there. If the media chooses to only pay attention to stories of U.S. interest abroad then they have to make sure to actually cover them as opposed to using all of their resources on just the Iraq war. Even though the U.S. is at war in Iraq, they also still had troops in Afghanistan, and tensions were mounting all around the middle east and in other areas of the world that directly affected the U.S.
Since there was a great increase in the lack of resources for media, many of the stories were hit and run stories that were great for the moment, but lacked anything of substance. Journalists and media could have given these stories value, but instead only covered them as events rather than continuing to develop and analyze them as weeks went on. These included stories like the shooting at Virginia tech and the Minneapolis bridge collapsing, which both could have been developed into stories involving deeper issues within the U.S. Since these hit and run stories were being harped on, long term issues like economics, health care, and business were mostly ignored since the resources went elsewhere. Even though the actual rat race of the election was highly covered, some of the most important issues were not covered and not analyzed by the media.
As resources grow in online and independent media, the hope is that issues can be covered more fully and developed thoroughly for less money than it would have cost for older sources of media. Since the media seems to be missing the big picture most of the time, which the report pointed out using graphs and statistics, it is in need of being steered in a new direction.