It’s been a quiet week for media moves, with only Computing welcoming Stuart Sumner as senior reporter. However, there has been some really interesting news about the relationship between the role of the journalist and the massive increase in digital content.

A survey has been published over at PR Week, which suggests that almost 60% of global journalists believe that their content has improved with the rise of digital media. Surprisingly 3% said it had got a lot worse. Although the survey doesn’t explain away the 3%, my feeling is that it might be down to the increased expectations on the media in the digital age resulting in less time for each story.

However, this is good news for the PR industry as it suggests that journalists are increasingly dependent on PR content for their titles. This has long been the case in most sectors of technical publishing of course; where there are mountains of titles with only one journalist on board. A massive 29% of journalists now claim to have less time to research stories in person and 40% say they are expected to produce more content.

Twitter received another boost thanks to the survey, with 40% of publications having official Twitter channels and 70% of journalists claiming to use twitter professionally. Staggeringly, there was an 8% decrease in publications using online TV and video clips as part of their digital content since last year, with the survey reporting 39% this year compared with 47% in 2009. I would explain the latter with the fact that it’s quite a lot more expensive to produce video than words.

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