Whenever Clay Shirky posts about journalism, journalism blogs must link it. It is the law.
In this case, it's worth it, too. He does a very straightforward piece of analysis of a newspaper in the US, figuring out what it's actually made up of, and how much of it is original reporting.
I wonder how many of us have the courage to do a similar exercise on our own publications?
It's an interesting read, as always. And it could be that the picture is even worse. It's not clear whether the paper he looked at is involved in "churnalism" in the way that many UK papers are: Nick Davies' research for Flat Earth News found that in his sample fortnight, only 12 per cent of stories in UK nationals were derived from original reporting. If Shirky was just looking at whether a piece was bylined to a named author as opposed to a wire service, he might have admitted into his news pile some material that was really just PR (though obviously the examples he links to are proper original reporting of stories the reporters had to go out and find).
Go to it, Adam.