acroyear | thatliardesmond likely will correct me on some of this, but...

William Grosso:

Here's what CNN wrote, when talking about a new album.
The album was released March 23. Its strong showing may be another sign the recording industry, which has been in a long slump because of piracy, the illegal Internet downloading of music and other factors, is on the upswing.

I think that the recording industry has been in a slump. But was piracy a significant factor? The most significant factor? A factor so much more significant than the others that only it needs to be named? I know the recording industry claims that piracy is a factor, but last I heard, it was very much an open question [...] Was that debate ever resolved? To the point where CNN can blithely assert in an offhand comment that piracy is the major cause of the record industry's woes.

The way I see it, CNN, or actually, the Associated Press (note the "AP" at the begining of the article after the city), don't really "research" these kinds of things anymore. And my further impression is they never have.

Any album announcement or other "big thing" in terms of record information comes directly from the RIAA's own press releases. All the AP guy did was take the content of the press release and paraphrase it into his/her own writing style. The RIAA has had a long-standing habit of mentioning "piracy" in every press story they've released for the last several years, whether it was relevant or not.

It also doesn't mention that mega-sales of a single album does not necessarilly reflect an upswing in the sales of ALL albums. This album may have sold 1.1 million copies, but what did the rest of the industry see during that rush. If the rest of the industry saw 1.1 million fewer sales of everything else over the usual amount, then the industry is in the same flat slump its been in for years. Or maybe sales of other albums were up, as people bought more than just the mega-hit; this would lead the industry to further conclude that the only way it can succeed is to intentionally strive for mega-hit albums at the expense of artistic progress.

This is because AP and Reuters don't really do analysis of the vast majority the stories they post. They read and summarize the analysis already provided for them by the PR people releasing the original story, turning it into byte-size (pun intended) content that can go down a wire for every news agency to publish or read on the air as-is. Sometimes they'll cite who actually did the analysis they're repeating, other times if the so-called analysis is part of the original release, as in the case of RIAA or SCO press releases, they'll just take it for given.

Outfits like CNN and most newspapers, constantly looking for online content to keep eyeballs coming in to see the ads, buy their content directly from AP and Reuters, without any eye to editing it aside from deciding whether or not to run it and where the headline goes on the front page.

In the end, its up to us to be skeptical of such reports, particularly the short sound-bite stories the newswire agencies put out, lest the reader/audient make the same mistakes I did in a story a couple of weeks ago.