EXPERT SAYS NEWS MEDIA CAN BRING 'COMMON GROUND'

The nation's news media can bring "common ground" to America's divided society, media expert Dr. Karen Brown Dunlap said Friday.

"We are a divided society," Dunlap told about 150 Southeast Missouri State University mass communication students and professors, and working journalists, publishers and broadcasters during her keynote speech at a daylong conference in Cape Girardeau.

She said society is divided by race, age and religion. "Mass communications have a special role to bring people together," said Dunlap, an associate professor, dean of faculty and trustee of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla.

"The role of the press is to keep a community in conversation with itself," she said.

It is important for newsrooms to have a diverse group of employees in terms of gender, race, age and culture, Dunlap said.

She spoke at the "Big Picture at the Forefront" conference, which was held at the University Center in conjunction with the Southeast Missouri Press Association's 109th annual meeting.

Dunlap said the news media too often provides superficial coverage of events and issues. Too often, she said, reporters don't thoroughly research their stories. As a result the public doesn't hold the media in high regard.

She said increasingly there is a need for reporters with expertise in specific fields to better explain complex issues.

The news media faces economic and technological changes, Dunlap said.

In the future, newspapers may be circulated increasingly via the Internet and home printers.

Internet readership of newspapers will increase, she said. That poses economic questions because most news organizations haven't found a way to make their Web sites profitable, Dunlap said.