Each third piece of news in regional online media outlets is a crime report: IMI research

The largest share of news in the regional online media reports about crimes and related issues, or covers some emergency events. At that, 70% of news are reprints or "no-legwork" news. These are the results of the research of NGO “Institute of Mass Information”, that was conducted in ten regions of Ukraine in October this year.* Based on IMI research, 34% of news in newsfeed of regional websites are crime reports or reports on emergency events, 15% is news on social topics and 11% is news about local authorities. Top ten most covered topics also included news of culture (6%), economic news and reforms, news about war and the JFO, political news (5% each), sports and community news (4 % each) та show business news (2%).   News materials on anti-corruption, ecology, public initiatives, and religion, are, in aggregate, only 5%. of the total. Based on the results of the monitoring, crime reports and reports on emergency occurrences are most frequent in online mass media of Kharkiv (49%, almost each second news publication), Uzhhorod (47%) and Zaporizhzhia (42%). The smallest share of crime reports is in the newsfeed of online media outlets of Lutsk (28%), Kropyvnytskyi (28%), and Vinnytsia (17%). At that, Kharkiv online media outlets are leaders in covering social topics (22%, or each fifth publication), which is on par with Lutsk (21%) and Odesa (20%). News about local authorities are most frequently covered by online media outlets of Poltava (23%), Odesa (20%) and Dnipro (14%), least frequently - in Lutsk (5%) and Kharkiv (3%).   It is worth mentioning that certain regions can favor so-called local topics, in particular, in the news of online media outlets of Vinnytsia, the topic of petitions and explosions in Ichnia was intensively covered in the analyzed period, in Mariupol - the news from the occupied territories, in Dnipro - the local community initiatives. In addition, during the time of the monitoring, it was discovered that the newsfeed of regional online media outlets has less than 30% of original news. Almost each second piece of news is a reprint from other websites or a publication of a press release from some governmental body. The largest share of reprints and “no-legwork” news was in online mass media of Lutsk (89%), Kharkiv (88%) and Uzhhorod (87%), and the smallest - in Mariupol online media (39%). *The research was conducted by NGO “Institute of Mass Information” within the framework of the project “Development of responsible online media”, with support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, in October of 2018. In the course of this research, 5000 news publications were processed, from 50 regional online media outlets in ten cities of Ukraine (Vinnytsia, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kropyvnytskyi, Lutsk, Mariupol, Odesa, Poltava, Uzhhorod, Kharkiv). The monitoring covered only  news from online media outlets' newsfeed; articles, journalist investigations, analytics, blogs, editorials, etc. were NOT analyzed. The methodology of the monitoring included analysis of topics of news publications starting from October 8, 2018, and further analysis of most covered topics. In total, in the analyzed period, the following topic categories were singled out: crime reports / extraordinary events reports, social topics (education, medicine, vulnerable categories of population), local authorities, culture, economics/reforms, war/JFO, politics, sports, community news, show business news, anti-corruption, ecology, public initiatives / volunteer services, news from occupied territories, religion, international events, weather, explosions in Ichnia, petitions, tourism, curious trivia. In addition, the experts were counting the number of original unique news pieces, that had no indications of being additionally worked on by journalists. The monitoring was conducted in the following mass media:VINNYTSIA ("Vinnytski REALiyi", "20 khvylyn" / RIA, Vezha, IA "Vlasno", Channel 33), DNIPRO ("Informator", Dnipro city website, "Dnepr info", "V gorode", 056.ua), ZAPORIZHZHIA (061.ua, "Zabor", "Reporter Zaporozhya", Forpost, IpNews), KROPYVNYTSKYI ("Hrechka", "Tochka dostupu", First Electronic Newspaper, "Central Ukrainian News Bureau", "Bez kupiur"), MARIUPOL (0629.com.ua, "Mariupol city", "Novosti Donbassa", "Mariupol-tv", "Mariupolnews"), LUTSK ("Volynski Novyny", "VolynPost", "Rayon.Lutsk", "Volyn24", "Volynska pravda", ODESA ("Dumska", 048.ua, USI, "Trassa-Е95", "Odesskaya zhizn"), POLTAVA (IV “Poltavshchyna”, "Kolo", OKIA “Novyny Poltavshchyny”, "Hromadske.Poltava", "Poltava365"), UZHHOROD (KarpatNews, Pershyi Kabelnyi, "Zakarpattia-online", "Holos Karpat", "Mukachevo.net"), KHARKIV (ATN,  Status Quo, "Glavnoye", "Gorod Kh", KHARKIV Today).