Two members of the design team for the Project for Excellence in Journalism's
periodic report cards on local broadcast journalism -- one of them the project's
former deputy director -- have resigned after not being notified that five years
of data gathered for those report cards would be used in a study on
news-ownership and group-ownership size.
The PEJ study said greater concentration of TV stations in the hands of
giant companies will likely lower the quality of local news.
Large station groups, including network owned-and-operated stations looking for Federal
Communications Commission approval to grow those groups, have questioned those
findings.
Project director Tom Rosenstiel acknowledged that the design-team members
should have been notified.
Neither resignee, Carl Gottlieb nor Gary Wordlaw, could be reached. Both are
veteran broadcast newsmen.
Wordlaw was a longtime news director who became a general manager, recently
joining the nation's largest station group, Viacom Inc, running KSTW(TV) Seattle.
Gottlieb was until last summer deputy director of the Project for Excellence
until he left to join Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc.'s News Central as managing
editor.
