State of the News Media 2009: bleakest ever, blames industry

Posted by Emma Heald on March 16, 2009 at 5:22 PM

The "bleakest" ever report on the State of the News Media in the US has just been released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Although the traditional media have held on to their audience numbers and it seems that "the old norms of traditional journalism continue to have value," the report comes to the same conclusion that we all have: the big problem is that of revenue.

One of the most important developments, states the report, is that audience migration to the Internet is now accelerating: according to one survey the number of Americans who regularly go online for news jumped 19% in the last two years and in 2008 alone traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27%. This shift "means that the news industry has to reinvent itself sooner than it thought," particularly in light of the worsening economy. Executives estimate that the recession at least doubled revenue losses in the news industry in 2008.

"And the news industry does not know," stresses the report, "how to convert this more active online audience into revenue." The report strongly criticises the industry for not trying hard enough to find a way to monetise its Internet readers. It "has done less than it could have to learn," newspapers have let other companies take classified advertising revenue instead of developing appropriate operations themselves, and there are growing doubts within the business "about whether the generation in charge has the vision and the boldness to reinvent the industry."

New media, although growing, is still "far from compensating for the losses in coverage in traditional newsrooms," and many sites are not actually self-sustainable. Ethnic media, however, seems to have made strides, and the report includes a special section on citizen-based media which is growing.

The verdict for newspapers is that although the situation is "dire" and weaker papers are already threatened, the Project for Excellence in Journalism does not believe that "the death of the industry is imminent." As papers still make about 90% of their revenue from print, and printing and delivery averages 40% of costs, it does not currently make sense for newspapers to go online-only. However, "closings, bankruptcies and online-only experiments" will continue throughout 2009.

Source: The State of the News Media 2009