“Only one media sector, the ethnic press, is still growing, and every measurement for audience—even page views and visitors—are now being questioned. Things are now moving faster than companies can even recognize,” said Project Director Tom Rosenstiel.

“The problems of newspapers appear to be the most acute at the moment,” Rosenstiel said. “After a traumatic year in 2005, circulation and job losses were almost as bad in 2006 and the industry saw earnings fall for the first time in memory in a non-recession year.”

Yet in the end, the report concludes that there is more reason than in the past years to believe that US’ traditional newsrooms will succeed in embracing this time of transition.

Some of the report’s main findings:

_The report reveals that a well-defined model for online journalism has yet to emerge, and that the Internet’s qualities are only marginally taken advantage of. For example, while immediacy and customizability have often been emphasized in online news, depth and multimedia production is still too rare an occurrence.  

_News organizations are now focusing around “franchise” and niche areas of coverage. The report warns that uncontrolled hyper-localism and niche branding can also lead to bias, or even to the “the death of a big city metro paper.”

_The news industry must find a new economic model. One model would charge Internet providers and news aggregators for licensed content.

_The once-preferred public ownership model is coming under fire, but private ownership hasn’t yet proved to be the solution either.

Rick Edmonds, from the Poynter Institute (and a co-author of the report), writes a summary of some the findings about online news websites.


The Editors Weblog will pursue its coverage of the State of the News Media Report in the following days.

Source: State of the Media