The Project for Excellence in Journalism report on the State of the Media for 2008 is online.

It offers a comprehensive and thorough analysis of trends in the media and is required reading for anyone in journalism.

Digesting the report will take some time. But I wanted to highlight two of its major trends:

• “News is shifting from being a product — today’s newspaper, website or newscast — to becoming a service — how can you help me, even empower me?”
• “A news organization and a news website are no longer final destinations.”

It is refreshing to hear this, especially when some newsrooms are still debating the value of linking out.

Online news is part of a wider system of connections. It is part of a network of information.

This means that news becomes a journey, rather than a destination. The smart news outlets realise this and seek to take on a new role, as a central hub in someone’s journey through a network of links.

Think of an airport. The airport with the most connections has the most value to many travellers, providing gateways to new places. The same model applies to a news website. The value of a news website to a visitor rises with the number of links it offers to other material online.

News outlets don’t have a choice anyway. People can flit from one site to another with the click of a mouse or search for a specific news item.

This is very different to the way news has worked in the past. In the physical world, news is a destination, often tied to a time and place, like the morning newspaper. It was the end of the search for news.

Now the start of a news journey is often an aggregators such as Yahoo or Google news. In an Internet age, news becomes a journey.

As the report states:

A site restricted to its own content takes on the character of a cul de sac street with yellow “No Outlet” sign, reducing its value to the user. “Search has become the predominant … paradigm,” an influential market research report circulating throughout the industry reads. That means every page of a website — even one containing a single story — is its own front page. And each piece of content competes on its own with all other information on that topic linked to by blogs, “digged” by user news sites, sent in e-mails, or appearing in searches.

Here’s to a network of journalism.