The comprehensive look at the media in the US by the Project for Excellence in Journalism has just been published.
The State of the News Media 2009 report paints a sombre picture:
Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online. By 2008, the industry had finally begun to get serious. Now the global recession has made that harder.
This is the sixth edition of our annual report on the State of the News Media in the United States.
It is also the bleakest.
The report points to two factors that have come together to create a perfect storm for legacy media.
First, the number of people going online for news accelerated substantially in 2008. But although many of these visited traditional news destinations, “the financial impact of that was a negative one”.
Second, the collapsing economy has hit the news industry hard: “the recession hammered advertising and diverted attention away from innovating new revenue sources”.
The combined impact is that legacy media is struggling at a time when there is a growing online audience for news and a need to invest in digital platforms, but it has less time and fewer resources to make the transition:
The problem facing American journalism is not fundamentally an audience problem or a credibility problem. It is a revenue problem—the decoupling, as we have described it before, of advertising from news.
That makes the situation better than it might have been. But audiences now consume news in new ways. They hunt and gather what they want when they want it, use search to comb among destinations and share what they find through a growing network of social media.
However, the report points out that “the death of newspapers is not imminent, despite news of bankruptcies and even some closures”.
The problem is that the time the news industry has to “underwrite the gathering of news online, while using the declining revenue of the old platforms to finance the transition” has effectively shortened.
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