I’m actually out of the office (and covering the news via cellphone and modem) the second half of this week, attending the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Vegas this week, looking for (and getting) a lot of really practical hands-on ways of digging deeper for news stories.
In the interests of not spamming my Twitter followers and Facebook friends into oblivion, I’ve established a special Twitter feed just for the show. Follow me (or just bookmark) @Beau_at_IRE.
This is a fascinating piece from 1999 on the Internet — hilariously viewed as a fad by one BBC journalist, and I knew others at that same time who felt the same — and technology, by my hero, the late, great Douglas Adams.
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
His final comments, about what will be coming next (from the standpoint of 1999) were incredibly prescient.
And now, a newer report. As the title suggests, this is a comprehensive look at the state of the media today, and it’s a mixed bag at best and quite grim in other areas. It also confirms a lot of stuff I’ve been seeing, both locally and more broadly.
The numbers for 2009 reveal just how urgent these questions are becoming. Newspapers, including online, saw ad revenue fall 26% during the year, which brings the total loss over the last three years to 43%.
Local television ad revenue fell 22% in 2009; triple the decline the year before. Radio also was off 22%. Magazine ad revenue dropped 17%, network TV 8% (and news alone probably more). Online ad revenue overall fell about 5%, and revenue to news sites most likely also fared much worse.
Only cable news among the commercial news sectors did not suffer declining revenue last year.
The newspaper industry, of course, is the only one that tells its audience about how much trouble it’s in all the time, which is an interesting cultural quirk.
For newspapers, which still provide the largest share of reportorial journalism in the United States, the metaphor that comes to mind is sand in an hourglass. The shrinking money left in print, which still provides 90% of the industry’s funds, is the amount of time left to invent new revenue models online. The industry must find a new model before that money runs out.
The losses are already enormous. To quantify the impact, with colleague Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute, we estimate that the newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000, or roughly 30%. That leaves an estimated $4.4 billion remaining. Even if the economy improves we predict more cuts in 2010.
Network news division resources are likely down from their peak in the late 1980s by more than half — which amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars — and new rounds of cuts came in the last 12 months. Local television is harder to gauge, but one estimate puts the losses in the last two years at over 1,600 jobs, or roughly 6%. Staffing at the news magazines Time and Newsweek since 1983 is down by 47%.2
It’s ironic, but not getting into Columbia’s grad school program might have been a good thing, since the places it could have taken me are slashing jobs and some of them will be out of business before the student loans would have been paid off. See, kids? Good grades are a trap!
And as we enter 2010 there is little evidence that journalism online has found a sustaining revenue model. A new survey on online economics, released in this report for the first time, finds that 79% of online news consumers say they rarely if ever have clicked on an online ad.
There was certainly more talk of alternative approaches to advertising in the last year. Entrepreneur Steve Brill and others launched JournalismOnline.com, which offers news sites a mechanism for charging, but at this point it is more a possibility than a business reality. Rupert Murdoch announced discussions with Microsoft about higher payments for searching his content and insisted that everything his company produces would go behind pay walls. Columbia University produced a report that explored nonprofit and public funding sourcing and assessed the state of start up new media. The New York Times announced it was giving itself a year to figure out a way to charge for content to “get it really really right.” And more new media startups were planned, a growing sign that as old media continues to shrink, the ecosystem is changing and some things are growing.
But if a new model is to be found it is hardly clear what it will be. Our survey, produced with the Pew Internet & American Life Project, finds that only about a third of Americans (35%) have a news destination online they would call a “favorite,” and even among these users only 19% said they would continue to visit if that site put up a pay-wall.
In the meantime, perhaps one concept identifies most clearly what is going on in journalism: Most news organizations — new or old — are becoming niche operations, more specific in focus, brand and appeal and narrower, necessarily, in ambition.
All of this rings true. And the Star, which has as its focus events happening in the boundaries of Hesperia and/or the Hesperia Unified School District, is certainly a niche publication — and is actually doing quite well, and is going in the opposite direction from newspapers around the country that are still trying to be all things to all consumers. (It turns out that consumers now prefer this big newspaper called the Internet for that.)
The notion that the news media are shrinking is mistaken. Reportorial journalism is getting smaller, but the commentary and discussion aspect of media, which adds analysis, passion and agenda shaping, is growing — in cable, radio, social media, blogs and elsewhere. For all the robust activity there, however, the numbers still suggest that these new media are largely filled with debate dependent on the shrinking base of reporting that began in the old media. Our ongoing analysis of more than a million blogs and social media sites, for instance, finds that 80% of the links are to U.S. legacy media. The only old media sector with growing audience numbers is cable, a place where the lion’s share of resources are spent on opinionated hosts. One result may be the rising numbers in polling data that show 71% of Americans now feel most news sources are biased in their coverage and 70% feel overwhelmed rather than informed by the amount of news and information they see. Quantitatively, argument rather than expanding information makes up the growing share of media people are exposed to today.
I know that I was depressed when I realized that CNN now gives up three hours at prime time of Headline News to opinion and entertainment news coverage.
When it comes to audience numbers online, traditional media content still prevails, which means the cutbacks in old media heavily impact what the public is learning through the new. An analysis in this year’s report of online audience behavior, extrapolated from Nielsen Net Ratings data, finds that 80% of the traffic to news and information sites is concentrated at the top 7% of sites. The vast majority of the top news sites (67%), moreover, are still tied to legacy media financed largely by their shrinking end of the business.3 New media are growing, but their ranks among the most trafficked sites are still small. Another 13% of these news sites are aggregators, whose content is derived from legacy media. Only 14% of these sites are online-only operations that produce mostly original reportorial content rather than commentary. In short, the cutbacks in old media are not only drastically affecting traditional media but significantly impact online content as well.
And finally, newspapers won’t disappear, but many of them will continue to get thinner:
Newspapers are not disappearing in droves. Only half a dozen of any size went out of business or cut back print publication last year and most of those were second papers in their market. But newspapers have seen ad revenues fall by nearly half in three years, staff cutbacks are dramatic, if not quite as large, and a coming issue now is that papers are at risk of becoming insubstantial, lacking the heft to be tossed up on the front porch or to satisfy those readers still willing to pay for a good print newspaper.
If anyone’s got any new ideas on how to pay for the creation of news, please don’t keep it to yourself.
At least, that’s one of the findings in a new(ish) study: 95 percent of all Baltimore news (the subject for the study) reported originated with traditional media, most of it from newspapers. Most of the other venues, including online, were mostly just regurgitating and discussing what the Baltimore Sun had turned up to begin with. Even in a market with now 53 (!) different entities covering local news, only 17 percent of their coverage had anything new, and most of that was generated by “old” media online.
Of course, it’s not all good news: The Sun is posting more government press releases verbatim in an apparent attempt to having news break as fast as possible.
Still, this (limited) study confirms what I’ve believed for a while: While Twitter and other social media might be great for disseminating the fact that an event has happened, and then linking to news stories about said event, it’s not going to replace traditional media any time soon. It’s not like there’s a big barrier to entry to live-blogging a Baltimore city council meeting on Twitter: It’s just that unpaid amateurs are unlikely to sit through all those meetings and do the basic work of reporting, especially in the absence of some burning issue that speaks to them personally.
