The Project for Excellence in Journalism is out with their annual report on the state of the news media. They have identified six trends for 2006,
1. The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories.
Instead of a paradox isn’t that a problem? What’s the point of more journalists if they are going to cover the same stories? Isn’t that one of the main drivers behind the growth of the blogosphere, that there are so many issues not being covered with the attention they deserve? Whether you are on the left or the right, both sides could point to example after example of issues that are poorly covered by the MSM to the dissatisfaction of large groups of people.
2. The species of newspaper that may be most threatened is the big-city metro paper that came to dominate in the latter part of the 20th century. In part, they are being supplanted by niche publications serving smaller communities and targeted audiences.
Look at the big city papers, the NY Times, the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, etc. All of them dripping with bias from the news pages to the editorial pages. They have given up trying to even pretend to be balanced. They have withered their audience down to their core constituency. How else can you explain Times Select?
3. At many old-media companies, though not all, the decades-long battle at the top between idealists and accountants is now over. The idealists have lost.
Hasn’t this been true for twenty years? According to Lee Hanna, a producer at NBC from Brinkley to Brokaw, “In the 1980s, network news budgets were cut, resulting in bureau closures and the employment of fewer correspondents.” The difference today is that television news organizations are, for the most part, not stand alone companies but part of conglomerates. Disney owns ABC, GE owns NBC and until a few months ago CBS was part of Viacom. Budget issues brought these companies together, and they continue to drive the decision making process today. With all due respect to Glenn Reynolds, sometimes small is not the new big. The key for media today is scale and that is true for TV and for newspapers.
4. That said, traditional media do appear to be moving toward technological innovation â?? finally. While the evidence is sketchy and the efforts are frustrated by newsroom cutbacks, in 2005 we saw signs that the pattern was beginning to change.
I agree, 2005 was the year that old media finally started getting creative and using blogs and podcasts to enhance their product. Well, many of them did, with a few notable exceptions.
5. The new challengers to the old media, the aggregators, are also playing with limited time. When it comes to news, what companies like Google and Yahoo are aggregating and selling is the work of others â?? the very same old media they are taking revenue away from. The more they succeed, the faster they erode the product they are selling, unless the economic model is radically changed.
This is true to a degree. However, Google and Yahoo get 98% of their revenue from advertising. The revenue they get from news aggregation is minescule. Internet companies will stay one step ahead of old media in figuring out how to monetize new technology like blogs and Podcasts.
6. The central economic question in journalism continues to be how long it will take online journalism to become a major economic engine, and if it will ever be as big as print or television.
The central economic questions should be, how do we improve our product? Without a better product, the economic problems will never solve themselves.
HT: Jeff Jarvis