The Project for Excellence in Journalism annual “State of the Media” report has been released, and as always, it’s a must read (set aside a good hour to go through it.) Of all the years I’ve read this report, this year is the most intriguing — many great points and a couple, well, that are debatable. Of course, no one argues now that news consumption is shifting online. Local TV news ratings continue to slide: -6% in the evenings, -7% at night and basically flat in the mornings over the last year. So this year, the two big points are these:
1. Audiences aren’t leaving traditional news brands. Many people, especially the young, are just shifting to the same branded content online. “More people now consume what old media newsrooms produce, particularly from print, than before,” explains the report.
2. As audiences shift, the advertising revenue isn’t shifting at the same level. “The crisis in journalism, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising,” reads the report. “As a category, news Web sites appear to be falling behind financially. They are not growing in advertising revenue as quickly as other kinds of Internet destinations. And these figures do not include the most important revenue source, search, where news is a relatively small player.”
I generally agree with both those conclusions. The point about news sites “falling behind financially” shouldn’t be taken as a limit of their success: revenue is growing in the double digits while traditional media is flat or in a decline. The point is that straightforward news and display advertising isn’t enough to compete with the pure plays, as I’ve written before.
The one area that I disagree with is PEJ’s assessment that there’s “too little that is new or verifiable” with blogs and user-generated media. In other words, a belittling of their importance. While this is true from an old school journalism perspective, this doesn’t dismiss the massive opportunity (that’s filled by some smart new sites) that exists in high-value niche categories ignored by traditional TV and print newsrooms. When you narrow the niche, user content becomes expert content. Just like cable TV, which now as an aggregate surpasses broadcast TV, local media will get beat if we take the attitude that these little niche sites can’t compete with us.
Two of PEJ’s major trends are certainly worth highlighting. One sounds like it’s channeling Terry Heaton: “There is no single or finished news product anymore. As news consumption becomes continual, more new effort is put into producing incremental updates… News is shifting from being a product — today’s newspaper, Web site or newscast — to becoming a service — how can you help me, even empower me?” And the second sounds like a Lost Remote blog post: “A news organization and a news Web site are no longer final destinations. Now they must move toward also being stops along the way, gateways to other places, and a means to drill deeper.”
Good stuff. Let us know your impressions of the report below, as well as some other nuggets you’ve discovered…