Study: News industry needs new economic model

Cory Bergman March 12th, 2007

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its annual report on the state of the news media, and as always, it’s required reading. It highlights these trends:

  -News organizations need to do more to think through the implications of this new era of shrinking ambitions.
  -The evidence is mounting that the news industry must become more aggressive about developing a new economic model.
  -The key question is whether the investment community sees the news business as a declining industry or an emerging one in transition.
  -There are growing questions about whether the dominant ownership model of the last generation, the public corporation, is suited to the transition newsrooms must now make.
  -The Argument Culture is giving way to something new, the Answer Culture.
  -Blogging is on the brink of a new phase that will probably include scandal, profitability for some, and a splintering into elites and non-elites over standards and ethics.
  -While journalists are becoming more serious about the Web, no clear models of how to do journalism online really exist yet, and some qualities are still only marginally explored.

I’ll be perusing the report today — all 160,000 words — and I’ll post more as I see it.