State of the media ‘more troubled’ this year
Cory Bergman March 16th, 2008
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…
8 Comments Add your own
1. tdc | March 16th, 2008 at 10:41 am
forgive me, you’ll find i posted roughly the same thing over at terry heaton’s pixel-
in regards to news as a continual product-
i got better coverage of yesterday’s atlanta tornados from livenewscameras than i did cnn.
WHAT???
cnn is world hq’d at yesterday’s ground zero and lnc appears to be hq’d in any then-unoccupied corner of foxchicago.
go figure.
oh, cnn had some nice pkgs don’t get me wrong, but lnc gave me 3-4 VERY raw live feeds… and they were very informative… put me right there.
this is the beginning of the LIVE web folks.
just for kicks, i then clicked on to my favorite news outlet in new orleans (wdsudotcom) to see how things were going there-
they had a “noon click cast” waiting for me on the homescreen…, FROM FRIDAY!
it’s sunday now and it’s still there.
sigh!
2. TR | March 16th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
You tell ‘em!
To tdc’s point, the conventional/traditional/old media is bogged down in too much oldtech. If you have to drag a big ol’ six-figure-cost live truck all over the place, of course you’re not going to move as fast as somebody with an iPhone in their pocket or at worst a laptop bag slung over one shoulder and a small camcorder bag over the other (hi!). Re: packaging vs. raw/live, I guess there always will be a market for context somewhere, but this is primarily an I Need To Know NOW kind of world, and by the time the contextizing/packaging is done in a few hours (or worse, a few days!), attention spans and needs have moved on to Something New I Need To Know About NOW.
3. Anonymous | March 16th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Too much of that and it looks like a camcorder prank on You Tube. You are missing the barn and shooting at the broad side of the farmer’s wife! While it’s really hard to get into TIBET right now and a cellphone call blessed, that sat truck is not only out there but if you are wise being used for larger projects (events, incidental production work, interviews) to maximize the value of that truck. It’s a good thing when small package become more capable and they can do so much that wouldn’t happen ofterwise.
The nicest thing about digital technologies would be that small devices get better as time goes on.
4. oakling | March 16th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
They’re all so desperate to convince us that information online can’t be trusted. Nooo! Don’t look at the wikipedia site behind the curtain!!!!
5. ??? | March 16th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Quite a little circle-jerk this website’s comments have become.
6. Rick Ellis | March 17th, 2008 at 11:24 am
I was just blogging about this (click my name for the post), and what struck me about the report was that it really missed the boat on the online side of the story.
But I did find these statistics interesting (in a depressing sort of way): 81% of national broadcast journalists, 80% of local broadcast journalists, 63% of local print journalists, and 53% of national print journalists still say that their traditional medium – not the Web – is the priority at their companies.
7. Rob | March 17th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
My comments refer mostly to the web side of the report. I won’t point out statistics and stuff but general observations from what I read.
1. Advertising agencies are being left in a position of having to catch up to the changes instead of leading the pack in innovation. News operations have taken over the helm in innovating online. If they - advertising sales people and ad agencies - don’t catch up and start innovating more they’re going to get left behind.
2. The days of the ‘Make us your homepage’ mentality are dead. Offline people are grazers, sticking with a daily paper or favorite local / network newscast. Online people are hunters and gatherers. More aggregation at the local level - including offering up relevant links to the competition’s coverage - is necessary. Local media in particular have to stop thinking in terms of beating the competition and start thinking more in terms of serving the site visitors, even if that means offering them up your content and everyone else’s at the same time.
3. Video continues to gain dominance. (Duh.) What’s interesting is that more and more newspapers that train VJs they’ll compete with the TV stations in local markets. Getting syndicated video content via AP, Reuters and CNN would put the local newspapers on par with local TV sites in video coverage of out-of-market news and they’re gaining ground on local video coverage.
4. Back to advertising … there’s a real quandry brewing over metrics. No one system is in place now that provides the same benchmarks that are available in legacy media. One needs to be devised soon to help bring along the advertising side of the house or we’re all going to be left behind by pure internet advertising plays.
5. Banner ads are out; search features are in. Advertising needs to be relevant to the individual user’s wants and needs.
6. Sites that are successful are ones that allow individual personalization / customization for each user and offer up content that the user might find interesting based on their previous site visits.
7. Break news online. Provide the context offline.
Personally, many of the things said in the report have been already said here and over at Terry Heaton’s and Jeff Jarvis’ sites. The frustrating thing is that now PEJ has said it people will now take notice, as if this site is the little kids’ table at Thanksgiving and it isn’t going to be considered until someone at the adults’ table says it.
8. Anonymous | March 17th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
As audiences shift, the advertising revenue isn’t shifting at the same level.
Well are your sales folks selling ads on your site? Or is it just a distant afterthought to your 30 second TV spots?
A hint, most franchised businesses are required per their agreements to spend 2-3% of their gross sales on local advertising per month. Now why aren’t you going after that market instead of watching them spending it in the local papers? Cold call them and ask if they’d like to spend X dollars on ads on your website.
Hell your sites will be even more localized to their respective communities if they had local business advertising instead of “punch the monkey” and laser hair removal ads.
I’ve had older people tell me that they block ads on the web because the ads are not even relevant. If they were, they wouldn’t block them.
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