• While the Internet becomes more popular, it doesn’t mean that TV viewing is declining. It does mean that the viewer experience is changing.
• TV is becoming a two-way experience via PC, mobile, and set-top boxes.
• Research clearly shows 18-24 year olds regard the PC as the only TV screen.
• One in seven 18-24 year olds now watch no live TV at all
• Over the next five years, the PC will decline as the primary Internet access device. Today it powers 95% of access, with the rising trends in mobile, game consoles and Internet-TV devices, PC’s will represent 50% of internet access.

The linked story also offered this quote:
Jeffrey Cole, centre for digital future director at USC Annenberg School, said: “Rather than shrinking, television will only grow in importance. TV no longer refers to the big screen in the home but to audio and visual content that will be watched everywhere. It will become our constant companion as it escapes from the home for the first time via the mobile phone and netbook PC.”

Audience: The big online sites are pulling the big audiences now, which are drawing them with aggregated content from wires and legacy media. Yahoo, MSNBC, CNN, and AOL are the top news sites, growing at twice the rate of last year. The 24-hour “on demand” culture now rules, scheduled broadcasts and established news cycles are broken.

Local television remained the nation’s most popular source for news, but, on a percentage basis, it was among the biggest losers of audience in 2008. Just over half of Americans are now regular viewers (52%), according to a survey, down from nearly two-thirds (64%) a decade earlier. Viewership of local evening newscasts, those around the dinner hour, fell by an average of 4.5%, according to an analysis of ratings data by PEJ. Morning and mid-day newscasts held basically stable. Even the trend toward adding new shows in new timeslots seems to have slowed.

Economics: The economic downturn has hit the media industry at a very bad time, and the ad forecast for 2009 is downright chilling, but this doesn’t account for all of it. The report finally recognizes that the Internet breaks supplychains and middlemen, saying the current advertising spending trend “also reflects the powerful structural shifts brought on by digital technology, which has allowed those who want to reach consumers to do so without the news media as intermediary.”

In local television, a deteriorating market for advertising had analysts scrambling to revise their estimates downward as the year wore on. Most concluded that the final revenue numbers were as much as 7% lower than the year before and that profit margins had probably been cut in half. And that came during an election, a bad sign for a sector that counts on political ads to replenish coffers every two years. Local television is being particularly hurt by the collapse of the auto industry, its biggest advertiser.

In overall ad spending, cable is gaining the biggest share where newspapers and magazines are losing the most. Online ad spending is almost completely benefiting Google and other search providers.

Investment: Aside from cable, there was virtually no investment in newsrooms in 2008. 2009 could be worse.

The news teams Americans say they most rely on – the familiar faces at the local television stations – also shrank in 2008. Fewer stations reported hiring, and the median staff size slid from an all-time high the previous year as news directors looked for ways to combine newsgathering functions. The move to expand or add news programs also appeared to be slowing. A big capital infusion in equipment for the conversion to digital broadcasting came to a close. And by the end of the year layoffs were accelerating.

Ownership: Newspaper stock prices fell 83% in 2008. People are waking up to the reality that stand-alone news companies can survive as publicly traded stocks is pretty much dead. There are no buyers for media assets.

In local television, which had been a financial bright spot, the situation dimmed. With credit tight and revenues declining, the number of television stations bought was half the figure reported the year before and the lowest since 2004. According to one accounting, 96 stations were sold from January to December 2008, with a total value of $866 million. This compared with 270 in all of 2007 for a value of $4.6 billion. The stock values of publicly traded companies that own stations plunged.

Digital Trends: Expansion and innovation are coming from outside of traditional news industries. It is clear that banner advertising in the current form cannot supply sufficient revenue to replace lost dollars and support worldwide newsgathering operations. No media company has figured out a way to monetize search advertising paired with news content.

Economically, one growing cause of concern for news is that national websites and aggregators like Google are fast making inroads in attracting local advertising. That means even if online advertising returns to big growth rates of two years ago, it may not help news organizations as much as once thought. Over the past decade, the share of Internet advertising derived from local businesses has doubled, by some estimates to 40%, but most of those ads (57% in 2007) are now going to national Internet-only sites like Google and Yahoo, not to local news organizations.

In online content, citizen news sites that do original reporting gained some steam in 2008, especially in areas where traditional coverage has vanished. But, according to a study of citizen sites in 46 markets, they remain far from a substitute for legacy media. Their range of topics is narrower, the sourcing somewhat thinner and the content often not updated even once a day. They also trail legacy news sites in the various methods for distributing their content.

Finally, the key findings summary notes that “Refugees of the mainstream press helped launch or staff a number of independent new ventures online.” There is a review of some of the more notable new ventures here.

We’ve been paying attention to The Daily Show for a long time here at LR, and we’re not alone. Stewart likes to remind us regularly that he’s a funny man, not a newsman. But, he’s doing a lot of things that funny newsmen have been doing for a long time, and he’s doing them better than they ever did. I’ll venture to say that Stewart represents a new brand of video-powered columnist, speaking truth to power in both politics and news media, and in the instance of his famous Crossfire appearance, sometimes both at the same time. Then again, I also bash my students when they write ledes that look like those from The Onion, but that’s for another post (but if you write like the people who are making fun of you, think twice, ok?)

The question I have is, are the news directors paying attention? Years after Crossfire, CNN still covers politics as theater or, worse, as sports, talking about the reds vs. the blues instead of focusing on the issues. Will CNBC take the hard look in the mirror that Stewart asks and change their ways? Will the industry continue to blame to the Internet for their decline, failing to realize that it is the people – their customers- who sit behind those networked computers and chose to tune them out or take matters into their own hands and publish on their own? Dave Winer, creator of RSS, said it recently: “Dear news people — WE ARE NOT HAPPY WITH THE JOB YOU’RE DOING.”

Will Bunch had a great piece earlier on what battered journalists can learn from all this. Let’s hear what the LR Faithful have to say.

To develop interest categories, we’ll recognize the types of webpages users visit across the AdSense network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we’ll add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category.

In the local space, one wonders if Google will be tracking interest in geographical locations, considering them as topical interests.

Prosecutors previously accused the defendants, who have insisted that their Web site is legal under Swedish law, of assisting in the distribution of copyrighted material. The amended charges focus on the act of making the material available.

The site has maintained that they have no material on their servers, only offering their search mechanism to find relevant torrents to download movies, games, and other copyrighted content. Pirate Bay’s founders are encouraging crowdsourcing of the trial coverage on the twitter hashtag #spectrial.

But with two federal agencies in charge, no clear idea of how many people would be affected and constant partisan disagreements over money, the program foundered just before its long-standing Feb. 17 deadline. It has now been pushed back four months.

The result is confusion for the millions of Americans for whom the television is not simply another electronic device in the home but a crucial source of news and information. The idea that the government might deprive people of television reception strikes some as unjust and, in the event of emergencies, possibly dangerous.

Getting out from under legacy systems isn’t easy, as anyone who has to deal in content management and IT dependencies know. We also want our customers to become stakeholders, but this is so big it can teach us whole new lessons. In the context of our recent industry conversation on paid content online, congress’ move to hold off the big DTV cutoff for reasons above should make everyone stop and think.

The new deadline for the transition is June 12.