Comments on: From bad to worse: The state of the media in 2009

We knew it was grim. But according to the sixth annual report on the US. media by The Project for Excellence in Journalism, it's even worse than that

[stuxstu]

Guess we will be stuck with the other biased news sources like CNET..... I do wonder how much of this is caused by all the yellow journalism?

[Vurk]

You realize dont you, that "yellow journalism" is like "activist judges", a phrase that indicates not its original meaning but rather "anything I dont like or disagree with, regardless of factual basis".

Fox News is practicing the original Hearst-inspired yellow journalism: "You supply the pictures; I'll supply the war."
Or, in more modern terms "You supply the WMD rumors; we'll supply the support for endless war."

[Mr. Dee]

This doom and gloom scares me. Why can't the print media simply evolve and conform with the times by building on the Internet? Social Networks would be such an amazing way to interact with users and build new empires since they are the ones creating the news. The need to realize, delivering ads need to be innovative, delivering content needs to be innovative: Wiki's, Blogs, My Space, Facebook, Twitter - Mobile Devices. Your content needs to be fresh, it needs to be first with the news, accurate, constantly updated. I can't be reading old news from half an hour ago, I need the latest. Please, can you deliver?

[Vurk]

You dont seem to realize that 'news' is a collection of things that have already happened that are different (new) from one time period to the next. 'The Nighly News', 'The Morning/Afternoon/Evening News'.

News organizations are not Harry Potter, they dont have magic teleportation; When something happens, it has to be considered worth the time and money to send a person to the place something is happening and report back.

Unlike citizen reporters, professional reporters are paid to make sense of the news; how, when, where, why, who, what and to write it down in an intelligent, sensible and readable fashion.
Professional reporters cannot do that in 30 minutes unless you are willing to pay for lolcat speech.

Haz u gt tim fur de newz?

[dbargen]

My 2¢: Part of this stems from two failures:
1. Failure to adapt- Sorry but the same old revenue streams don't convert to them web where information is next-to-free in the vast majority of cases.
2. Pandering biased agenda- it was pretty poor for the half-dozen years, but with the previous election cycle, bias was on full display and most literary commentary, be it on politics, tech, human interest, etc. offered no real substance that the public feels is worth the read. It also doesn't help that everyone picks up the AP newslines, using the SAME PHRASES, and runs it as their own, be it in publications or cable networks. Sounds a bit like marching orders...

Readership and revenue is down because information and opinions come much more cheaply. The information monopolies of previous decades have all-but dissolved You're going to have to have some valuable, specialized info to pull eyeballs these days. Large publications often have a hard time moving from using token pieces to targeting specific reader groups.

Perhaps an iTunes model would save magazines- very inexpensive content, and high sales volumes. That would take a lot less work than the research for target market groups...

[SamuraiArtGuy]

I will still on occasion visit the New York Times, exclusively online. But after the horrifying excesses of the Bush years, and the utter pandering in search of ratings by the corporate mainstream media, and the lip service paid to ubiased reporting, I an utterly FINISHED with American Network News. In fact for the recent Presidential Election, some of the better reporting was on the COMEDY CHANNEL, second to BBC America, which still practices something resembling journalism. Yep, Not Made Here. Gee, what a surprise.

There is a reason why both Dan Rather and Ted Koppel, two of the last trustworth voices on the air, LEFT the networks. Traditional investigative journalism doesn't fit with the model of "entertainment news"

[SactoGuy018]

Here's the biggest problem with traditional news networks: they assume that people will tune into the news only once a day. Problem is, with the modern public Internet and 24-hour cable news channels, they can catch up on the news any time of the day; they don't need to wait for newspaper deliveries in the early morning or watching the network newscasts at the end of the day.

Alvin Toffler warned about this exactly 30 years ago in his famous book THE THIRD WAVE; it appears the traditional news organizations ignored that fact, much to their loss. Newspapers are particularly vulnerable because sites like Craigslist and eBay have effectively taken away all the classified advertising revenue that newspapers used to depend on.

[kingtrae79]

I believe that all of this could be summed up in a few words- you snooze, you loose. This didn't happen overnight, they tried to fight it at every turn, and this is the natural process that occurs when an entity cannot or refuses to evolve with "The Times" funny that many papers used to call themselves that! they might as well have been distributing on stone tablets.

[Len Bullard]

News news everywhere and not a truth to think.

Clouds aren't restricted to angels.