You can reduce the conclusions from the sixth annual report on the state of the U.S. news media to a couple of words: Infinitely bleak.
And that's taking the optimistic view.
The 180,000-word report by he Project for Excellence in Journalism comes against a backdrop of newspaper closings and staff reductions around the country. It just so happens that this week also marks the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's farewell as a print publication. After that, the newspaper will be offered solely in digital form. But as the report makes clear, the transition from dead trees to the Web may not be enough to reverse the decline in U.S. newspapers.
Here are the highlights:
• Newspaper ad revenues fell 23 percent in the last two years.
• Nearly one of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone from that line of work.
• 2009 may be the worst year yet for newspapers.
• Local television news revenue fell by 7 percent (even in an election year).
The only bright spot on the news horizon was in cable , though the report finds that some of the ratings gains evaporated after the election.
All the while, the accelerating migration to the Internet continued apace. In the last year, Web traffic at the top 50 Internet news sites rose 27 percent. The irony is that this stunning shift in reading preference isn't likely to work to the benefit of the newspaper establishment. To wit:
"Yet it is now all but settled that advertising revenue--the model that financed journalism for the last century--will be inadequate to do so in this one. Growing by a third annually just two years ago, online ad revenue to news websites now appears to be flattening; in newspapers it is declining."
The recession came at a particularly bad time for an industry struggling to remain afloat. But even if the economy had not gone south, the report makes clear that the industry would still be facing a fight for survival.
"Imagine someone about to begin physical therapy following a stroke, suddenly contracting a debilitating secondary illness. Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online. By 2008, the industry had finally begun to get serious. Now the global recession has made that harder."
The one piece of good news in the report is that "audience gains at sites offering legacy news were far larger than those for new media." In other words, readers still find value in what the report terms "the old norms of traditional journalism." But there's a bigger challenge facing the profession.
"The problem facing American journalism is not fundamentally an audience problem or a credibility problem. It is a revenue problem--the decoupling, as we have described it before, of advertising from news. That makes the situation better than it might have been. But audiences now consume news in new ways. They hunt and gather what they want when they want it, use search to comb among destinations and share what they find through a growing network of social media."
And the report is blunt about the news industry's often feckless efforts to monetize an increasingly active online audience. It notes, for instance, that about half of all classified advertising revenue has disappeared--"a good deal of that to operations that newspapers could have developed for themselves." But wait. It gets worse.
"Insiders now expect that classified revenue could be zero in five years--or sooner. When newspaper executives met this winter to talk about how to create a way for consumers to design their own ads, the discussion focused on doing so for print editions, not online. 'They still don't get it,' one irritated executive told us on background."
At this rate, you have to wonder whether the kicker to next year's edition will be "Last one out the door, turn out the lights."
I'm spending Saturday in an auditorium somewhere in the bowels of Microsoft's Mountain View, Calif., campus. The occasion: a series of panels co-sponsored by Microsoft, Google, the Computer History Museum, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, probing "the impact of information technology on society."
That's quite a mouthful, not to mention quite an ambitious subject to tackle, but a very timely conclave. To their credit, the hosts have assembled a collection of very big brains up for the task.
The day started off with a rocking presentation by Joshua Cohen, a Stanford professor of political science. Alluding to the accelerating collapse of newspapers, he cautioned that the still-to-be-determined impact on the American polity will be anything but good.
From left to right: Edward Lazowska, Joshua Cohen, Henry Brady, and Edward Felten
(Credit: Charles Cooper/CNET)"Here's where there is a big problem," he said, arguing that a "successful democratic sphere" is impossible without the information that newspapers supply. He added that "the damage is growing, and the consequences, potentially, are severe."
"Call me old-fashioned," Cohen continued, but blogging will not offer "a viable alternative" to investigative journalism. He faulted arguments that an increasingly decentralized blogosphere can fill that vacuum, a contention that he dismissed as "cyberutopianism."
"It is not only misplaced," Cohen said. "It's dangerous."
Talk about waking up with a strong cup of coffee.
Cohen's argument has been made by many others in different forums. But for the sake of perspective, however, keep in mind that it not universally shared. You'll find investigative reporting by agencies or individuals who don't belong to the ranks of professional journalists. But as the discussion broadened out to the political impact technology was having on public discourse, electoral politics, and governance, Cohen maintained that investigative journalism was "an important source" of information for the nation's political discourse.
"I think you have to talk about investigative journalism...It's not about weather or reporting sports. A world in which investigative journalism disappears is not a world in which democracy works very well," he said.
"The situation is getting urgent. Big newspapers are laying of about 20 percent of their investigative journalists," he said. "This is a profession where people learn how to do it. There are standards. It would really be a disaster if this investigative profession went out of business, a disaster for democracy. There's absolutely no reason to think that there's a fundamental hostility between the future of investigative journalism and technology, but nobody's figured it out yet."
He was right about that. Nobody did provide a conclusive answer to the question. Another panelist, Edward Felten, who teaches computer science at Princeton University, said that by 2020, the current disruptions taking down so many newspapers will lead to a reshaped landscape with more emphasis on what's taking place in peoples' backyards.
"There will be many fewer newspapers...partly due to fact that people can read newspapers from far away. We'll see smaller outlets which focus on the local and operate in a low-budget way, more like a community paper than a big city newspaper. And we'll see a lot of non-profit or low-profit punditry."
I'm an unabashed New York Times fan boy. Warts and all, it remains the best edited daily newspaper in this country. Disagree? Then come find me on Twitter and let's mix it up. (My handle is "coopeydoop").
You won't have a chance to do the same with many Times reporters and editors--on Twitter or any other social network, for that matter. Batting it back and forth with the hoi polloi just isn't part of the drill. Not, mind you, because they lack for opinions or have no stomach for engagement.
The Poynter Institute reposted the text of a memo from Craig Whitney, the paper's assistant managing editor, to his newsroom, in which he urges extreme caution in how Times employees use Facebook and other social-networking sites. For starters:
"One of them is that outsiders can read your Facebook page, and that personal blogs and "tweets" represent you to the outside world just as much as an 800-word article does. If you have or are getting a Facebook page, leave blank the section that asks about your political views, in accordance with the Ethical Journalism admonition to do nothing that might cast doubt on your or The Times's political impartiality in reporting the news. Remember that although you might get useful leads by joining a group on one of these sites, it will appear on your page, connoting that you "joined" it -- potentially complicated if it is a political group, or a controversial group."
Whitney is an accomplished Times veteran whose work I've admired over the years. But this memo sums up some of the very reasons why so many believe the mainstream media is doomed to irrelevance.
The Times achieved primacy in American journalism by getting the story (usually) right and delivering the news with depth and nuance. By itself, the formula that worked so well for the Times in the 20th century may not be enough in the 21st. That's because the fragmentation of media has created a multiplicity of voices on the Internet, some good, others less so, where the authority of the Times depends on more than a prototypical article.
So it is that the decision to separate the Times from its public strikes me as completely arbitrary. What's more, it makes for an utterly boring one-way conversation--and that's no conversation at all. Whitney may not want the chief White House correspondent riffing in public about the failings of the 43rd president, but how about a little give? For instance, I'd be shocked if Frank Rich does not think George Bush was an abject idiot. Or that William Kristol does not believe Bill Clinton remains a skirt-chasing hippy hedonist. Seems they also ought to have the green light to tweet to their hearts' content.
But it's not just Facebook and Twitter. Consider the following:
"Be careful not to write anything on a blog or a personal Web page that you could not write in The Times -- don't editorialize, for instance, if you work for the News Department. Anything you post online can and might be publicly disseminated, and can be twisted to be used against you by those who wish you or The Times ill -- whether it's text, photographs, or video. That includes things you recommend on TimesPeople or articles you post to Facebook and Digg, content you share with friends on MySpace, and articles you recommend through TimesPeople."
In other words, don't write anything that's passionate or pointed in ways that might stir people beyond what the Times provides in its news columns. Pardon my sarong but that's like serving up a diet of rice cakes to people hungry for General Tso's chicken.
With newspapers cutting back, and predictions of even worse times ahead, Rupert Murdoch said the profession may still have a bright future, if it can shake free of reporters and editors who he said have forfeited the trust and loyalty of their readers.
"My summary of the way some of the established media has responded to the Internet is this: It's not newspapers that might become obsolete. It's some of the editors, reporters, and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper's most precious asset: the bond with its readers," said Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corp. He made his remarks as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Australian Broadcast Corporation.
Murdoch to journalists: Shape up or risk extinction
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET Networks)Murdoch, whose company's holdings also include MySpace and The Wall Street Journal, criticized what he described as a culture of "complacency and condescension" in some newsrooms.
"The complacency stems from having enjoyed a monopoly--and now finding they have to compete for an audience they once took for granted. The condescension that many show their readers is an even bigger problem. It takes no special genius to point out that if you are contemptuous of your customers, you are going to have a hard time getting them to buy your product. Newspapers are no exception."
The 77-year-old Murdoch, recalling a long career in newspapers that began when his father's death forced him to take over the Adelaide News in 1952, said the profession has failed to creatively respond to changes wrought by technology.
"It used to be that a handful of editors could decide what was news--and what was not. They acted as sort of demigods. If they ran a story, it became news. If they ignored an event, it never happened," Murdoch said. "Today, editors are losing this power. The Internet, for example, provides access to thousands of new sources that cover things an editor might ignore. And if you aren't satisfied with that, you can start up your own blog, and cover and comment on the news yourself. Journalists like to think of themselves as watchdogs, but they haven't always responded well when the public calls them to account."
To make his point, Murdoch criticized the media reaction after bloggers debunked a 60 Minutes report by former CBS anchor Dan Rather that President Bush had evaded service during his days in the National Guard.
"Far from celebrating this citizen journalism, the establishment media reacted defensively," Murdoch said. "During an appearance on Fox News, a CBS executive attacked the bloggers in a statement that will go down in the annals of arrogance. 60 Minutes, he said, was a professional organization with 'multiple layers of checks and balances.' By contrast, he dismissed the blogger as 'a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.' Eventually, it was the guys sitting in their pajamas who forced Rather and his producer to resign."
Murdoch continued: "Mr. Rather and his defenders are not alone. A recent American study reported that many editors and reporters simply do not trust their readers to make good decisions. Let's be clear about what this means. This is a polite way of saying that these editors and reporters think their readers are too stupid to think for themselves."
Murdoch's comments come at a time when the media landscape looks increasingly bleak both for print-based and online news organizations. A recent report by Goldman Sachs predicted that advertising pressure will continue because of the declines in the auto and financial industries. Online outlets are also feeling the impact. On Friday, TheStreet.com shut its San Francisco office.
Despite the blemishes, however, Murdoch said newspapers can still count on circulation gains "if papers provide readers with news they can trust." He added that they will also need to embrace technology advances like RSS feeds and targeted e-mails. The challenge, according to Murdoch, will be to "use a newspaper's brand while allowing readers to personalize the news for themselves-and then deliver it in the ways that they want."
Murdoch concludes that "the newspaper, or a very close electronic cousin, will always be around. It may not be thrown on your front doorstep the way it is today. But the thud it makes as it lands will continue to echo around society and the world."
Have the rules for PR changed so radically from the days when the IBM Selectric typewriter was state of the art?
The conventional wisdom says yes, though I'm less convinced.
In fact, many public relations folks are still trying to gauge the import of new tools like Twitter and FriendFeed. But they remain unclear about what it means to their profession and what's the best way to approach this new community. That ambivalence was on display at the Horn Group's downtown San Francisco offices Wednesday evening, where an overflow audience gathered to attend a panel discussion with the over-the-top title, "Is social media killing PR?"
A better title would have been "Is PR killing PR?"
Seriously.
As a tool for communications, social media obviously is of keen interest to public relations types. But let's dispense with the nonsense about it being a paradigm changer. Maybe that day will arrive, but to date, the cheerleaders have overstated the results. So it is that many PR professionals have drunk the Kool-Aid to the point where they believe that engaging the community emerging around social media should be their top priority. At the same time, they remain unsure how best to communicate their companies' message in an unfamiliar and often unwieldy new medium.
What's more, they are scared stiff of antagonizing the "influencers." Especially when one or another bloviator from the blogosphere wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and issues a fatwa. But does a relatively small circle of (mostly California-based) bloggers still command the same influence it did a year ago? Ultimately, people listen to trusted voices though, unfortunately, the deepening recession leaves fewer of them all the time.
As I listened to the panelists debate the question, I began to fidget as Forrester Research's Jeremiah Oywang offered a marketing-heavy spiel on the central role social media should occupy in any effective PR strategy. Oywang is earnest about this stuff so I can't come down too hard, and yes, social media has its place. Still, it sounded like so much gobbledygook to me.
Then the predictably prescient Kara Swisher from The Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital cut to the core question which--I believe--outweighs all others: If the message is empty, why bother? There is little point in trying to push a lame product or marketing idea. That's a message some sales and marketing departments don't want to hear. But in the end, doesn't everything come back to value?
That's not a social media idea. It's an old school idea.
Update: You can check out what Sam Whitmore, who moderated last night's panel, had to say about the event.
And I was feeling so good today--that is until I read this memo from The Philadelphia Inquirer's managing editor Mike Leary to his staff, essentially establishing guidelines on how the newspaper intends to commit ritual hara-kiri.
"Colleagues--Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won't post those stories online until they're in print. We'll cooperate with Philly.com, as we do now, in preparing extensive online packages to accompany our enterprising work. But we'll make the decision to press the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up the Inquirer on their doorstep or on the newsstand."
"For our bloggers, especially, this may require a bit of an adjustment. Some of you like to try out ideas that end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first. If in doubt, consult your editor. Or me or Chris Krewson."
(Here's a follow-up interview Ryan Sholin conducted with Chris Krewson, the executive editor for online/news at the Inquirer.)
Luckily, I don't work for the Philly Inquirer and I don't have to consult with Leary, Krewson or any other editor who signed off on this disastrous policy in order to understand that it's doomed to fail. The Inquirer believes this policy will make its paper a more relevant read. I beg to differ.
What's profoundly depressing is that this mindset still infects the newsroom of a top city daily, as if the last decade's worth of media transformation never took place. If I did find myself in the employ of Messrs. Leary, Krewson et al, I would argue in a counter-memo that the Inquirer was long past the point where newspapers can force readers to use a certain medium. If readers want to read a publication online, at least they're reading us. It's a tough business and making the jump from one business model to another is hard. Still, the prescription offered up is redolent of how people in the media business thought about the Internet in the mid-1990s.
I can tell you a story about those times. Back then, I worked at PC Week, which then was a $100 million-plus property and widely considered to be the preeminent news property covering technology. My job was to help get PC Week online. In the beginning, that largely consisted of repurposing "middle of the book" pieces which closed earlier in the week. These were basically filler pieces and totally uninteresting to more than a fraction of the readership. We held the good stuff for print.
Then one day Lisa DiCarlo (who later moved on to Forbes) came to me with a minor scoop about a Hewlett-Packard printer price cut. The news was not going to hold so why not run it online? And so we did. Within the hour, Lisa received a phone call from a Wall Street analyst asking if she could share any more details. Obviously, somebody was reading this stuff.
Unfortunately for me, so was the publisher, who came storming down the hall after finding out we were posting original content. "Are you crazy?" he asked. "We can't do that. We'll kill the cash cow!"
I don't want to embarrass the man so I'll refer to him as P. He knew the technology business inside out and was as good a space salesman as they came. To be fair, I can't really dun him for not being clairvoyant. How many among us were? (If I were so smart, I would have started Amazon before Jeff Bezos.) But P was so much a prisoner of his previous success that he could not envision dispensing with a business model that had worked so splendidly for him until then.
We know what subsequently happened to PC Week as well as the rest of tech publishing's star properties. These "weeklies" either migrated online, where they published in real time, or they become irrelevant to the conversation. These days you can find any number of similar stories about how the Internet forced media to fragment and change. But now the braintrust in charge at the Inquirer believes it can prove itself the exception to that rule simply by "saving the good stuff" for the a.m. edition delivered to subscribers by the paperboy.
On his blog, the always excellent Jeff Jarvis titled his post, "A stake through the heart of the has-been Inquirer."
Sadly, that's spot on.
MediaDefender is rightly taking its lumps in the court of public opinion after being fingered as the culprit behind the Memorial Day weekend denial-of-service outage at Revision3. But this is just a sideshow in the bigger battle waged by big copyright holders against illegal digital file sharing.
And as we're learning, things are getting out of hand.
Revision3 happened to use a BitTorrent tracker for perfectly legitimate content distribution. But BitTorrent has also figured in unauthorized sharing of copyrighted movies, TV shows, and music. So MediaDefender went on a fishing expedition. (Read Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback's full description here.) But pay particular attention to this snippet:
Revision3 runs a tracker expressly designed to coordinate the sharing and downloading of our shows. It's a completely legitimate business practice, similar to how ESPN puts out a guide that tells viewers how to tune into its network on DirecTV, Dish, Comcast and Time Warner, or a mall might publish a map of its stores. But someone, or some company, apparently took offense to Revision3 using Bittorrent to distribute its own slate of shows. Who could that be?
Now we know. And just who is MediaDefender? (Check out the archive of news articles that company collected on its Web site. For some reason, I doubt the collection will be updated to feature MediaDefender's latest exploits.) In a 2005 profile, Ars Technica said the Santa Monica, Calif., company made its living poisoning peer-to-peer networks. The hyperbole is understandable as MediaDefender plants fake files or decoys on peer-to-peer systems
But let's not lose track of who's really calling the shots. The power brokers in this novella work out of offices at big record labels and movie studios and MediaDefender is only a bit player, doing their bidding.
"It's absolutely not our policy to overwhelm any servers or do any DoS attacks," MediaDefender CEO Randy Saaf told my colleague Elinor Mills this afternoon. "We post fake files. In our mind, we were not targeting a legitimate company. All we saw was a public tracker with pirated content."
In other words, Revision3 was collateral damage. Sorry for taking you down, but that's the necessary--albeit inadvertent--price we pay because others simply refuse to play by accepted rules. Or something corny like that.
This is one of the more bizarre stories to hit the tech world since the Hewlett-Packard pretexting scandal.
Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback
(Credit: Revision3)Check out the post from Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback detailing the inside story of the denial-of-service attack which crippled his company's servers over the Memorial Day weekend.
Revision3 tracked the attack back to an Internet address belonging to a subsidiary of Artist Direct, called MediaDefender. And it admitted as much when confronted with the evidence. I'll let Jim take it from here:
So I picked up the phone and tried to get in touch with ArtistDirect interim CEO Dimitri Villard. I eventually had a fascinating phone call with both Dimitri Villard and Ben Grodsky, vice president of operations at Media Defender.First, they willingly admitted to abusing Revision3's network, over a period of months, by injecting a broad array of torrents into our tracking server. They were able to do this because we configured the server to track hashes only--to improve performance and stability. That, in turn, opened up a back door which allowed their networking experts to exploit its capabilities for their own personal profit.
Second, and here's where the chain of events come into focus, although not the motive. We'd noticed some unauthorized use of our tracking server, and took steps to de-authorize torrents pointing to non-Revision3 files. That, as it turns out, was exactly the wrong thing to do. MediaDefender's servers, at that point, initiated a flood of SYN packets attempting to reconnect to the files stored on our server. And that torrential cascade of "Hi"s brought down our network.
Grodsky admits that his computers sent those SYN packets to Revision3, but claims that their servers were each only trying to contact us every three hours. Our own logs show upwards of 8,000 packets a second.
"Media Defender did not do anything specific, targeted at Revision3″, claims Grodsky. "We didn't do anything to increase the traffic"--beyond what they'd normally be sending us due to the fact that Revision3 was hosting thousands of MediaDefender torrents improperly injected into our corporate server. His claim: that once we turned off MediaDefender's back-door access to the server, "traffic piled up (to Revision3 from MediaDefender servers because) it didn't get any acknowledgment back."
I've never heard of Grodsky but the man's brass obviously has served him well professionally. MediaDefender "did not do anything specific, targeted at Revision3?" Other than borrow Revision3's servers without permission and for its own profit, that is. (Here is where everyone can exclaim in concert, "WTF?"
At this point, Revision3 says it's not planning to file a lawsuit. Not because it doesn't have a case but pursuing a court remedy would likely cost a lot of money. But here's an opportunity for a public-regarding watchdog like the Electronic Frontier Foundation to get involved. Maybe temporary insanity will serve as a defense strategy because the emerging story boggles the imagination. And now you have to wonder whether Revision3 is the only victim or whether there are others.
Call me a cynic but MediaDefender's actions have already spoken volumes about its ethics. The only way to root out the full story is to get these folks in front of a magistrate.
Talk about missing the forest for the trees. With everyone and their mother-in-law predicting a coming wave of acquisitions of so-called new media companies by old media outfits, that future's already snuck up on us.
In the last year:
• Cox bought Adify
• Hi-Media Group bought Fotolog
• Time Warner's AOL bought Bebo, Quigo, Third Screen Media
• Comcast bought Plaxo
• Disney bought Club Penguin
• CBS bought Last.fm, CNET Networks, Wallstrip, Dotspotter
• Microsoft bought 1.6 percent of Facebook
• Hearst bought Kaboodle and Answerology
• Jupiter Media bought MediaBistro
• News Corp. bought Photobucket, Beliefnet
• The New Times bought Freakonomics blog
• Forbes bought Clipmarks
• Discovery bought Treehugger
If you use News Corp.'s 2005 acquisition of MySpace.com as the starting point, the list gets longer. Going back that far, there's been more than $19 billion worth of significant mergers between the biggest old and new media players in the online media industry.
After Microsoft launched its late January takeover bid for Yahoo, a lot of new media start-ups hoped it would trigger a chain reaction where they'd be able to cash out. It's easy to understand their anxiety. A recent report from PubMatic concluded that:
• On average, Web site monetization dropped by 23 percent from 49 cents in March to 38 cents in April.
• Among the verticals, social networking led the plunge with monetization dropping 47 percent, from 37 cents in March to 19 cents in April, below January lows of 22 cents. Entertainment monetization dropped 17 percent from 40 cents in March to 33 cents in April. Gaming and sports were down marginally (4 percent and 5 percent, respectively). Technology remained relatively flat at 83 cents in April vs. 82 cents in March, but is still off January highs of 92 cents.
Maybe a bunch will still cash out before the window slams shut but the more interesting question is why more media giants haven't built their online empires organically? The snarky explanation is that they're too hidebound and slowed by bureaucracy to think creatively about this stuff. But that's too easy and misses the bigger point.
I think Piper Jaffrey's Gene Munster offers a better answer when he wrote in a recent report that Google "has forced old media companies to realize they must act immediately or lose relevance in the Internet space." He may be right about that. These companies typically came late to the party when they recognized that lots of their customers (and advertisers) were heading to the Internet. And thanks to the Yahoo novella, we've seen how even a company like Microsoft, which doesn't fit under the "old media" label, finds itself scrambling to find answers to the Google question.
I just don't know whether the land grab strategy will be enough to restrain Google's growing appetite. Maybe it is, but I wouldn't want to take that bet.
• Update: 2:05 PM
And the beat goes on. This afternoon comes word that Conde Nast is buying Ars Technica. So who's next?
From the counterintuitive files, the Project for Excellence in Journalism came out with its fifth annual look at the media, and it's a doozy of a report.
"Read all about it"
(Credit: Project for Excellence in Journalism)The study contradicts most of the assumptions we've grown to accept about the impact of technology on media and journalism in the last few years.
Among its findings:
• News is shifting from being a product to more of a service.
• The days when news sites were final destinations are over.
• Prospects for user-generated content now appear more limited.
• Madison Avenue does not yet grok the world of new media.
• U.S. media coverage is becoming increasingly narrow.
Digging down further, the study takes specific aim at the belief that audience fragmentation is breaking the grip of "media elites."
"Some people even advocate the notion of "The Long Tail," the idea that, with the Web's infinite potential for depth, millions of niche markets could be bigger than the old mass market dominated by large companies and producers.
The reality, increasingly, appears more complex. Looking closely, a clear case for democratization is harder to make. Even with so many new sources, more people now consume what old-media newsrooms produce, particularly from print, than before. Online, for instance, the top 10 news Web sites, drawing mostly from old brands, are more of an oligarchy, commanding a larger share of audience, than in the legacy media.
The verdict on citizen media, for now, suggests limitations. And research shows blogs and public-affairs Web sites attract a smaller audience than expected and are produced by people with even more elite backgrounds than journalists."
But don't take that to mean all is well in the world of the mainstream media. If the authors are right, advertising isn't accompanying the online migration with the consumer. Translation: Media faces both a shrinking audience as well as a "decoupling of news and advertising."
Happy days. So, what's next--the meltdown of the economy? Oh yeah, I forgot. That's already started.
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