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."
Each time our little world suffers a disaster, man-made or otherwise, count on the usual suspects to rush to their keyboards and pound out yet more bloviation about the existential importance of Twitter to our 24 x 7 ecosystem.
Before some of you jump ugly on me, let me hasten to mention that I've long found Twitter to be extremely useful. But how long before we can move past this "wonder of Twitter" moment? An earthquake in China, the Mumbai massacre, war in Gaza--Twitter's proved itself as a tool to report and comment on breaking news. If you haven't been paying attention, Twitter might seem wondrous. For the rest of us, it's old hat by now.
Yet so many of the usual suspects insist on remaining awestruck. So it was that today's U.S. Air crash triggered the predictable run of worshipful commentary. Silicon Alley Insider's headline: "U.S. Airways Crash Rescue Picture: Citizen Journalism, Twitter At Work," was representative of the chatter among the TechMeme crowd.
Maybe it was a slow day for some, but I cringed at the invidious comparisons drawn between the "mainstream media" and Twitter. By now, that's simply a cliche observation. Any news-gathering organization with any hope of surviving is reorganizing its operations around the best technology possible--and Twitter naturally figures into a successful plan.
A little perspective would be welcome. As I tweeted a few days ago, Twitter is the beginning of wisdom, not the end. (Especially in 140 characters.) And at the risk of pointing out the painfully obvious, you can also send photos on a mobile phone without Twitter. The devices are built to do that and millions of us actually know how to operate the devices. Imagine that.
This reminds me so much of the late 1990s when the novelty of the Internet had yet to wear off. Back then, the "Web reacts" article were in vogue, no matter how mundane the subject: Web reacts to Princess Di crash. Web reacts to Lewinsky dress. Web reacts to Bigfoot contemplating his left bunion. Etc. It was a phase. The Internet was a new toy and we were understandably infatuated at how you could actually write a story and put it up on the Internet. Magic!
Eventually, though, we grew out of it. How long before we outgrow the Twitter obsession? Beats me. It's just too easy a headline for some to resist writing again and again. Have at, if you must. But if you want to keep prostrating yourselves before Twitter, make sure to also fall on your knees before the telephone each time someone dials 911.
A journalist's best friend? Maybe, one day.
(Credit: Twitter)After the derision that greeted The New York Times' blogging-will-kill-you story on Sunday, I'm probably not going to do much for the reputation of the mainstream media with hard-core bloggers. So it goes.
Out of curiosity, I drew up a list of 55 technology journalists to find out how many use Twitter, arguably one of the most important social-media technologies on the scene. I included names of some online reporters--including colleagues from CNET as well as TechCrunch--but in the main, the list is comprised of people employed by A-list newspapers and periodicals.
I don't pretend to have come up with a statistically representative list. Call it my weekend science experiment. What's more, some people may have crossed me up by hiding behind pseudonyms. Truth be told, I only changed my "coopeydoop" handle to "Charles Cooper" on Saturday after realizing it made searching for me on Twitter that much harder. So, apologies in advance if I inadvertently lumped anyone in with the wrong list.
Out of the 55 names I randomly came up with, 15 were found on Twitter while the remainder were missing in action. When I pinged one of the reporters asking why--sorry, names of the innocent are being withheld--here's what he answered:
"I don't have a Twitter account, because I think it's silly," the answer came back. "Twitter is lame."
OK, but my guess is that by year's end, most of the folks on the holdout list will get with the program. Not because it's necessarily an elegant system--I'm keeping my pet list of Most Needed Improvements on the service if any of the Twitter folks is interested. Rather, it's a question of self-interest. News often breaks on Twitter before it hits blogs. And companies are paying attention to what comes over the transom. For instance, Mike Arrington's Comcast novella over the weekend did not go unnoticed by the company's monitors.
"Within 20 minutes of my first Twitter message I got a call from a Comcast executive in Philadelphia who wanted to know how he could help. He said he monitors Twitter and blogs to get an understanding of what people are saying about Comcast, and so he saw the discussion break out around my messages."
You're going to see more of this in the weeks and months ahead. More than anything else, self-interest will decide the question for the Fourth Estate. As TechMeme's Gabe Rivera twittered a few days ago, resistance is futile.
The Twitterers
Michael Arrington, Techcrunch; Charles Cooper, CNET; Caroline McCarthy: CNET; Kara Swisher, The Wall Street Journal; Tom Foremski, SiliconValley Watcher; Ina Fried, CNET; Saul Hansell, The New York Times; John Markoff, The New York Times;
Om Malik, GigaOm; Duncan Riley, Techcrunch; Dan Farber, CNET; Jim Kerstetter, CNET; Sara Lacy, BusinessWeek; Elinor Mills, CNET;Maggie Reardon, CNET; Stephen Shankland, CNET; and Dan Terdiman, CNET.
The Holdouts
George Anders, the Journal; Mark Boslet, San Jose Mercury News; Anne Broache, CNET Networks; Peter Burrows, BusinessWeek; Ben Charny, Dow Jones; Don Clark, the Journal; Elizabeth Corcoran, Forbes; Don Clark, the Journal; Cliff Edwards, BusinessWeek; Benny Evangelista, San Francisco Chronicle; Mary Jo Foley, ZDNet; Deborah Gage, San Francisco Chronicle; Jim Goldman, CNBC; Dan Goodin, The Register; Rob Guth, the Journal; Quentin Hardy, Forbes; Miguel Helft, The New York Times; Mark Hendrickson, TechCruch; Rob Hof, BusinessWeek; Michael Kanellos, CNET; Rich Karlgaard, Forbes; Verne Kopytoff, San Francisco Chronicle; Matthew Karnitschnig, the Journal; Tom Krazit, CNET; Brian Krebs, The Washington Post; Martin Lamonica, CNET; Adam Lashinsky, Fortune; Declan McCullagh, CNET; Stefanie Olsen, CNET; Therese Poletti, Marketwatch; Benjamin Pimentel, Marketwatch; Mike Ricciuti, CNET; Eric Savitz, Barrons; Erick Shonfeld, TechCrunch; Jon Swartz, USA Today; Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat; Pui-Wing Tam, the Journal; Wendy Tanaka, Forbes; Ashlee Vance, The Register; and Troy Wolverton, San Jose Mercury News.
*******Oops. The original post lumped Tom Foremski and Saul Hansell with the wrong group (though Saul writes that he doesn't really use the account much.) Also, Benjamin Pimentel is now with Marketwatch. Sorry guys.
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