2009 news media woes outlined

The opening line from the 6th annual edition of the Pew Research Center report about conditions in the news media says it all: “Some of the numbers are chilling.”

The chilling numbers include:
• Newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23% in the past two years.
• According to the Pew report, nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone, and 2009 may be the worst year yet.
• News staffs of local television stations, already too small to adequately cover their communities, are being cut at unprecedented rates; revenues fell by 7% in an election year — something unheard of — and ratings are now falling or flat across the schedule.

The numbers are chilling except for news and information companies operating exclusively on the Internet. Pew reports that “audience migration” to the Internet jumped 19% in the last two years; in 2008 alone traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27%.

“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,” Pew noted in the report.

The Pew authors also suggest two factors have “effectively shortened” the time the news industry has to change its business model.

“First, the hastening audience migration to the Web means the news industry has to reinvent itself sooner than it thought — even if most of those people are going to traditional news destinations. At least in the short run, a bigger online audience has worsened things for legacy news sites, not helped them.”

“Then came the collapsing economy. The numbers are only guesses, but executives estimate that the recession at least doubled the revenue losses in the news industry in 2008, perhaps more in network television. Even more important, it swamped most of the efforts at finding new sources of revenue. In trying to reinvent the business, 2008 may have been a lost year, and 2009 threatens to be the same.”

Other key points in the Pew Research report include:
• “(A)udiences 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.”

• “In newspapers, roughly half of all classified advertising revenue has vanished, a good deal of that to operations that newspapers could have developed for themselves. ,… 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.”

• “There are growing doubts within the business, indeed, about whether the generation in charge has the vision and the boldness to reinvent the industry. It is unclear, say some, who the innovative leaders are, and a good many well-known figures have left the business.”

• “In the last year, alternative news sites have continued to grow, including those produced by journalists who have left legacy newsrooms, but their scale remains small.”