US media in crisis - but hope for wireless (News Feature)

By Andy Goldberg Mar 13, 2007, 2:35 GMT

Los Angeles - Ten years ago when Internet news sites first started gaining attention, the hope was that the new interactive medium would allow a breadth and depth of information that would make traditional newspapers seem trite and shallow.

So much for that prediction.

According to an annual report issued Monday by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), online news sites have cannibalized their ancestors, replacing hard-nosed coverage with a diet of celebrity and hyper-local content that often means that the important stories of the age are under-reported and sometimes ignored.

At the same time, news organizations that harbour the hope that online media will one day make up for the drop in their advertising and subscription are likely to be disappointed. Growth in online advertising is slowing and 'there are growing doubts about how much of that (growth) will accrue to news,' the study said.

The report said that the news industry must come up with a new economic model that would get consumers to pay for digital content. It proposed that news organizations create consortiums to charge internet providers and news sites licensing fees for content.

Currently, most internet news sites and weblogs are based on fact-based journalism produced by newspapers, even as they undercut the economic model that allows newspapers to devote resources to traditional news gathering. Newspaper audiences have shrunk by 5.2 per cent since 2000, with only 124 million people getting information regularly from a newspaper.

The one sector in print that seemed to break the trend continued to be the ethnic press, especially Hispanic, the report said. For the latest year available, 2005, ad dollars spent in Hispanic publications grew 4.6 per cent and the percentage of ad revenue from high-paying national advertisers in Hispanic newspapers doubled.

There were however a few rays of good news for the news industry in the 700-page report.

The study found that far more of the rapidly growing ranks of wireless Internet users were likely to retrieve news online than those who access the web in other ways.

The report found that a third of all online adults in the US have logged onto the Internet using a wireless connection and that nearly half - or 46 per cent - of all wireless users go online for news on a typical day.

'Those who use mobile devices to get news are valuable customers to begin with, and it would make sense to provide content optimized for these devices,' said report author John Horrigan. This would also offer a better strategy for capturing the younger demographic that the news industry is so eager to attract, he said.

The report estimated that newsroom job cuts in 2006 reached 1,000, speeding up after relatively minor cutbacks in the previous two years. It estimated that the number of journalism jobs in the US had dropped by 4,000, or 6.5 per cent, since 2000, bringing the number of working journalists and editors to well under 60,000 professionals.

PEJ is affiliated with the Pew Research Center in Washington, DC, after spending its first nine years at the prestigious Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The study is available at www.stateofthemedia.org/2007/.