The Evolving Newsroom

A few notes from the introduction of Pew’s annual State of the News Media report. I’ve yet to delve into the report, but judging by the intro there’s plenty to look at.

This is the sixth edition of our annual report on the State of the News Media in the United States.

It is also the bleakest.

Much of what we have noted in the past holds true. The old media have held onto their audience even as consumers migrate online. In 2008, audience gains at sites offering legacy news were far larger than those for new media. The old norms of traditional journalism continue to have value. And when you look at the numbers closely, consumers are not just retreating to ideological places for news.

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 news industry does not know—and has done less than it could to learn—how to convert this more active online audience into revenue. 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. 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.

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. Reinvention does not usually come from managers prudently charting course. It tends to come from risk takers trying the unreasonable, seeing what others cannot, imagining what is not there and creating it. We did not see much of it when times were better. Times are harder now.

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. The new media in aggregate are far from compensating for the losses in coverage in traditional newsrooms, and despite enthusiasm and good work, few if any are profitable or even self-sustaining.