Media trends

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In March 2004 the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a project of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and funded by Pew Charitable Trusts, released a report - State of the News Media 2004 - identifying trends affecting the media. While focussed solely on U.S. media, the trends are global.

The report identified eight over-arching trends:

  • "A growing number of news outlets are chasing relatively static or even shrinking audiences for news. One result of this is that most sectors of the news media are losing audience. That audience decline, in turn, is putting pressures on revenues and profits, which leads to a cascade of other implications. The only sectors seeing general audience growth today are online, ethnic and alternative media.
  • "Much of the new investment in journalism today - much of the information revolution generally - is in disseminating the news, not in collecting it. Most sectors of the media are cutting back in the newsroom, both in terms of staff and in the time they have to gather and report the news. While there are exceptions, in general journalists face real pressures trying to maintain quality.
  • "In many parts of the news media, we are increasingly getting the raw elements of news as the end product. This is particularly true in the newer, 24-hour media. In cable and online, there is a tendency toward a jumbled, chaotic, partial quality in some reports, without much synthesis or even the ordering of the information. There is also a great deal of effort, particularly on cable news, that is put into delivering essentially the same news repetitively without any meaningful updating.
  • "Journalistic standards now vary even inside a single news organization. Companies are trying to reassemble and deliver to advertisers a mass audience for news not in one place, but across different programs, products and platforms. To do so, some are varying their news agenda, their rules on separating advertising from news and even their ethical standards. What will air on an MSNBC talk show on cable might not meet the standards of NBC News on broadcast, and the way that advertising intermingles with news stories on many newspaper Web sites would never be allowed in print. Even the way a television network treats news on a prime time magazine versus a morning show or evening newscast can vary widely. This makes projecting a consistent sense of identity and brand more difficult. It also may reinforce the public perception evident in various polls that the news media lack professionalism and are motivated by financial and self-aggrandizing motives rather than the public interest.
  • "Without investing in building new audiences, the long-term outlook for many traditional news outlets seems problematic. Many traditional media are maintaining their profitability by focusing on costs, including cutting back in their newsrooms. Our study shows general increases in journalist workload, declines in numbers of reporters, shrinking space in newscasts to make more room for ads and promotions, and in various ways that are measurable, thinning the product. This raises questions about the long term. How long can news organizations keep increasing what they charge advertisers to reach a smaller audience? If they maintain profits by cutting costs, social science research on media suggests they will accelerate their audience loss.
  • "Convergence seems more inevitable and potentially less threatening to journalists than it may have seemed a few years ago. At least for now, online journalism appears to be leading more to convergence with older media rather than replacement of it. When audience trends are examined closely, one cannot escape the sense that the nation is heading toward a situation, especially at the national level, in which institutions that were once in different media, such as CBS and The Washington Post, will be direct competitors on a single primary field of battle - online. The idea that the medium is the message increasingly will be passé. This is an exciting possibility that offers the potential of new audiences, new ways of storytelling, more immediacy and more citizen involvement.
  • "The biggest question may not be technological but economic. While journalistically online appears to represent opportunity for old media rather than simply cannibalization, the bigger issue may be financial. If online proves to be a less useful medium for subscription fees or advertising, will it provide as strong an economic foundation for newsgathering as television and newspapers have? If not, the move to the Web may lead to a general decline in the scope and quality of American journalism, not because the medium isn't suited for news, but because it isn't suited to the kind of profits that underwrite newsgathering.
  • "Those who would manipulate the press and public appear to be gaining leverage over the journalists who cover them. Several factors point in this direction. One is simple supply and demand. As more outlets compete for their information, it becomes a seller's market for information. Another is workload. The content analysis of the 24-hour-news outlets suggests that their stories contain fewer sources. The increased leverage enjoyed by news sources has already encouraged a new kind of checkbook journalism, as seen in the television networks efforts to try to get interviews with Michael Jackson and Jessica Lynch, the soldier whose treatment while in captivity in Iraq was exaggerated in many accounts.

Concen about the trends in reporting spans the political spectrum. In Auhust 2004, Laura Bush said in an interview on Fox News that "there are a lot of reasons to be critical of the media in America".

"I think that a lot of times the media sensationalize or magnify things that aren't -- that really shouldn't be," she said. "I do think there's a big move away from actual reporting, trying to report facts ... It's in newspapers and everything you read -- that a lot more is opinion," she said. [1]

State of the US Media 2006

The Project for Excellence in Journalism's "State of the News Media 2006" study claims, "The troubles of 2005, especially in print, dealt a further blow to ... journalism in the public interest."[2] While newspaper circulation, ad income and staff levels decreased, "the industry will still post profit margins of 20%." The study also examined news coverage across numerous print, broadcast and online outlets on one randomly-chosen day, and found "enormous repetition and amplification of just two dozen stories."

This means that "while there were more media outlets ... they were covering less news," reported the New York Times. [3] Noting that national broadcast reports repeatedly quoted the same few people, the study cautions that "more coverage ... does not always mean greater diversity of voices." The "shallowest" news media was cable news, according to the study. Bloggers "raised new issues," but "did almost no original reporting." [4]

A 2006 study, by the Pew Research Center, found that nearly half of U.S. residents spent at least 30 minutes a day watching TV newscasts. Fifty-four percent of respondents said they regularly watched local TV news, while 34 percent turn to cable TV news. News websites tend to be used "as a supplemental source," and the audience "is skewing older," with "fortysomethings" more likely than youths to read news websites, reported Reuters. [5]

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