by Jennifer Saba, www.editorandpublisher.com
Read online
HERE Published: March 15, 2010
NEW YORK-- Newspaper advertising revenue plunged an astounding 45% over the last three years forcing publishers to make drastic reductions to the actual size of the print edition, to the space devoted to news to the ranks of employees.
Those findings are the latest from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media 2010 report that starkly quantifies the affects of a nasty recession and the sweeping structural changes faced by media organizations.
"For newspapers, which still provide the largest share of reportorial journalism in the United Sates, the metaphor that comes to mind is sand in an hourglass," stated the report.
The shrinking top and bottom line over the last three years resulted in loss of 15,000 full-time reporting and editing jobs falling to about 40,000 wrote Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute who authored the report's newspaper chapter.
"That means newsrooms have shrunk by 27% in three years," he wrote. Edmonds, along with PEJ, estimated that the newspaper industry lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000. Yet newly launched news organizations and citizen journalism efforts aren't necessarily picking up the slack. The J-Lab project headed by Jan Schaffer found that only $141 million of non profit money has flowed to upstart media projects not including broadcast - one-tenth of the losses in newspaper resources alone, the report noted.
Despite the flourishing of new media organizations the report gets to the heart of the problem: cost effective technology has yet to translate into dollars. "Unless some system of financing the production of content is developed, it is difficult to see how reportorial journalism will not continue to shrink, regardless of the potential tools offered by technology," said the report.
PEJ teamed up with the Pew Internet and American Life Project to survey consumers on their willingness to pay for online news. Those polled showed little loyalty to any one news organization online and indicated little desire to pay for that content. Thirty-five percent of Americans said they have a "favorite" news site and among that group only 19% responded that they would continue to visit their favorite site if confronted with a pay wall.They ignore online advertising as well. The survey found that 79% of online news consumers rarely if ever clicked on an online ad. The report picked up on a symbiotic relationship between traditional media and the mushrooming of commentary of media.
The authors' analysis of more than a million blogs and social media sites found that 80% of the links are to U.S. legacy media. However, 80% of traffic to news and information sites is directed at the top 7% of sites. Nor do they linger for long at these news sites.
The average visitor spends only 3 minutes and 4 seconds per session on a typical news site the report said citing an analysis of Nielsen Online data.Legacy media makes up more than 65% of the top 199 news sites. Forty-eight percent are newspaper Web sites. Aggregators, such as Yahoo and Google News, make up 27% of the top news sites and four are in the top six.
Traffic at the top three newspaper Web sites - The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today - amounted to half that of the top three cable channels.
Cable sites also enjoy more loyalty among readers who spend more time on site per month at 23 minutes and 36 seconds versus newspaper Web sites time spent of 10 minutes and 18 seconds. The report does point to some positive developments for newspapers: The predictions that large metros would cease operations turned out to be largely untrue. For those that did go out of business, they were in markets with another daily.
Newspapers will benefit from the end of the recession, said the report, however it also noted that newspapers are their own worse enemies: "Far too many papers are at risk of becoming insubstantial," warned the report. "They lack the heft to be thrown up on the front porch or to satisfy those readers still willing to pay for a good print newspaper."