Media’s focus turning hyper-local, warns report

BY A CORRESPONDENT

March 14, 2007: A media watchdog group has released an eye-opening finding that media news organisations, faced with declining revenue and increased competition, are entering an era of more limited ambition in which they will shed a broad worldview in favour of narrowly focused reporting.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, in its annual review of the news business released on March 12, 2007, says that the struggle to create sustainable media brands is driving “hyper-local” coverage in newspapers, encouraging citizen journalism on the internet, and giving rise to opinion-driven television personalities like CNN’s Lou Dobbs and Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.

“The consequences of this narrowing of focus involve more risk than we sense the business has considered,” warns the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an arm of the Washington-based Pew Research Center. “Concepts like hyper-localism, pursued in the most literal sense, can be marketing speak for simply doing less.”

The review describes print, radio and television news operations as weathering ‘epochal’ changes – with audiences splintering so radically that is has become difficult to measure accurately new viewing and reading habits.

Daily newspaper circulation in the United States fell by 3% in 2006, but the increase in online readership is more difficult to quantify. The three television networks in the US collectively lost an additional 1 million viewers – about the average in each of the last 25 years – but YouTube and other online services created a new delivery vehicle for the networks’ content.

Traditional newsrooms still remain the primary source for information. The report suggests that news organisations need to be more aggressive about getting revenue for their work.

The old-line media may have to form consortiums to force internet “aggregators” which compile content from other sources, to pay licensing fees for news and information, the report says.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says that most news organisations would have to shrink their staffs, but more thought needs to go into how the reductions are made.

“The current thinking, hyper-localism, seems problematic,” Tom Rosenstiel says. “In an era of globalism, how can you suggest that the Los Angeles or Boston market does not need its own specialised foreign reporting that informs the local economy, the local culture and more, in a way that is different than what generic wires would cover?”

Respected newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have placed high hopes in replacing declining print advertising with advertisements on their websites. In fact, as audiences online have expanded, newspapers have seen their online revenue grow by over 30% a year.

But the Project for Excellence report suggests that the boom in online news audiences and income has begun to wane.

A study found that the number of Americans who said they went online for news every day dropped to 27% in June 2006, compared with 34% in June 2005.

The growth rate in online advertising is projected to slow and could drop into the single digits before the decade ends, according to Emarketer, the online research firm. The study shows that growth online is, therefore, “not enough to clarify the future.”

The Project for Excellence in Journalism report says that the loss of about 4,000 newspaper journalists since 2000, combined with the smaller number of pages devoted to news, suggest that “American newspapers have reduced their ambitions.”

Newspapers have traditionally served a “complete diet” of news to the public and alerted television, radio and other media to stories, the report found, and suggested that more study is needed to determine “what is lost and what is left uncovered.”

The report says that the ethnic media sector is one of the few witnessing solid growth. The circulation of Spanish-language newspapers in the US, for example, jumped to 900,000 to 17.6 million in 2005.

The report also summarised public attitudes toward the media. It noted that journalists remained in relatively low esteem, though not substantially diminished in 2006. For about two decades, the audience has taken a more sceptical view of journalists’ ethics, accuracy and professionalism.

But, recent survey results also showed a capacity for opinion to evolve. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, for example, a majority leaned toward favoring government censorship over freedom of the press. By 2006, 56% in a Pew survey tilted toward press freedom over the 34% supporting censorship.