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Television news, newspapers in US
take a beating
Television news loses its
audience in the US; newspapers lose
even more.
BY A CORRESPONDENT
March 12, 2007: In the United
States, for the first time in many
years, every sector of television news
lost audience in 2006.
Newspapers in the US, despite gaining
larger readership than ever for their
content via online platforms, fared
worse than television financially.
The shifting economic fundamentals are
prompting mainstream news
organisations to try to build audience
around “franchise” areas of coverage,
specialties and even crusades,
according to a new report on the state
of journalism in America, The State of
the American News Media 2007, prepared
by the Project for Excellence in
Journalism (PEJ).
The Project for Excellence in
Journalism is a non-partisan,
non-political research group and a
part of the Pew Research Center in
Washington, D.C.
The new phenomenon is exemplified by
cable news, which had been growing for
a decade, but is now suffering
audience declines.
The “argument culture” of the cable is
giving way to something new: the
“answer culture,” a growing pattern
that has news outlets, programmes and
journalists offering solutions,
certainty and the impression of
putting all the information needed in
clear order for the people.
These are some of the conclusions from
The State of the American News Media
2007, a 700-page comprehensive look at
the state of US journalism by the
Project for Excellence in Journalism.
This is the fourth annual report.
“Trends that we have been tracking now
for four years are reaching a pivot
point,” PEJ director Tom Rosenstiel
said. “Only one media sector, the
ethnic press, is still growing, and
every measurement for audience – even
page views and visitors – is now being
questioned. Things are now moving
faster than companies can even
recognise. Mainstream news media are
adapting, in part, by focusing on
specialties. In a sense, every outlet
is becoming more of a niche player
with reduced ambitions.”
That does not mean that journalism is
dying. There is even more reason than
a few years ago to believe, the report
says, that the old newsrooms of the US
are most likely to be the successful
newsrooms of the future.
However, the report cautions that the
consequences of the overall trend
toward franchise branding remain
unclear. “Hyper-localism, a favorite
term on Wall Street, can be market
speak for simple cost-cutting.
Branding can be a mask for bias.
Pursued mindlessly, the franchise
approach could also spell the death of
a big city metro paper. The character
of the next era, far from inevitable,
will likely depend heavily on the
quality of leadership in the newsroom
and boardroom,” the report concludes.
The 2007 report includes a special
content analysis of digital
journalism, which systematically
examines the nature and character of
over three dozen websites offering
news and information in a variety of
styles.
Among other findings, the online
analysis concludes that, while
journalists are becoming more serious
about the Web, no clear models of how
to do journalism online exist yet, and
some qualities are still only
marginally explored. Features such as
immediacy and customisability, for
example, have been developed much more
than others, like depth or the use of
multimedia.
Like in the case of past annual
reports, the 2007 study gives detailed
chapters on nine different sectors of
the press – newspapers, magazines,
network television, cable news, local
TV, the internet (including blogs),
radio, the ethnic press and
alternative media.
For each sector, the report collects
all available information on six
different areas: audience, economics,
ownership, newsroom investment, and
public attitudes.
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