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Overview

Introduction

By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

Some of the numbers are chilling.

Newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23% in the last two years. Some papers are in bankruptcy, and others have lost three-quarters of their value. By our calculations, nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone, and 2009 may be the worst year yet.

In local television, news staffs, already too small to adequately cover their communities, are being cut at unprecedented rates; revenues fell by 7% in an election year—something unheard of—and ratings are now falling or are flat across the schedule. In network news, even the rare programs increasing their ratings are seeing revenues fall.

Now the ethnic press is also troubled and in many ways is the most vulnerable because so many operations are small.

Only cable news really flourished in 2008, thanks to an Ahab-like focus on the election, although some of the ratings gains were erased after the election.

Perhaps least noticed yet most important, the audience migration to the Internet is now accelerating. The number of Americans who regularly go online for news, by one survey, jumped 19% in the last two years; in 2008 alone traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27%. Yet it is now all but settled that advertising revenue—the model that financed journalism for the last century—will be inadequate to do so in this one. Growing by a third annually just two years ago, online ad revenue to news websites now appears to be flattening; in newspapers it is declining.

What does it all add up to?

Even before the recession, the fundamental question facing journalism was whether the news industry could win a race against the clock for survival: could it find new ways to underwrite the gathering of news online, while using the declining revenue of the old platforms to finance the transition?

In the last year, two important things happened that have effectively shortened the time left on that clock.

First, the hastening audience migration to the Web means the news industry has to reinvent itself sooner than it thought—even if most of those people are going to traditional news destinations. At least in the short run, a bigger online audience has worsened things for legacy news sites, not helped them.

Then came the collapsing economy. The numbers are only guesses, but executives estimate that the recession at least doubled the revenue losses in the news industry in 2008, perhaps more in network television. Even more important, it swamped most of the efforts at finding new sources of revenue. In trying to reinvent the business, 2008 may have been a lost year, and 2009 threatens to be the same.

Imagine someone about to begin physical therapy following a stroke, suddenly contracting a debilitating secondary illness.

Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online. By 2008, the industry had finally begun to get serious. Now the global recession has made that harder.

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.

Those are just some of the questions and conclusions in this edition of our annual report on the state of American journalism. This year’s report, as always, offers a general overview of the state of journalism as well as detailed examinations of the state of eight separate sectors (newspapers, online, network television, cable television, local television, audio, magazines, and ethnic media). The report also includes our in-depth content analysis, based on a study of nearly 80,000 news stories and television and radio segments in A Year in the News.

This year we also offer some Special Reports. There is one on citizen-based media, including a university study of 363 citizen websites in 46 markets. There is a first-ever survey of the members of the Online News Association, to be released March 30. There is an essay by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel on the Lessons of the Election. There is a backgrounder on the growing models of entrepreneurial journalism, new Web news organizations run by professional journalists outside the mainstream press. There is a review of changes in the last year in public attitudes.

Major Trends

By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

Beyond our broadest conclusions, we identify six new trends emerging in 2009, which build off those we have identified in past years.

The growing public debate over how to finance the news industry may well be focusing on the wrong remedies while other ideas go largely unexplored. Much of the discussion has centered on whether consumers would make micro-payments for online content and the possibility of nonprofits assuming ownership of the press. The micro-payment idea, however, was already tried and rejected by users early on and has run headlong into resistance from online advocates. Nonprofit financing, even with ad revenue, may make sense in targeted subject areas—health or investigative reporting, for instance—but it is unlikely that there is enough funding to become a general ownership model. The scale of the commercial media is too large and the potential losses too great. A host of other ideas, with more potential, are worth considering. While hardly a complete list, they include: 1. Adopt the cable model, in which a fee to news producers is built into monthly Internet access fees consumers already pay. News industry executives have not seriously tested this enough to know if it could work, but these fees provide half the revenue in cable. 2. Build major online retail malls within news sites. This could both create a local search network for small businesses and link them directly with consumers to complete transactions, not just offer advertising—with the news operation getting a point-of-purchase fee. 3. Develop subscription-based niche products for elite professional audiences. These are more than subject-specific micro-sites. They are deep, detailed, up-to-the-minute online resources aimed at professional interests, and they are a proven and highly profitable growth area in journalism. There are other ideas as well, including news companies collaborating to seriously challenge aggregators, especially Google, to start sharing more revenue. Several new revenue streams most likely are needed. The closest thing to a consensus right now is that no one source is a likely magic bullet.

Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions. The trend is still forming and its potential is uncertain but the signs are clear. Through search, e-mail, blogs, social media and more, consumers are gravitating to the work of individual writers and voices, and away somewhat from institutional brand. Journalists who have left legacy news organizations are attracting funding to create their own websites. Experiments like GlobalPost are testing whether individual journalists can become independent contractors offering reporting to various sites, in much the way photographers have operated for years at magazines. It would be a mistake to overstate the movement at this point. But for a few journalists at least, there are signs of a new prospect: individual journalists, funded by a mix of sources, offering expert coverage to many places. The movement offers the possibility of more skilled reporting from the field. Yet it would also require consumers to be discriminating and raises questions about how news organizations would ensure quality and reliability.

On the Web, news organizations are focusing somewhat less on bringing audiences in and more on pushing content out. The shift reflects the news industry more fully recognizing the viral nature of the Web and the rise of social media. What began as a few podcasts, RSS feeds and e-mail alerts a year or two ago has mushroomed into a more serious emphasis on developing multiple forms of distribution. One form involves helping citizens grab and share information with one another. Another involves placing content on as many platforms as possible. Most news websites now have links attached to stories so readers can more easily share that content, and many have gone further, creating their own Twitter or Facebook accounts to put more content into consumers’ hands and allow them to pass it along. News Corp. and NBC Universal jointly purchased Hulu.com—a site where users can view streaming video free of cost—giving both companies another outlet for their products. The economics of all this is unresolved and home websites still matter. The industry is also late in arriving. But the movement represents a dawning realization that the nature of the Web is something the news industry cannot fight and might even begin to employ.

The concept of partnership, motivated in part by desperation, is becoming a major focus of news investment and it may offer prospects for the financial future of news. Partly to cut costs, partly to make up for lost or more narrowly focused content and partly an effort to remain relevant, news organizations are beginning join forces with institutions they once saw as rivals. Papers in South Florida and Texas now share copy rather than simply compete. The local television affiliates of NBC and Fox are sharing video of breaking news events. Online, CBS Radio began a joint venture with AOL and Yahoo , pooling its stations together on one platform. The efforts are just taking root and, as with other experiments, there is little sign yet of how much success there could be in attracting new audiences or revenue. But the partnerships represent a small step toward individual companies in trouble beginning to pool ideas and resources in a way they traditionally have resisted. The move toward partnership also reflects change of another sort. The appeal of a news organization in the future increasingly will be not just the content it produces but also the fuller package of information it assembles from multiple sources.

Even if cable news does not keep the audience gains of 2008, its rise is accelerating another change—the elevation of the minute-by-minute judgment in political journalism. In 2008 cable news came close to becoming the primary television platform of American political discourse. It was the only medium to be a clear winner in 2008, profits rising by a third and audiences growing 38%. But with cable’s singular fascination on politics, the biggest impact may be a sense of accelerating journalistic judgment. The minute-by-minute assessment of daily campaign maneuverings, many offered by partisan spin doctors in ways deliberately coarse and provocative, are now snap judgments about governance. The notion of a media honeymoon has become passé. The journalist who earned perhaps the most attention in Obama’s first month was a cable news financial “editor” who ranted on a Chicago trading floor, became a YouTube star and accused the White House of “threatening” him when Obama’s press secretary chastised him by name. Add to that the rising role of blogs, and now political figures “tweeting” from the Senate and House floor their immediate personal feelings. Even President Barack Obama has warned the press and public about listening to “cable chatter” and cautioned Republicans not to take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh, whose role as a political leader is now news. Incrementally, it feels as if the line between unfiltered personal thought and public discourse is evaporating a little more.

In its campaign coverage, the press was more reactive and passive and less of an enterprising investigator of the candidates than it once was. In 1992, the Washington Post produced 13 major profiles examining the past record and biography of the eventual winner of the race. In 2008, the paper’s ombudsman found, it produced three. At the Los Angeles Times, the number of such enterprise stories about the winning candidate fell by two-thirds. Many factors have contributed to this less pro-active press. Smaller newsrooms leave people less time for enterprise. Blogs and websites are deep wells of information, but they consume time and attention. The campaigns have become more disciplined about controlling their message, keeping their distance and putting out their own information directly to the public (see Lessons of the Election). Similar to 2000, most of what we know about the new president came from his campaign rather than from media enterprise. And very quickly his political agenda, whether changed by events or there but not always clear, has proved more sweeping than advertised.

Key Findings

By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

New patterns in news consumption and a deteriorating economy deepened the emerging cracks in the economic foundation of the media in 2008.

Here is a brief look at the battering year for the news industry as measured by six key indicators: audience, economics, news investment, ownership and digital trends:

Audience

In a big news year, most media continued to see audiences shrink.

Only two platforms clearly grew: the Internet, where the gains seemed more structural, and cable, where they were more event-specific.

The data also suggest a clear trend in the changing nature of how Americans now learn about the world around them. People are relying more heavily — both during peak moments and in general — on platforms that can deliver news when audiences want it rather than at appointed times, a sign of a growing “on demand” news culture. People increasingly want the news they want when they want it.

Much of that traffic, moreover, went to the biggest Internet sites, many of them offering news primarily from wire services or aggregated from legacy media outlets. The top 50 news websites saw traffic for the year grow 27%, according to PEJ’s analysis of comScore data, while all news and information sites grew 7%. The top four news sites —Yahoo, MSNBC.com, CNN.com and AOL—saw unique visitors grow 22% to 23.6 million visitors a month. That was twice the rate of increase of 2007 and more than five times the rate in 2006.

The gains in cable, which generated even greater publicity, were more ephemeral. For 2008, the average monthly audience of the three major news channels throughout the day and evening grew by 38%, to a new high of 2.2 million. But after the election, the audience began to drift away. A bump in early 2009, though, brought the average back up slightly, and in February, prime-time audiences were running 5% ahead of the corresponding month of 2008.

Audiences Turn to Cable and Web

Percentage Change in Audience, 2007 to 2008, Across Media

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Arbitron, Audit Bureau of Circulations, comScore Media Metrix, Nielsen Media Research¹

The numbers for network news were down but not as precipitously as in past years and not as much as it was for network entertainment programming. The decline in the three commercial evening newscasts, for instance, slowed in 2008 to just 1% —or 300,000 viewers (compared with roughly a million lost annually over the last two decades). A combined 22.8 million people still watch the three programs each night, and 13.1 million watch the networks’ morning news. Late in the year, as the worsening economy became big news, both evening news and to a lesser extent morning shows saw audience gai

The numbers were bleak for newspapers in print, though better for their digital editions. Circulation fell 4.6 % daily and 4.8% Sunday for the latest period compared with a year earlier. That brings them down 13.5% daily and 17.3% Sunday since 2001. Traffic to newspaper websites is growing, however. Unduplicated Web audiences are now estimated to add 8.4% to the average newspaper’s readership, making up most, but not all, of the audience decline.

In audio platforms, AM/FM radio audiences either grew slightly or fell depending on how you count them. Arbitron reported a small rise in the audience for news and talk programs, up 2% to 48 million. But survey data show small declines in the number of people who said they listened to radio news the day before (to 35% from 36%). Various new audio technologies, including from satellite, podcasts and Internet radio, grew. Sirius XM, the satellite radio company forged in the merger of the industry’s two pioneers, expected to finish the year with 9.2% more subscribers than the two companies had the year before.

And the ethnic press, a growing sector the last few years, saw its audience numbers become more complicated. The circulation for most of the African American papers declined. For Spanish-language dailies, results were mixed, while Spanish television stations gained. Online, the ethnic media made more strides in 2008 than in the past.

Perhaps the bleakest news came in for the American weekly news magazine. According a survey, less than a quarter of American adults said they read a magazine of some kind the day before—down from a third in 1994. Of the eight publications that PEJ tracks as news magazines, circulation dropped 4.8%. One stalwart – U.S. News & World Report – announced it would no longer be a news weekly, converting instead to a consumer guide focused on its popular rankings of colleges and other topics.

Local television remained the nation’s most popular source for news, but, on a percentage basis, it was among the biggest losers of audience in 2008. Just over half of Americans are now regular viewers (52%), according to a survey, down from nearly two-thirds (64%) a decade earlier. Viewership of local evening newscasts, those around the dinner hour, fell by an average of 4.5%, according to an analysis of ratings data by PEJ. Morning and mid-day newscasts held basically stable. Even the trend toward adding new shows in new timeslots seems to have slowed.

Economics

The economic storm of 2008 accelerated the crisis facing news business, forcing the weakest into insolvency and testing the strength of the rest. If estimates by Advertising Age prove accurate, total spending on advertising fell for the second consecutive year. Another decline is predicted for 2009. That would mark the first consecutive three-year decline in advertising spending since the Great Depression.For news, some of this—perhaps at least half—cannot be attributed solely to the cyclical downturn. It also reflects the powerful structural shifts brought on by digital technology, which has allowed those who want to reach consumers to do so without the news media as intermediary.

Change in Ad Spending by Medium

2007 to 2008

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Cable: SNL Kagan; Network: TNS Media Intelligence; Online: eMarketer; Local TV: Television Bureau of Advertising; Audio: Radio Advertising Bureau; Magazines: Publishers Information Bureau; Newspapers: Newspaper Association of America.²

In newspapers, total ad revenue fell 16% in 2008. Even online ads – once the great hope – ended up falling 0.4%% and amounted to less than 10% of revenue.
In radio, the only gains at most stations are from new technology, concerts and billboards, but none of those sectors is particularly large. Fully 90% of radio revenue still flows to traditional, or terrestrial, radio. And through the first nine months of the year, traditional radio revenue was down 7% compared with the first three quarters of 2007. This contrasted to a 2% drop for all of 2007.
And in news magazines, the model of the mass-market printed weekly appears to have collapsed. U.S. News has gone to monthly guides while Newsweek, in a move to staunch losses, is trying to emulate the niche, elite model of The Economist. That leaves Time as the sold survivor of a genre it invented.

Even while online ad spending grew about 14% through the first three quarters of the year, most of it benefited Google and other search providers. Revenue from the sale of banners and other display ads that news websites depend on increased just 4%, and estimates are that it declined by the fourth quarter. One reason: the infinitely expanding universe of blogs and websites has forced them to cut their rates to compete for advertisers. The cost to reach 1,000 viewers fell by half in 2008 alone, to an estimated average of 26 cents.

In local television, a deteriorating market for advertising had analysts scrambling to revise their estimates downward as the year wore on. Most concluded that the final revenue numbers were as much as 7% lower than the year before and that profit margins had probably been cut in half. And that came during an election, a bad sign for a sector that counts on political ads to replenish coffers every two years. Local television is being particularly hurt by the collapse of the auto industry, its biggest advertiser.
Given all this, cable television executives could be excused for exuberance. Pre-tax profits in 2008 for the three major news cable channels grew by a third over the year before to an estimated $1.1 billion. Next year will likely not be as strong. A big source of the revenue gains was campaign ads, which ended with the election. But cable has one big advantage: fully half of its revenue comes from subscription fees built into monthly cable bills, which insulates the channels from downturns in ad rates and spending.
Network news, without that cushion of subscription fees, faces a long-term future that is far more questionable. With a different and decidedly disadvantaged economic model, the whole network model of providing programming to local stations is in question. If it collapses, so might the notion of network news programming. All that can be said with certainty is that network executives are facing challenges they have never seen before.

News investment

Other than in cable news, the picture in newsrooms in 2008 was brutal, and 2009 could be worse.

America’s newspapers got smaller in just about every way. One estimate shows 5,900 full-time newsroom jobs were cut, or about 11%, in 2008. By the end of 2009, the newsrooms of American daily newspapers may employ roughly 25% fewer people than in 2001—and the losses are higher at big-city metros. The impact was especially severe on overseas bureaus, in state capitals and in Washington. Half the states no longer have a newspaper covering the U.S. Congress. And the change in the product is manifest. The physical dimensions of the daily paper are smaller, ads now are common on front pages, sections have disappeared and some papers have stopped printing or delivering on unprofitable days.

In network television, for much of the year it looked as though newsrooms would be spared more of the bloodletting that had taken place the year before. Originally, cuts were smaller, although mostly among on-air personnel in contrast to behind-the-camera cuts the prior year. Heading into 2009, however, another round of cuts was on its way, and both foreign and domestic bureaus could be affected. Overseas, all three networks had, by the end of 2008, eliminated the posting of full-time reporters in Iraq.
The news teams Americans say they most rely on – the familiar faces at the local television stations – also shrank in 2008. Fewer stations reported hiring, and the median staff size slid from an all-time high the previous year as news directors looked for ways to combine newsgathering functions. The move to expand or add news programs also appeared to be slowing. A big capital infusion in equipment for the conversion to digital broadcasting came to a close. And by the end of the year layoffs were accelerating.

Radio news, already operating at a fraction of the size it did decades ago, seems headed into another period of contraction brought on by drops in local ad spending. Newsrooms – which already average only slightly more than two people and produce news for three stations – were expected to shrink further. Even the nonprofit National Public Radio announced layoffs – 7% of its staff of nearly 900 — and canceled two programs

Yet nowhere was the turmoil more acute than in news magazines. Late in the year, several publications announced substantial layoffs, on top of cutbacks in staffing and resources already made earlier in the year. Newsweek saw some of the biggest cuts, both in manpower and bureaus. Buyouts eliminated 160 employees, and one-correspondent bureaus in Chicago, Detroit and Mexico City were shuttered. Further cuts were feared in 2009.
Only the newsrooms of the three major cable channels were on a pace to increase their investment in newsgathering, at an average of 7%. CNN established one-person bureaus in 10 cities and announced the creation of a wire service. Fox News, at No. 2 in spending, was projected to have the biggest boost in budget, up 17%.

Ownership

If things were bad in the counting house and the newsrooms, the picture for the companies that owned the news business was just as grim. There were few buyers out there. And those who had recently bet on the news business—like News Corp., Tribune, and McClatchy — were punished for buying too high or had trouble meeting their debt payments. Stock prices fell, and dividends were slashed. If two years ago there began to be doubts about whether ownership through publicly traded stocks was still an appropriate model, in 2008 bankruptcy restructuring entered the discussion of media ownership in a serious way.

In newspapers, stock prices fell 83% in 2008. Hearst announced it would have to sell, close or reorganize papers in Seattle and San Francisco. E.W. Scripps closed its paper in Denver. The Tribune Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection even though most of its papers and television properties still generated operating profits; it was just not enough to cover the debt left over from the transaction in which it went private a year before. The owners of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News also went in bankruptcy. One of the last of the African American dailies, the Chicago Defender, converted to a weekly publication cycle and AsianWeek folded.

In broadcast television, the Big Three owners with network news remained profitable in 2008 but looked overseas, to cyberspace and to new partners for growth in the face of continuing declines in their traditional advertising-based businesses. CBS wrote down the value of its holdings by $14 billion, citing the soft advertising environment, but invested heavily in a newly formed Internet division. The stock of NBC’s parent company, General Electric, fell so far so fast that it led to speculation that the network may be sold, although no signs of that emerged. ABC’s parent, Disney, warned that the recession would affect nearly everything it does, reducing attendance at its theme parks and sapping revenue from its television network.

In local television, which had been a financial bright spot, the situation dimmed. With credit tight and revenues declining, the number of television stations bought was half the figure reported the year before and the lowest since 2004. According to one accounting, 96 stations were sold from January to December 2008, with a total value of $866 million. This compared with 270 in all of 2007 for a value of $4.6 billion. The stock values of publicly traded companies that own stations plunged.
The pattern was similar in radio. While the biggest player, Clear Channel Communications, completed its sale to private equity investors in 2008, an expected surge of such dealmaking failed to materialize. In satellite radio, the two pioneers joined to form Sirius XM Radio, but the wilting economy soon forced them to accept a white knight investor to avoid defaulting on debt payments.

And in magazines, the major owners consolidated and even closed some publications. For the second year in a row, fewer new magazines were introduced and sales dwindled. There were 42 mergers and acquisitions among consumer magazines, a drop of 25% from 2007, and the value of the deals fell a staggering 97%.

Digital Trends

In addition to the broader audience and economic trends online, a number of specific Web developments emerged in 2008. For the news industry, they bring concern, glimmers of hope and new voices. But much of the expansion and innovation is now coming from those outside of traditional news industries.

And it became clearer during the year that newspapers, television and other legacy media are unlikely to ever support their worldwide news gathering with the sale of banners, pop-ups and other display advertising. The real growth online continues to be in search advertising, and no one has figured out a way yet to combine search advertising with news in sufficient volume.

Economically, one growing cause of concern for news is that national websites and aggregators like Google are fast making inroads in attracting local advertising. That means even if online advertising returns to big growth rates of two years ago, it may not help news organizations as much as once thought. Over the past decade, the share of Internet advertising derived from local businesses has doubled, by some estimates to 40%, but most of those ads (57% in 2007) are now going to national Internet-only sites like Google and Yahoo, not to local news organizations.

The areas of growth in news are small. Advertising in online video and rich media – those commercials that precede the video a user clicks to see — is growing swiftly, a compound rate of 33% over the last five years, although it still only represents about 10% of Internet advertising. And many users have figured out they can often view the same video without the ad on YouTube and other sites.
Mobile technology has also taken a leap, raising the prospect of millions of Americans getting their news from their smartphones. With 40 million active users of the mobile Web, advertisers spent $1.3 billion to reach them in 2008, up 59% from a year earlier. News organizations are scrambling to establish beachheads in this new land, but old questions of revenue persist. Will the tiny banner ads pay enough to finance the effort?

In online content, citizen news sites that do original reporting gained some steam in 2008, especially in areas where traditional coverage has vanished. But, according to a study of citizen sites in 46 markets, they remain far from a substitute for legacy media. Their range of topics is narrower, the sourcing somewhat thinner and the content often not updated even once a day. They also trail legacy news sites in the various methods for distributing their content.

Presence of Various Distribution Systems %of sites with each feature
	Legacy News	Citizen News	Citizen Blog
RSS Feed	75%	77%	89%
MP3/iPod feed available	28	15	5
Content delivered to cellphone	29	6	2
Able to e-mail stories to a third party	79	30	25

Refugees of the mainstream press helped launch or staff a number of independent new ventures online. Some are nonprofits; others have been given start-up money with the expectation of becoming self-sustaining; still others are for-profit entities. The sites also are diverse in subject matter. Some cover very local news, other report globally and still other focus on niche areas such as health or science. A review by PEJ of several of the larger initiatives finds they are offering some solid journalism in niche areas of interest. But for now, these new ventures rely primarily on philanthropic funding and partly for that reason seem more suited to fill in the gaps of vanished journalism than to replace the industry entirely.

Footnotes

1. The cable figure is based on PEJ’s analysis of Nielsen Media Research data. It represents the combined mean daytime and prime-time viewership (individuals over the age of 2) of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The online figure is based on PEJ’s analysis of comScore Media Metrix data. It represents mean unique viewers of the top 50 news websites, excluding weather, entertainment and other specialty sites. (Another leading Internet audience measurement company, Hitwise, calculated a similar audience growth of 23% in its “news and media” category.) The audio figure is based on Arbitron Ratings data. It represents the latest estimate of the average number of people over the age of 12 who listened to news/talk/information on AM/FM radio over the course of a week. The network figure is based on PEJ’s analysis of Nielsen Media Research data. It represents the mean evening news viewership (individuals over the age of 2) of NBC, CBS and ABC. The local TV figure is based on PEJ’s analysis of Nielsen Media Research data. It represents the mean evening news ratings (individuals over the age of 2) for ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC affiliates. The newspaper figure is based on circulation data provided by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. It represents average circulation for the 50 largest U.S. daily newspapers during a six-month period ending September 30 compared to the same period a year prior. The magazine figure is based PEJ’s analysis of circulation data provided by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. It represents the average circulation during the first half of the year, compared to the same period a year earlier, for eight news magazines studied by PEJ: Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, The Economist, The Atlantic, The Week, The New Yorker and National Journal.

2. Cable figures are based on estimated combined ad revenues for CNN/Headline News, Fox News and MSNBC for 2007 and 2008, provided by SNL Kagan, a division of SNL Financial LLC. Online figures are total online display ad revenues, from January to September 2008, compared with the same period in 2007, provided by eMarketer. Network figures are based on combined ad revenues for news divisions at ABC, CBS and NBC from January to September 2008, compared with the same period in 2007, provided by TNS Media Intelligence. Local TV figures are based on ad revenue estimates from January to September 2008, compared with the same period in 2007, provided by the Television Bureau of Advertising. Radio figures are based on AM/FM advertising revenues from January to September 2008, compared with the same period in 2007, provided by the Radio Advertising Bureau. Newspapers figures are based on total industry advertising for 2007 and 2008, provided by the Newspaper Association of America. Magazines figures are based on combined 2007 and 2008 rate-card-reported advertising revenue, provided by the Publishers Information Bureau for the eight news magazines PEJ studies: Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, The Economist, The Atlantic, The Week, National Review, and The New Yorker.

Author's Note

By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

This report each year attempts to analyze the major sectors of the news media in depth and to look across those different elements of the news media to see broader trends.

For each of the nine sectors studied, we examine developments in five different distinct areas—audience, economics, newsroom investment, ownership and digital journalism—and, often, alternative outlets as well. We aggregate as much publicly available data as possible in one place and include original content analysis. In addition to numerous new charts of data, most compilations from earlier reports are updated and still available.

Our goal is to be a resource for the public, journalists, students, academics, those in government and those who want to use the news culture to communicate. People can approach the material in this report in several ways. They can go directly to the medium about which they are most concerned — say, local television news — and drive vertically through it. Or they can focus on a particular issue — audience trends, for example — and move horizontally across different media sectors to see how consumption of news and information is changing. They can move across the introductory overviews of each sector. They can flip back and forth between our narrative and the interactive charts and tabular material. Or they can work through the statistics for themselves, making their own charts, answering their own questions, in effect creating their own reports.

Our desire in this study is to answer questions we imagine any reader would find important, to help clarify the strengths and weaknesses of the available data, and to identify what is not yet answerable.

The study is the work of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonpartisan and nonpolitical institute that studies the information revolution. PEJ is one of seven initiatives that make up the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. The center and this work are funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The chapters were written by the Project’s staff, with the exception of the chapter on newspapers, which was written with the help of a co-author. All of the chapters also benefit from the input of teams of readers who are experts in each media sector.

Our aim is a research report, not an argument. Where the facts are clear, we hope we have not shied from explaining what they reveal, making clear what is proved and what is only suggested. We hope that we are not seen as taking sides. Our intention is to inform, not to persuade, and where we interpret data to draw conclusions, our goal is to do so in a way that is fully supported by the data, and only when those data are clear.

We have tried to be as transparent as possible about sources and methods, and to make it clear when we are laying out data and when we have moved into analysis of it. We have attempted, to the best of our ability and within the limits of time, to seek out multiple sources of information for comparison where they exist. Each year we hope to gather more sources, improve our understanding and refine our methodology.

Our approach — looking at a set of questions across various media — differs from the conventional way in which American journalism is analyzed, one medium at a time. We have tried to identify cross-media trends and to gather in one place data that are usually scattered across different sites. We hope this will allow us and others to make comparisons and develop insights that otherwise would be difficult to see.