News media needs to have consumers pay

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The news concern is more than troubled than it was a twelvemonth ago, but at least the jobs it confronts are different from what many perceivers had predicted, according to the yearly State of the News Media study released today by the Undertaking for Excellence in Journalism.

Mainstream mass media as a whole, the study found, isn't losing its audience. It just doesn't cognize how to acquire its new online clients - or anyone else who is reading what they're producing through online collectors - to pay. The top 10 online news land sites in 2007 were either big-media trading operations - such as as as the New House Of York Times or rudiment News - or online collectors such as Yokel News or Google News, whose content is largely produced by traditional mass media outlets.

So while there may be more than readers out there for large media, there is less advertising, leading many black and white trading operations to cut staff as a manner to cut down costs - the up-to-the-minute beingness 157 Media News employees in the Bay Area being allow spell over the past few weeks.

"The fact is that the audience still sees a batch of value in coverage about public life," said Uncle Tom Rosenstiel, manager of the initiative. "What (media companies) demand to do is figure out how to make money doing that.

"It would be a batch harder if the audience didn't like the product, but they do. It's much easier to repair jobs on the concern side," he said.

Many of those early solutions are coming from the column side of the newsroom, he said. Faced with the prospect of their ain extinction, some journalists are doing something that their predecessors never had to: coming up with an advanced thought - and figuring out how the company can do money doing it.

"People used to believe that the people on the concern side would salvage journalism, but it's turning out to be the other manner around in a batch of cases," Rosenstiel said. While mainstream black and white newsmen are learning how to hit picture and photos, many publishing houses told him that they wished their advertisement sections were as expert at creating online picture ads.

Rosenstiel said most analysts figure it will take the mass media 10 old age now to right its concern model. And how deep into that decennary of desperation is the media: "Oh, it's calm early," he said.

The report, which analyzes many sectors of the mass mass mass media - from newspapers, magazines, television and radiocommunication news to ethnical media and online suppliers - said "increasingly, it looks the greatest job facing traditional media have less to make with where people acquire information than how to pay for it - the emerging world that advertisement isn't migrating online with the consumer."

So while newspaper circulation dropped 2.5 percentage nationally, according to the report, online viewership of newspaper Web land sites increased 3.7 percent. But the online advertisement gross for most newspaper Web land sites is usually only about 7 percentage of the news mercantile establishments entire income.

Still, the news for newspaper companies stinks, as many key indexes are dropping. In improver to the circulation drop, advertisement gross dipped 7 percentage and stock terms of newspaper companies have got plunged 42 percentage since 2005.

It have long been thought that the rise of the Internet would go on to "democratize" media, splintering the mass mass mass media audience across the huge array of information beginnings on the Internet. But, the study found, even with billions of new beginnings of information, "more people now devour what old-media newsrooms produce, particularly from print, than before."

While the figure of citizen news mass media Web land sites may be booming, "their economical theoretical account isn't any better than mainstream media's," Rosenstiel said. Plus, many are adopting the doorkeeper function of the mainstream mercantile establishments they long disdained.

"It was thought that people could just post any narrative they wanted to on a citizen mass media site," he said. "But a batch of them are only allowing remarks to be posted."

Even though evaluations for local and web eventide shows dropped, the television news concern largely enjoyed good fiscal news because, Rosenstiel said, their advertisement beginnings have got remained strong. While the audience for the three nightly web news broadcasts dropped 5 percentage in 2007, the prime-time audience at the three cablegram news mercantile establishments grew 9 percent. Gross is up 21 percentage at Fox News, 7 percentage at CNN and 10 percentage at MSNBC.

Ethnic mass media also experienced growth, with advertisement gross for Latino document up 13 percentage from 2005 to 2006.

And the study tossed this os to publish wretches everywhere: "Despite all this, those who stay in the newsroom, particularly in print, evince a stubborn optimism - a sense of missionary post to turn out what they see a career still have resonance, and in clip will happen fiscal footing."

Online resource

Read the full study at journalism.org.

E-mail Joe Garofoli at .