Pew: Traditional News Sources Rapidly Shrinking

In its annual review of the media industry in the United States — which it published online early Wednesday morning — the Pew Research Center says the news business looks somewhat healthier than it has in past years, according to gigaom.com.  

The report cites an influx of new investors and new jobs being offered by rapidly-growing digital-native entities like Vox and First Look Media.

However, the report notes that traditional players still make up the bulk of the industry and that as a whole the industry continues to shrink rapidly, both in jobs and revenue.

The Pew Center says that 2013 and early 2014 brought “a level of energy to the news industry not seen for a long time.” The authors added that some of the new players who have emerged and/or broadened their ambitions — such as BuzzFeed, which now has a news staff of 170, or First Look with its $250-million budget from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar — have “created a new sense of optimism, or perhaps hope, for the future of American journalism.”

Pew study states that while traditional broadcast radio continued to reach the majority of Americans (2013's 91% unchanged from 2012),online listening "in the past week" is growing, up from 29% to 33% in a year, and that online listening in cars rose from 17% in 2012 to 21% in 2013.  

Accompanying this momentum is the question of what it adds up to within the full scope of news that consumers receive. Here the events of the last year get put in some perspective. Our first-ever accounting found roughly 5,000 full-time professional jobs at nearly 500 digital news outlets, most of which were created in the past half dozen years. But the vast majority of bodies producing original reporting still comes from the newspaper industry. But those newspaper jobs are far from secure. Full-time professional newsroom employment declined another 6.4% in 2012 with more losses expected for 2013. Gannett alone is estimated to have cut 400 newspaper jobs while the Tribune Co.  announced 700 (not all of them in the newsroom).

The new money from philanthropists, venture capitalists and other individuals and non-media businesses, while promising, amounts to only a sliver of the money supporting professional journalism.

According to the Pew Study, traditional advertising from print and television still accounts for more than half of the total revenue supporting news, even though print ad revenues are in rapid decline. While seeing some small gains in new revenue streams like digital subscriptions and conferences, total newspaper advertising revenue in 2012 (the last year that full data are available) was down 52% from 2003. Television ad revenue, while stable for now, faces an uncertain future as video becomes more accessible online. What’s more, most of the new revenue streams driving the momentum are not earned from the news product itself.

Local television, which remains the primary place American adults turn to for news, saw its audience increase for the first time in five years. At the same time, though, there were fewer stations producing original news compared with 2012, primarily the result of television acquisitions that left fewer companies in control of more stations.  At this point, fully a quarter of the 952 U.S. television stations that air newscasts do not produce their news programs. Additional stations have sharing arrangements where much of their content is produced outside their own newsroom. The impact on the consumer seems to vary from market to market, with some markets increasing potential reach by airing news on stations that never had it – even if that newscast is the same one that airs on another local station. In other markets the news has contracted, as news organizations have reduced staff or content production for cost efficiency.