State of the news media 2007

Der von mir durchaus geschätze JEP-Blogger Jan Eric Peters hat mich drauf aufmerksdam gemacht: Die State of the news media ist draußen – wie lange eigentlich schon?

Ein paar Statements:
Is the newspaper industry dying? Not now. On an average day, roughly 51 million people still buy a newspaper, and 124 million in all still read one.
Print:
But the print newspaper is unquestionably ailing. Circulation is declining. Advertising is flat. As Warren Buffett said at his annual investor’s meeting in May 2006 newspapers appear to have entered a period of “protracted decline.”
In 2006, the traditional indicators were all negative:

*Circulation fell even faster than in 2005 — down 2.8% daily and 3.4% Sunday for the six months ending in September compared to that period a year earlier.3

*Industry revenues were flat, a poor showing in a non-recession year. On the print side, retail, national and automotive classified all showed weakness. Online growth left most companies roughly even in revenues for the year.

*Earnings fell. Wall Street responded by marking shares of publicly traded companies down by about 14%, after a tumble of 20% in 2005.4

*At big metro papers, such as the Dallas Morning News and the Philadelphia Inquirer, there were deep newsroom cuts. Together with some closings of national and international bureaus, the trend was to smaller, local papers with diminished ambitions.

Online

After a decade of growth, the online news audience for now has reached a plateau, despite the increase in the number of people with high-speed connections.
News Web sites also found reason for concern in online advertising revenues. They are still small relative to other media, and while they continued to grow by roughly a third last year, experts now think the growth rate is beginning to slow — even down to single digits this decade.

Local TV

There are signs that the local TV news industry is at long last beginning to take the Web more seriously. It has been among the last of the traditional media to do so. We have found in past years that some Web sites were more advertorial than news in their content. That, finally, may be changing.