Traditional Media Declines In 2009: Pew Report

(RTTNews) - The Pew Research Center's annual Project for Excellence in Journalism, or PEJ, report showed that traditional news gathering suffered severe losses in the year 2009, offsetting innovations in the world of news and journalism.

In the digital age, newspapers currently spend $1.6 billion less annually on reporting and editing than they did a decade ago, as per PEJ's State of the News Media 2010 report. The study was the seventh in a series of annual efforts by PEJ to take stock of the revolution occurring in news and information in the United States.

Network TV is down by hundreds of millions since their peak in the 1980s. Local TV newsrooms are also cutting, down 6% in the last two years, some 1,600 jobs.

In the year 2009, newspapers ad revenue fell 26% and local television declined 22%. Revenues from Radio was down 22%, magazine 17%, network TV 8%, and Online ad revenues dropped about 5%. Cable news, among the commercial news sectors, alone did not suffer declining revenue and layoffs last year. Nearly half of the 37 publicly traded media companies, for which there are current data, lost money in 2009, PEJ's analysis of media ownership and industry data reported.

According to estimates by J-Lab, the non-profit contributions flowing to these new media efforts since 2006 amount to about $141 million.

PEJ Director Tom Rosenstiel said, "Last year was significantly harder on the news industry even than 2008, and the report predicts still more cutbacks in 2010, even with an improving economy. And while there is more discussion of alternative ways of financing the news, there is not yet much concrete progress."

According to a new survey that examines the potential for online revenue models, 79% of online news consumers said they have never or only rarely clicked on an online ad, and only 35% of online news consumers can identify a "favorite" news website. Of this most likely group that might pay for the content, only 19% said they would continue to visit the favorite site if they had to pay for it.

A new analysis of news web sites based on Nielsen NetRatings data showed that of the 4,600 news sites Nielsen tracks, the top 7% get 80% of the traffic, and of the top roughly 200 news sites, legacy media are heavily represented, accounting for 67%. Another 13% are aggregators, such as Google News, primarily of legacy content, while 14% are online-only sites that produce original content.

The report noted that the average visit to an online news site is three minutes and four seconds long, but a visit to the New York Times website averages more than a minute longer than a visit to an aggregator site. People spend about half as much time per month on niche news sites as they do on those focused on general interest news.

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