I came across this report in my News Writing class at Ohio University.  Its an annual report on American journalism conducted by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, entitled “The State of the News Media”.

I focused specifically on newspapers, since they seemed to have the most to gain/lose from this kind of report.  The Pew Project hired researchers and analysts to examine data collected through the year 2008.  After doing this, they came back with some interesting and sobering statistics.

Here is a particularly insightful excerpt from the report:

“We still do not subscribe to the theory that the death of the industry is imminent. The industry over all in 2008 remained profitable.

But the deep recession already threatens the weakest papers. Nearly all are now cutting so deeply and rapidly that simply coping with the economic downturn has become a major distraction from efforts to reinvent the economics of the business. And even once the downturn ends, growing or stabilized revenues are no sure thing.

If the industry’s death isn’t imminent, the more pertinent question may be this: can newspapers beat the clock? Can they find a way to convert their growing audience online into sufficient revenue to sustain the industry before their shrinking revenues from print fall too far?”

Scary stuff, huh?  I guess that this is something that all of us “textually active” folks out there are going to have to face.  The report showed that newspapers still make roughly 90% of their revenue from print.  Circulation continued to shrink, and advertising declined by 23% or 11.5 billion from just two years ago.  Earnings and stock value fell sharply, and have shown no signs of stopping.

If I had the answers to these problems, I would be a CEO right now.  Unfortunately, I don’t.  So just like everyone else, I’m waiting to see what will happen, and hoping for the best.

-Tyler ;)

Advertisement