AR&D - Audience Research and Development

Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog    

03/13/2006 Entry: "State of Journalism report is a dud"

The Project for Excellence in Journalism's latest "State of the News Media" report is heavy on self-pity and light on understanding the forces driving the decline and fall of professional journalism. This is to be expected, I guess, but it's a bit like wasting time staring at a wound instead of moving to fix the thing.

This is the third year for this study, and there are some good tidbits of information. However, the overall theme is defensive and whiny and doesn't do the industry any good.

The problem here is that professional journalism itself is the problem, not the forces buffeting it from every side. In this sense, the report is the useless attempt of a physician trying to "heal thyself." The study's central theme is that the real threat to professional journalism is that the industry has been turned over to the bean counters and that heroic attempts to protect an increasingly threatened public from the dark side of government (the Holy Grail of the Woodward and Bernstein crowd) come from only a handful of idealists within. With that perspective, the study lists six major "findings."

The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories. This is the finding getting most of the early coverage today, and why not? The authors note, "we tend to see more accounts of the same handful of stories each day. And when big stories break, they are often covered in a similar fashion..." This, the study notes, makes it easy for authorities to corral reporters away from the news, and the writers conclude that this is a bad thing for journalism.

The species of newspaper that may be most threatened is the big-city metro paper that came to dominate in the latter part of the 20th century. The study concludes that this isn't good for journalism either, because these are the types of papers that spend the resources necessary to "act as watchdogs over state, regional and urban institutions, to identify trends, and to define the larger community public square."

At many old-media companies, though not all, the decades-long battle at the top between idealists and accountants is now over. The idealists have lost, according to the study, and by that they mean those working on behalf of the public trust or "public interest." This is deemed bad for journalism, and contributes to the above. The report quotes Polk Laffoon IV, the corporate spokesman of Knight Ridder. "I wish there were an identifiable and strong correlation between quality journalism...and newspaper sales," he said. "It isn't...that simple."

That said, traditional media do appear to be moving toward technological innovation -- finally. The study concludes that this is because most of media companies' revenue growth is coming from online, so the accountants are finally moving to the web, which prompts the authors to ask two questions. "One is whether younger audiences care anything about these traditional news brands. Another is, even if these legacy media do finally try to move online seriously, can they change their culture, or will they succumb to the natural tendency to favor their traditional platforms?"

The new challengers to the old media, the aggregators, are also playing with limited time. Here the report openly states that companies like Google and Yahoo! are taking money from the news organizations they aggregate and suggests that demanding payment for such is something to watch in 2006. As these companies take readers away from news organizations, they also speed the downfall of those (legitimate?) organizations whose content they aggregate.

The central economic question in journalism continues to be how long it will take online journalism to become a major economic engine, and if it will ever be as big as print or television. The study notes that even with astronomical 33% annual growth, online revenues won't match offline revenues for media companies until 2017. "Realistically," the report concludes, "even with the lower delivery costs online, it will be years before the Internet rivals old media economics, if it ever does."

Professional journalism -- as this report (and the institution itself) defines it -- is sinking slowly into the sea of irrelevance, having been blasted by the torpedoes of a culture that wishes to move forward. It's biggest enemy is itself, and history will one day view its destruction is the inevitable result of an interested public that has weighed the institution on the scale of public contribution and found it wanting. It never asks itself if IT is a problem, and it always assumes that its roots and motives are pure and beyond reproach. This is its Achilles' Heel.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism would do us all a favor by stepping outside the trees in crafting this annual report. Otherwise, that which deserves defending will be lost amidst the indefensible.


Replies: 1 Comment

Interesting how this study comes out at the same time of the Knight-Ridder sale... Howard Kurtz piece in the WP echoes your comments.

Posted by Tim Eby @ 03/14/2006 10:32 PM CST


"The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create."

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