LeonardSipes.Com

The state of the news media and what it means for public affairs.

I was listening to TWIG (This Week in Google) hosted by Leo Laporte and featuring Gina Trapani (a web designer) and Jeff Jarvis (a professor of journalism). For those of you who listen to Leo’s shows, you know he represents the best in entertaining video and audio podcasts on technology (see http://twit.tv/twig). I spend more waking hours with Leo than I do with my wife.

The discussion turned to the role of social media and the emergencies in Japan and the Middle East. They gushed about the role of Twitter and Facebook as to providing information.

No one can deny the role of social media in providing video, audio and tweets from the ground. It’s a game-changer; there’s no doubt about it. This is especially true when journalists are barred from the scene.

But as someone who has 30 years of experience in talking to the media, and as someone who has lead government public affairs emergency response teams dozens of times, the explosion of social media brings me to one question; how accurate is the information we’re getting?

Long before there was social media, we inserted rumor control teams into every emergency response. I learned that a lot of the “user-generated” reports from average citizens was not only inaccurate, but sometimes dangerously so.

The Quality of News Reporting

I have witnessed a decrease in the quality of news reporting. Early in my career, you had hard-bitten journalists who believed no one (including government representatives). Reports from citizens in the field were looked upon with even more skepticism. As far as veteran reporters were concerned, everyone had a motive and sometimes those motives interfered with the truth.

The report below from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism provides the best possible overview of the state of the news media over the course of years and it isn’t pretty.

The bottom-line? Professional journalists have greatly decreased in number. Consumers are turning away from many traditional news sources. Internet popularity as a source for news is increasing.

How accurate is the information we’re getting?

But my question stands; how accurate is the information we’re getting from non-traditional sources?

If you accept the premise that a lot of content is self-serving, then who decides the truth? Do we have enough old-school journalists who doubt everything and verify endlessly?

Don’t get me wrong, the explosion of social media and citizen generated content is wonderful. There’s no turning back. This is a great time to be alive.

But I will gladly return to the days when there were sufficient journalists who doubted their own mothers and asked endless hard questions and made the lives of government spokespeople hell.

That’s democracy, but today’s economic models are tearing away at the fabric of excellence in journalism.

The Pew report below is wonderfully detailed but sad.

So Leo, Jeff and Gina, I love the show, but I’ll trust the journalistic gate-keepers more than an anonymous tweet. We need good reporters in sufficient numbers more than ever before.

Best, Len.

The State of the News Media, 2011

Pew Research Project for Excellence in Journalism

Overview

By Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell of the Project for Excellence in Journalism

By several measures, the state of the American news media improved in 2010.

After two dreadful years, most sectors of the industry saw revenue begin to recover. With some notable exceptions, cutbacks in newsrooms eased. And while still more talk than action, some experiments with new revenue models began to show signs of blossoming.

Among the major sectors, only newspapers suffered continued revenue declines last year—an unmistakable sign that the structural economic problems facing newspapers are more severe than those of other media. When the final tallies are in, we estimate 1,000 to 1,500 more newsroom jobs will have been lost—meaning newspaper newsrooms are 30% smaller than in 2000.

Beneath all this, however, a more fundamental challenge to journalism became clearer in the last year. The biggest issue ahead may not be lack of audience or even lack of new revenue experiments. It may be that in the digital realm the news industry is no longer in control of its own future.

News organizations — old and new — still produce most of the content audiences consume. But each technological advance has added a new layer of complexity—and a new set of players—in connecting that content to consumers and advertisers.

In the digital space, the organizations that produce the news increasingly rely on independent networks to sell their ads. They depend on aggregators (such as Google) and social networks (such as Facebook) to bring them a substantial portion of their audience. And now, as news consumption becomes more mobile, news companies must follow the rules of device makers (such as Apple) and software developers (Google again) to deliver their content. Each new platform often requires a new software program. And the new players take a share of the revenue and in many cases also control the audience data.

That data may be the most important commodity of all. In a media world where consumers decide what news they want to get and how they want to get it, the future will belong to those who understand the public’s changing behavior and can target content and advertising to snugly fit the interests of each user. That knowledge — and the expertise in gathering it — increasingly resides with technology companies outside journalism.

In the 20th century, the news media thrived by being the intermediary others needed to reach customers. In the 21st, increasingly there is a new intermediary: Software programmers, content aggregators and device makers control access to the public. The news industry, late to adapt and culturally more tied to content creation than engineering, finds itself more a follower than leader shaping its business.

Meanwhile, the pace of change continues to accelerate. Mobile has already become an important factor in news. A new survey released with this year’s report, produced with Pew Internet and American Life Project in association with the Knight Foundation, finds that nearly half of all Americans (47%) now get some form of local news on a mobile device. What they turn to most there is news that serves immediate needs – weather, information about restaurants and other local businesses, and traffic. And the move to mobile is only likely to grow. By January 2011, 7% of Americans reported owning some kind of electronic tablet. That was nearly double the number just four months earlier.

The migration to the web also continued to gather speed. In 2010 every news platform saw audiences either stall or decline — except for the web. Cable news, one of the growth sectors of the last decade, is now shrinking, too. For the first time in at least a dozen years, the median audience declined at all three cable news channels.

For the first time, too, more people said they got news from the web than newspapers. The internet now trails only television among American adults as a destination for news, and the trend line shows the gap closing. Financially the tipping point also has come. When the final tally is in, online ad revenue in 2010 is projected to surpass print newspaper ad revenue for the first time. The problem for news is that by far the largest share of that online ad revenue goes to non-news sources, particularly to aggregators.

In the past, much of the experimentation in new journalism occurred locally, often financed by charitable grants, usually at small scale. Larger national online-only news organizations focused more on aggregation than original reporting. In 2010, however, some of the biggest new media institutions began to develop original newsgathering in a significant way. Yahoo added several dozen reporters across news, sports and finance. AOL had 900 journalists, 500 of them at its local Patch news operation (it then let go 200 people from the content team after the merger with Huffingtonpost). By the end of 2011, Bloomberg expects to have 150 journalists and analysts for its new Washington operation, Bloomberg Government. News Corp. has hired from 100 or 150, depending on the press reports, for its new tablet newspaper, The Daily, though not all may be journalists. Together these hires come close to matching the jobs in 2010 we estimate were lost in newspapers, the first time we have seen this kind of substitution.

A report in this year’s study also finds that new community media sites are beginning to put as much energy into securing new revenue streams — and refining audiences to do so — as creating content. Many also say they are doing more to curate user content.

Traditional newsrooms, meanwhile, are different places than they were before the recession. They are smaller, their aspirations have narrowed and their journalists are stretched thinner. But their leaders also say they are more adaptive, younger and more engaged in multimedia presentation, aggregation, blogging and user content. In some ways, new media and old, slowly and sometimes grudgingly, are coming to resemble each other.

The result is a news ecology full of experimentation and excitement, but also one that is uneven, has uncertain financial underpinning and some clear holes in coverage. Even in Seattle, one of the most vibrant places for new media, “some vitally important stories are less likely to be covered,” said Diane Douglas who runs a local civic group and considers the decentralization of media voices a healthy change. “It’s very frightening to think of those gaps and all the more insidious because you don’t know what you don’t know.” Some also worry that with lower pay, more demands for speed, less training, and more volunteer work, there is a general devaluing and even what scholar Robert Picard has called a “de-skilling” of the profession.

Among the features in this, the eighth edition of the State of the News Media produced by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, is a report on how American newspapers fare relative to those in other countries, two reports on the status of community media, a survey on mobile and paid content in local news, and a report on African American media. The chapters this year have also been reorganized and streamlined: each is made up now of a Summary Essay and a longer, separate By the Numbers section where all the statistical information is more easily searchable and interactive.

Keep reading to see the report’s major trends and key findings.

Source: http://stateofthemedia.org/