Study: News Business Suffered a Stroke, but Then...

The annual State of the News Media report by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism is out and it makes for some tough reading if you are rooting for the traditional media to survive. For me, the key statement in the report’s overview is this:

“Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online. By 2008, the industry had finally begun to get serious. Now the global recession has made that harder.”

Here are a few takeaways:

• Ad revenues for newspapers have fallen by 23 percent over the past two years.
• Big newspaper companies have lost up to 90 percent of their value as their stocks are downgraded to junk and reach penny stock territory.
• Twenty percent of those who worked in journalism eight years ago have lost their jobs, but the biggest waves of layoffs may be yet to come.
• Many publishers are in bankruptcy or will be soon. Newspapers are closing, or cutting back editions, all across the U.S.
• Local television stations experienced revenue declines of 7 percent in an election year! Staff cuts have been deep.
• Ethnic media are being decimated by the current industry decline.
• Audience migration to the Internet is accelerating, growing by double digit margins each year.
• Online ad revenues are falling for newspaper sites, and flat-lining for news sites on the web as a whole.
• “And the news industry does not know—and has done less than it could to learn—how to convert this more active online audience into revenue.”

Take a deep breath, sit back and read an analysis in the executive summary of the report over what is happening, why it is happening, and what it all means:

“Even before the recession, the fundamental question facing journalism was whether the news industry could win a race against the clock for survival: could it find new ways to underwrite the gathering of news online, while using the declining revenue of the old platforms to finance the transition?

In the last year, two important things happened that have effectively shortened the time left on that clock.

First, the hastening audience migration to the Web means the news industry has to reinvent itself sooner than it thought—even if most of those people are going to traditional news destinations. At least in the short run, a bigger online audience has worsened things for legacy news sites, not helped them.

Then came the collapsing economy. The numbers are only guesses, but executives estimate that the recession at least doubled the revenue losses in the news industry in 2008, perhaps more in network television. Even more important, it swamped most of the efforts at finding new sources of revenue. In trying to reinvent the business, 2008 may have been a lost year, and 2009 threatens to be the same.

Imagine someone about to begin physical therapy following a stroke, suddenly contracting a debilitating secondary illness…”

Somebody better call 9-1-1.