Digital Media Embrace Can’t Offset Losses, Pew Says

Innovations in online news media weren’t enough to offset financial losses, suggests a report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Although news media show tremendous energy toward digital journalism, cutbacks in traditional outlets dominate, the report suggested.

Newspapers now spend less annually on reporting and editing jobs than they did a decade ago, PEJ said. By comparison, the non-profit contributions flowing to new media initiatives since 2006 amount to about $141 million, estimates the group J-Lab, PEJ said. In 2009, revenue was down in almost every sector of the traditional news media, PEJ said. Newspapers saw ad revenue fall 26 percent, while TV stations had a 22 percent drop, PEJ said. Radio was down 22 percent, magazine 17 percent and network TV 8 percent.

Unlike traditional media, for a third consecutive year digital and cable news saw audiences grow, PEJ said. According to its data, in 2009 those gains were captured by one network, Fox, though during the day CNN also gained viewers. The economy and health care topped the 2009 mainstream news agenda, found PEJ’s analysis of the “Year in the News."

In 2009, PEJ said consumers were “participatory” when reading or sharing news, but not when viewing ads. The Internet is now the third-most-popular news platform, behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio, the research found. According to PEJ’s survey of online news consumers, 33 percent of cellphone owners now access news on them, 28 percent of Internet users have personalized their homepage to include news and 37 percent of Internet users have contributed to the creation of news via Facebook or Twitter. The report also found a high degree of public resistance to online ads. Almost 80 percent of online news consumers say they never or rarely clicked on an online ad, the study found.