*The gothickest of Gothic High Tech. Imagine a vast Fifth Estate castle with 45 percent of its stones and bricks blasted out of existence.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004075082
The State of Newspapers? Think of Sand Falling in an Hourglass, Pew Report Says
By Jennifer Saba
Published: March 15, 2010
NEW YORK Newspaper advertising revenue plunged an astounding 45% over the last three years forcing publishers to make drastic reductions to the actual size of the print edition, to the space devoted to news to the ranks of employees.
Those findings are the latest from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media 2010 report that starkly quantifies the affects of a nasty recession and the sweeping structural changes faced by media organizations.
"For newspapers, which still provide the largest share of reportorial journalism in the United Sates, the metaphor that comes to mind is sand in an hourglass," stated the report.
The shrinking top and bottom line over the last three years resulted in loss of 15,000 full-time reporting and editing jobs falling to about 40,000 wrote Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute who authored the report's newspaper chapter. "That means newsrooms have shrunk by 27% in three years," he wrote.
Edmonds, along with PEJ, estimated that the newspaper industry lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000. Yet newly launched news organizations and citizen journalism efforts aren't necessarily picking up the slack.
(((Why would they? No reason why one can't run a world on pure social-media word-of-mouth superstition. The Soviet Union had huge newspaper empires, but of course nobody actually read them or believed anything they said. Went on that way 70 years. Still going on that way nowadays too, except that Russians have Internet.)))
The J-Lab project headed by Jan Schaffer found that only $141 million of non profit money has flowed to upstart media projects not including broadcast - one-tenth of the losses in newspaper resources alone, the report noted. ((("Replacing analog dollars with digital dimes.")))
Despite the flourishing of new media organizations the report gets to the heart of the problem: cost effective technology has yet to translate into dollars. "Unless some system of financing the production of content is developed, it is difficult to see how reportorial journalism will not continue to shrink, regardless of the potential tools offered by technology," said the report. (((Now, if I were Venezuela, I'd simply buy all this wreckage and run it at a loss; soon there would be nobody to link to but me.)))
PEJ teamed up with the Pew Internet and American Life Project to survey consumers on their willingness to pay for online news. Those polled showed little loyalty to any one news organization online and indicated little desire to pay for that content. (((Why this still surprises anyone is beyond me. It's like asking them to pay for hours of computer time.)))
Thirty-five percent of Americans said they have a "favorite" news site and among that group only 19% responded that they would continue to visit their favorite site if confronted with a pay wall.
They ignore online advertising as well. The survey found that 79% of online news consumers rarely if ever clicked on an online ad. (((Even if news recovers, what is "advertising" supposed to do with itself? Google undercut all that years ago. Why should I ever manifest any interest in anything any huckster ever tells me about anything whatsoever?)))
The report picked up on a symbiotic relationship between traditional media and the mushrooming of commentary of media. The authors' analysis of more than a million blogs and social media sites found that 80% of the links are to U.S. legacy media. (((The relationship of the finance industry to primary production leaps to mind.)))
However, 80% of traffic to news and information sites is directed at the top 7% of sites.
Nor do they linger for long at these news sites. The average visitor spends only 3 minutes and 4 seconds per session on a typical news site the report said citing an analysis of Nielsen Online data....
