Good overview from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. I’m still working through the complete report (which apparently tops out at 700 pages), so for now I’ll just focus on some of the major trends they identify:
The growing public debate over how to finance the news industry may well be focusing on the wrong remedies while other ideas go largely unexplored.
Forget about micropayments and changing to non-profit status. And forget about a single revenue source being the magic bullet that will save the news business. Most likely, it will take a combination of new ideas, including “online retail malls” and “subscription-based niche products for elite professional audiences.” That last point is an important one; while it’s nearly impossible to get an audience to start paying for a service they’ve been receiving for free, there are always opportunities to upsell premium offerings to segments of your audience.
Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions.
This sounds like a good thing for journalists, but as Spider-man would say, with greater power comes greater responsibility; specifically, the responsibilities journalists used to depend on organizations to take care of such as editing, marketing and publicity.
On the Web, news organizations are focusing somewhat less on bringing audiences in and more on pushing content out.
This is another trend that’s potentially liberating, but also scary. When publishers bring users to their content, they also control the options for monetizing it. Even if they are able to place ads in RSS feeds, for example, it’s a completely different type of ad from the one they’re used to selling. And RSS ads are at least quantifiable; even scarier are all the things that can’t be measured. What’s the exact value of providing readers with the information they want at the time and place they want it? It’s impossible to know, but there’s a good chance that it’s greater than the cost of not providing those services.
The rest of the report includes special reports on citizen-based media and new ventures, a survey of online journalists and in-depth studies of a number of media verticals, including newspapers, online, television and magazines. Definitely worth checking out the whole thing.
