Otterblog

Back after a week in corporate development. Good to get away. Good to be home.

One of the things we spent a lot of time wrestling with in Richmond was the continuous news monster, the potential, the power, the pitfalls.

There’s a report out today from the Project for Excellence in Journalism on the state of the media, 2008. Needless to say, it’s not all that cheery.

Key points from the intro:

The reality, increasingly, appears more complex. Looking closely, a clear case for democratization is harder to make. Even with so many new sources, more people now consume what old media newsrooms produce, particularly from print, than before. Online, for instance, the top 10 news Web sites, drawing mostly from old brands, are more of an oligarchy, commanding a larger share of audience, than in the legacy media. The verdict on citizen media for now suggests limitations. And research shows blogs and public affairs Web sites attract a smaller audience than expected and are produced by people with even more elite backgrounds than journalists.2

But more and more it appears the biggest problem facing traditional media has less to do with where people get information than how to pay for it — the emerging reality that advertising isn’t migrating online with the consumer. The crisis in journalism, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising.

If you’re interested in the media business, I recommend the report. The PEJ has some biases, and they don’t have a solution, but their reports are to me a generally accurate mirror/prism of the state of things.