Broadcasting & Cable notes that:
“The fraternity of the nation’s television critics at daily newspapers was once a thriving milieu, dominated by a great diversity of committed voices. The critics’ opinions were sought, revered — in many cases, even feared — and blurbed in network on-air promos. That reality has changed drastically of late as the ranks of critics have grown noticeably leaner. Caught in the financial turmoil roiling the newspaper industry, they have become a beleaguered lot, a growing part of the collateral damage of the digital revolution. In the past two years, more than one-dozen longtime critics at major-market dailies — including the Dallas Morning News, Seattle-Post Intelligencer, New York Newsday, New York Daily News and Houston Chronicle — have been either let go, shunted to different beats or been forced to take the ubiquitous buyout…”
This is not altogether surprising. I think there are three main culprits:
(1) Growing outlet competition and audience fragmentation: There’s just a lot more to read, watch and listen to now, so something’s got to give.
(2) Continued decline of newspaper business in general: For reason #1, newspapers are hurting and losing revenue. [see James Gattuso’s recent post on this]. That has meant ongoing staff cuts, and critics (TV, music, art, or otherwise) are likely to be the first with their heads on the chopping blocks.
(3) Explosion of independent voice & critics via blogosphere: Finally, anyone can be a critic these days. That does not mean anyone can be a good critic–there are plenty of blithering idiots out there in the blogosphere when it comes to armchair media criticism–but there are many “amatuers” who do a fine job critiquing mass media programming (especially television).
So, while I am sad to seem some mainstream critics struggling, I just don’t see this newspaper beat surviving much longer.
Today and tomorrow I am attending a terrific conference at Penn State University called, “Playing to Win: The Business and Social Frontiers of Videogames.” It features panel discussions about various legal and business issues facing the video game industry, as well as discussions about how video games are used to aid teaching and learning. There are also panels on multiplayer online worlds and virtual reality environments and the issues surrounding both. [They will apparently be posting videos from the conference on their site shortly.]
The folks at PSU were kind enough to invite me to deliver the luncheon keynote on Day 1 and I decided to provide a broad overview of the policy issues facing video games that I have covered in some of my past work. My presentation was entitled, “Video Games, Ratings, Parental Controls, & Public Policy: Where Do We Stand?” and the entire 36-slide presentation is now available online here. Down below, I thought I would just outline a couple of the key themes I touched upon in my presentation.
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The Newspaper Association of America reported on Friday that print ad revenue for the industry fell by 9.4 percent last year, the biggest decline since it started keeping records in 1950. Within this total, classified ad revenue was hit even harder, down by some 17 percent. The figures show an accelerating decline in newspapers fortunes.
The figures were widely reported newspapers across the country, from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times to the Chicago Tribune. And I didn’t read it in any of them. Like an increasing number of Americans I read the stories only in electronic form, learning about the development initially through an e-mail.
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One of the installments in my ongoing Media Metrics series was called “Ad Wars” and in it I discussed the radical changes underway in the modern advertising market. And in a subsequent installment in the series entitled “Changing Fortunes,” I made it clear that we are already seeing the ramifications of these changes for some of the nation’s oldest media providers, especially broadcasters.
On that point, Diane Mermigas, one of the finest media market watchers in America, has a piece up today about how the “Recession + Google = Critical Blow To Broadcasters.” She argues that:
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I love these opening lines in Jose Antonio Vargas’s article this morning about the vigorous online conversation that has been taking place about race, Barack Obama, and the controversy regarding past remarks made by his friend, Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
In the church of the Internet, call him the preacher heard all around our YouTubing world, where believers not only watch the videos of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s controversial and racially charged sermons but also edit them, comment on them, pass them around. And make them their own.
Wright’s homilies — including the one where he says “God damn America” — have taken on a new life, opening up a conversation so kaleidoscopic only the vastness of the Internet has room for it. It’s about race, Sen. Barack Obama, the presidential campaign, us.
Think about that line for a moment: “opening up a conversation so kaleidoscopic only the vastness of the Internet has room for it.” In a few of my recent essays about the annual State of the News Media report as well as Andrew Keen’s rants against “amateur” media, I have argued that we should appreciate just how much better our deliberative democracy is today thanks to the Internet, new media technologies, and user-generated content. Some critics bemoan the fact that we no longer have a handful of media intermediaries moderating or filtering that conversation, but this Obama-Wright issue provides us with a wonderful case study about why that thinking is so utterly misguided. As Vargas suggests, a conversation about race and politics is a conversation about us as a people; as a society. Shouldn’t, therefore, “we the people” all be able to have our voices heard in that conversation in one way or another? The Internet enables that, and we are better off for it. Thirty years ago, 3 big networks and a few newspapers would have determined the confines and duration of this discussion. Today, we do.
I realized it might make sense to have a single meta-link for all the installments in my ongoing “Media Metrics” series, so this will be it. To reiterate, the goal of the Media Metrics series is to paint the most thorough and objective portrait of the true state of the modern media marketplace using evidence, not emotion. Too often, media debates get caught up in rhetorical skirmishes based upon the way people “feel” about media. In this series, by contrast, I hope to replace feelings with facts and provide an objective assessment of where we stand today. My PFF colleague Grant Eskelsen are also in the process of compiling all of this material into a single database / report that we plan on making available shortly to policymakers, the press, and the public to use as a resource. Here are the online installments I have already posted:
#1: Introduction & Analytical Framework (1/16/08)
#2: Household Access to Media Services & Technologies (1/17/08)
#3: Ad Wars [a look at advertising competition & substitution] (1/20/08)
#4: Changing Fortunes [market capitalization comparisons] (1/29/08)
#5: The Competition for our Ears (2/1/08)
#6: The Video Revolution (3/2/08)
#7: An Uncertain Future for Newspapers (3/5/08)
[… up next… a report on the magazine market.]
Diane Mermigas, the editor-at-large of MediaPost and one of the most consistently insightful media analysts in America, has this sobering assessment of the predicament most traditional media operators find themselves in today:
Media companies, like many industries, are placing bets on new technology and business models while their traditional business models are deteriorating. They are increasingly resorting to a variety of new metrics and formulas to track their return on investment. The complexities of tracking traditional revenues under siege and emerging revenues not yet steadied will pose financial accountability problems that will become increasingly evident. Add to that heavy investing in digital infrastructure and the carryover (for some) of costly, increasingly ineffective legacy operations, and media has its own lethal financial squeeze in the making. No way will new digital revenues ramp to replace traditional revenues as rapidly as they are deteriorating. A weakening economy has made advertisers and consumers more conservative about spending money.
Not a pretty picture. I highlight many of these trends in my ongoing Media Metrics series.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its latest “State of the News Media” (SOTNM) report. As a journalism junkie and a student of information history, I always look forward to these reports, especially because they are jam-packed full of very useful information and statistics about the health of various media sectors, something I have spent a lot of time discussing here in my ongoing “Media Metrics” series of essays.
This year’s SOTNM report contains some conclusions that are sure to provoke controversy and criticism. I thought I would just mention the one conclusion that is sure to be the most controversial. Namely, the report concludes (this is from the Executive Summary):
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. [p. 1]
[…]
The prospects for user-created content, once thought possibly central to the next era of journalism, for now appear more limited, even among “citizen” sites and blogs. News people report the most promising parts of citizen input currently are new ideas, sources, comments and to some extent pictures and video. But citizens posting news content has proved less valuable, with too little that is new or verifiable. … The array of citizen-produced news and blog sites is reaching a meaningful level. But a study of citizen media contained in this report finds most of these sites do not let outsiders do more than comment on the site’s own material, the same as most traditional news sites. Few allow the posting of news, information, community events or even letters to the editors. And blog sites are even more restricted. In short, rather than rejecting the “gatekeeper” role of traditional journalism, for now citizen journalists and bloggers appear for now to be recreating it in other places. [p. 3]
I suppose my fundamental problem with this conclusion is that it is simply too early to be making sweeping conclusions about the impact of user-generated media and Web 2.0 reporting on the overall health of the news media.
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There are some wonderful stats in this new IDC white paper “The Diverse & Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011.” For example:
The IDC research shows that the digital universe—information that is either created, captured, or replicated in digital form — was 281 exabytes in 2007. In 2011, the amount of digital information produced in the year should equal nearly 1,800 exabytes, or 10 times that produced in 2006. The compound annual growth rate between now and 2011 is expected to be almost 60%. The size of the digital universe in 2007 (and 2006) is bigger by 10% than we calculated last year, and the growth is slightly higher. This is a factor of faster-than-expected growth in higher resolution digital cameras, surveillance cameras — especially in places like China and major urban centers — and digital TVs and of improved methodology for estimating replication.
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