Do newspapers still matter?
03/14/2011
People have been signing the death warrant for newspapers for decades. With the emergence of the internet and the titanic sinking of ad revenue, many newspapers in Florida and elsewhere are a shadow of their glorious past.
Now, iPads, smartphones, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms are not only redefining news but further dismantling the traditional advertising model.
And it may be one explanation for why Florida Gov. Rick Scott and other politicians feel less inclined to cater to news media.
A PEW research study released today titled - State of the News Media 2011 - finds a few glimmers of hope but only a few.
Below are a few excerpts. You can read the entire PEW study here.
In a media world where consumers decide what news they want to get and how they want to get it, the future will belong to those who understand the public's changing behavior and can target content and advertising to snugly fit the interests of each user. That knowledge -- and the expertise in gathering it -- increasingly resides with technology companies outside journalism.
In the 20th century, the news media thrived by being the intermediary others needed to reach customers. In the 21st, increasingly there is a new intermediary: Software programmers, content aggregators and device makers control access to the public. The news industry, late to adapt and culturally more tied to content creation than engineering, finds itself more a follower than a leader in shaping its business.
Meanwhile, the pace of change continues to accelerate. Mobile has already become an important factor in news. A new survey released with this year's report, produced with the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in association with the Knight Foundation, finds that nearly half of all Americans (47%) now get some form of local news on a mobile device. What they turn to most there is news that serves immediate needs -- weather, information about restaurants and other local businesses, and traffic. And the move to mobile is only likely to grow. By January 2011, 7% of Americans reported owning some kind of electronic tablet. That was nearly double the number just four months earlier.
For the first time, too, more people said they got news from the web than newspapers.
Financially the tipping point also has come. When the final tally is in, online ad revenue in 2010 is projected to surpass print newspaper ad revenue for the first time. The problem for news is that by far the largest share of that online ad revenue goes to non-news sources, particularly to aggregators.
All things in their being are good for something.
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