Phil Trupp

Newspaper Death Watch

The "State of the News Media 2008," issued annually by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, provides much nuance. Its research clearly indicates that consumers of news have different expectations of the press and want a changed product.

But more and more it appears that the biggest problem facing traditional media has less to do with where people get information than how they pay for it--the reality that advertising isn't migrating online with the consumer. According to the report, "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."

More effort keeps shifting toward "processing" information and away from original reporting. Fewer people are being asked to do more, and the era of reporters operating in the world of multimedia has arrived.

According to the report, pressure points vary by news sector--"In print, the problem is vanishing advertising, particularly classified." Were it not for that one sector, newspapers' problems would be comparatively modest.

The major trends outlined in the 2008 report include:

* News is shifting from being a product to becoming a service: how can you help me, even empower me?

* News organizations and news Web sites are no longer final destinations. Now they must move toward becoming gateways to other places, "and a means to drill deeper, all ideas that connect to service rather than product," according to the report's survey.

* The prospects for user-created content, once thought possibly central to the next era of journalism, appear to be more limited, even among "citizen" sites and blogs.

*The newsroom is perceived as the more innovative and experimental part of the news industry. "I think we may need to blow up the culture of the newsroom," said one of the country's most respected editors. But now the business side has begun to be seen as the most difficult problem area, the place where people are having the most difficulty changing. "Advertising doesn't know how to start to cope," said one trade association official.

* The agenda of the American news medium continues to narrow, not broaden. A comprehensive audit of coverage in 2007 revealed that the war in Iraq and the 2008 political campaign filled more than a quarter of the "newshole" and consumed much of the media's energies and resources. There was minimal coverage of events overseas, some involving U.S. blood and treasure.

* Madison Avenue, rather than pushing change, appears to be having trouble keeping up with it.

Much of the news audience appears to be shifting more and more to talk radio, which is almost 95 percent "conservative," Rush Limbaugh far and away leading the pack.

As for online news audiences, they too are growing. The most active online site is Yahoo, followed by MSNBC, CNN, AOL, New York Times, Gannett, ABC, Google News, USA Today, and CBS News.

And there's another trend worth considering: "Citizen New Sites." These are fast-growing Internet sites often staffed by reporters who once worked for local news outlets. A study of 15 markets found a total of 60 citizen news sites in Missouri, Ohio, and Michigan.

As for blogs, the number in 2007 doubled every 320 days. In that year, there were 70 million blogs. Unfortunately, I don't even the latest figures, but conservative estimates are that the number of blogs has doubled or tripled in the past two years.

Does this mean the end of newspapers are we know them? I doubt it. We will always need "papers of record," such as the New York Times. Papers of record serve as proven data pools and are widely used in industry and academe. There will be fewer such papers in the future, and advances in technology through sources such as Google may eventually be predominant. An indication of change may be deduced from the fact that many media professionals now call newspapers "the timber industry."