News organizations confronted with declining revenue and increased competition are entering an era of more limited ambition in which they will drop a broad worldview for more narrowly focused reporting, according to an annual review of the news business being released today by a watchdog group.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that the struggle to create sustainable media brands is driving "hyper-local" coverage in newspapers; encouraging citizen journalism on the Internet; and giving rise to opinion-driven television personalities like CNN's Lou Dobbs and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly.
"The consequences of this narrowing of focus involve more risk than we sense the business has considered," said the report from the project, an arm of the Washington-based Pew Research Center. "Concepts like hyper-localism, pursued in the most literal sense, can be marketing speak for simply doing less."
The review describes print, radio and television news operations as weathering "epochal" changes -- with audiences splintering so radically that is has become difficult to accurately measure new viewing and reading habits.
Daily newspaper circulation declined 3% in 2006, for instance, but the increase in online readership is more difficult to quantify. The three television networks collectively lost an additional 1 million viewers -- about the average in each of the last 25 years -- but YouTube and other online services created a new delivery vehicle for the networks' content.
Traditional newsrooms remain the primary source for information, and the report suggests that news organizations need to be more aggressive about mining revenue for their work. The old-line media may have to form consortiums to force Internet "aggregators," which compile content from other sources, to pay licensing fees for news and information, the report says.
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said that most news organizations would have to shrink their staffs but that much more thought needed to go into how the reductions are made.
"The current thinking, hyper-localism, seems problematic," he said in an e-mail response to a question. "In an era of globalism, how can you suggest that the L.A. or Boston market does not need its own specialized foreign reporting that informs the local economy, the local culture and more, in a way that is different than what generic wires would cover?"
