It’s Unanimous. Traditional News is Dead.

The Pew Research Center published its Sixth Annual The State of the News Media report yesterday, and it’s not looking good for traditional media companies. Here are just a few recent obituaries:

• CNET NEWS, “From bad to worse: The state of the media in 2009″
• TIME, “The State of the Media: Not Good”
• Reuters UK, “The State of the news media? Not so hot”
• PRWeek, “Pew Study: Media facing continue ad crisis”
• BNET Media, “Study: News Business Suffered a Stroke, but Then… “

And of course, our strong favorite from Followthemedia.com, “Oh Pew”.

The operative word, however, is “traditional”. No surprises that this sector is dead. But how about this blurb from the introduction of the report:

“Perhaps least noticed yet most important, the audience migration to the Internet is now accelerating. The number of Americans who regularly go online for news, by one survey, jumped 19% in the last two years; in 2008 alone traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27%. Yet it is now all but settled that advertising revenue—the model that financed journalism for the last century—will be inadequate to do so in this one. Growing by a third annually just two years ago, online ad revenue to news websites now appears to be flattening; in newspapers it is declining.”

They don’t make headlines but here are some of the facts we like:

• National and International News Destination
  • The Web surpassed all other media sources, except television.
• Percentage of Americans regularly relying on Internet for news
  • Close to the percentage who regularly watched cable television for news (39%).
• Percentage of adult users indicating their “most important” info source
  • Internet – 79%
  • Television – 68%
  • Newspapers 60%

 

• Increase in mobile viewing, sharing on social networks and video sites, and postings on a multitude of microblogs
  • Earlier tools like e-mail and RSS remained popular, but not growing as quickly. By compiling, sharing and customizing the news they consume, people in a sense are becoming not only their own editors, but also critical agents in the trajectory of a news story.

 And some statistics we love:

          Projected Growth for Online Advertising Spending, by Category Dollars

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Filed Under Internet Trends & Drivers