Guest Contributor
The new numbers released this week were bad enough for a newspaper industry that lost nearly 3% of its circulation in the last year. But when you factor in subscriber discounts, the economic picture gets worse. And the industry’s efforts to compensate for decreasing circulation with increasing online readership may not stand up to scrutiny.
Baseball's Fall Classic has not been a hit with TV viewers in recent years. In the last 20 years World Series ratings have fallen by more than 50% so that it now only averages one quarter of the audience of the Super Bowl. And through two games, the 2006 Series is the lowest-rated ever.
President Bush's second term has brought a big increase in the number of solo press conferences. Bush had only had 17 in his first term but looks like he's on the way to doubling that number in this four-year stint. The president still lags behind previous White House residents, but the change suggests a different approach to the press.
A media conference featuring a futuristic video and a keynote address from a BBC official sketched out a scenario for news delivery that may be just around the corner. But will the proliferation of citizen journalists and wireless news platforms create its own set of financial and credibility problems for the journalism profession?
Sandwiched between a declining print industry and an online universe still building economic momentum, newspaper companies are looking at combined Internet and newsprint readership as a new way of measuring audience. A big unanswered question is whether advertisers will agree that this is a more accurate way to count their potential customers.
A new book surveying more than 1,000 journalists finds their politics have drifted a bit to the right since the 1990s, but they still remain more liberal than the general US population. With a majority of the public accusing news outlets of political bias, these numbers aren’t likely to silence that noisy debate.
A newly released book based on four decades of surveys of US journalists finds a profession that is steadily growing grayer, but lagging behind when it comes to integrating women and minorities into the newsroom. This demographic stagnation may well be a reflection of a mainstream media beset by a series of economic woes.
Many of those in the blogosphere see themselves as watchdogs arrayed against an insular political establishment dominated by consultants, interests groups, and the mainstream media. But with bloggers taking an increasingly active role in some of the key 2006 political races, are they sacrificing that independence to become part of the system they decry?
Earlier this year, a research team led by a Harvard professor unveiled a strategy to help reverse the revenue and circulation ills of the newspaper industry and encourage it to reinvent itself. Some publications have reported early success in adopting the plan that asks readers: “What do you hire a newspaper to do for you?”
Despite all the problems plaguing the newspaper industry, a new survey reveals that 2005 was the best year since 1999 for college grads with a print journalism degree to land jobs in their field. Thanks to the economic health of local papers and the old media’s transition to cyberspace, a degree in journalism is still a pretty good ticket to a first paycheck.
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