Opinion - News Analysis

The Changing Newsroom

“Newspapers are still far from dead, but the language of the obituary is creeping in. The industry has been in declining health for some time now. It got sicker rather than better in 2007, and 2008 offers no prospect of a quick cure. It’s negative for circulation and advertising revenues, newspaper company stocks, but positive in terms of a growing online audience and revenues.” So says a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (U.S.).

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism is a research organisation that specialises in using empirical methods to evaluate and study the performance of the press. It is non-partisan, non-ideological and non-political. The Project has put special emphasis on content analysis in the belief that quantifying what is occurring in the press, rather than merely offering criticism and analysis, is a better approach to understanding. It is a part of the Pew Research Center in Washington DC.

There is a special report on the future of advertising, a survey of journalists, and a new comprehensive study of the content of the press. The survey, carried out in the first quarter of 2008 and published on July 21, 2008, was based on two primary sources of information — face-to-face interviews with editors and other newsroom executives at 15 daily newspapers across the United States and the responses to a 43-question survey, administered by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI) and sent to the editors of 1,217 daily newspapers. It concludes that the state of the American news media in 2008 is more troubled than a year ago.

The trends are:

1. News is shifting from being a product — today’s newspaper, web site, or newscast — to becoming a service. There is no single or finished news product anymore.

2. A news organisation and a news web site are no longer final destinations. Now they must move toward also being stops along the way, gateways to other places, all ideas that connect to service rather than product. “The walled garden is over,” the editor of one of the most popular news sites in the country said.

3. The prospects for user-created content, once thought possibly central to the next era of journalism, appear more limited for now. News people report that the most promising parts of citizen input currently are new ideas, sources, comments, and to some extent pictures and video.

4. Increasingly, the newsroom is perceived as the more innovative and experimental part of the news industry. This appears truer in newspapers and web sites than elsewhere.

5. The agenda of the American news media continues to narrow, not broaden. The study, the authors believe, is unique in depth and scope, breaks the news industry into eight sectors (newspapers, magazines, network, cable and local television, the Internet, radio, and ethnic media).

What follows is: a look at the changing newsroom, a chapter in the study:

“The Changing Newsroom” (July 21, 2008)

Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008. It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialised subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.

The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.

Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years.

This description is a composite. It is based on face-to-face interviews conducted at newspapers across the country and the results of a detailed survey of senior newsroom executives. In total, more than 250 newspapers participated. It is, we believe, the most systematic effort yet to examine the changing nature of the resources in American newspaper newsrooms at a critical time. It is an attempt to document and quantify cutbacks and innovations that have generally been known only anecdotally ….

(To be continued)

Published with permission from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), a project of the Pew Research Center, from its study “The Changing Newsroom”. The study was published on July 21, 2008. The article published here is excerpted from chapter I (pages 1-3) “The Changing Newsroom”. The website of the report is http://journalism.org/node/11961

The Readers’ Editor, K. Narayanan, is on vacation. His column will appear on his return.

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