Can Digital Journalism Bridge the News Gap?
Declining Numbers for Newspapers Put Online News in the Spotlight
Oct 27, 2009
How to "save" newspapers, news coverage, and even journalism itself, continues to be a fast-developing story in 2009. As newspapers fail, or transition to digital, as more online-only news start-ups emerge, and as both the "old media"and the new struggle to maintain and develop a successful business model, the story has only become more intense and interesting.
Commentators and industry observers based in both the legacy and new media camps can find agreement in the basic facts, summed up by Rick Edmonds at the Poynter Institute this way: "Nearly everyone agrees now on the basic narrative....Old media – newspapers especially – are contracting drastically. . .On the other hand, alternative digital startups are exploding, and may in time plug much of the gap."
But just exactly how the future will unfold, and what should be done to support journalistic enterprises –whether old/new, digital/print/broadcast, or a hybrid product combining "platforms" (another way to say "news delivery systems") is still very much debated.
Knight Commission, Downie-Schudson Report Make News About the News Business
Individuals, commissions and committees are busy re-considering the role of journalism in society. Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism told Congress in late September that more aspects of civic life in America are going unccovered by journalists. He told the Joint Economic Committee what every newspaper subscriber has learned – the loss of journalism jobs adds up to diminished news coverage.
A week later, October 2nd, the Knight Commission, calling for universal broadband access and 14 other recommendations for "Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age," was released. Although the Commission declined to prescribe strategies for saving newspapers, it did identify "professional journalism as essential" to healthy communities.
This was followed by release in mid-October of Columbia University's much-discussed Downie-Schudson Report, known formally as "The Restructuring of American Journalism." It "proposes steps for maintaining a vibrant, independent press, with special emphasis on local 'accountability' journalism,"
Capping all the discussion, October will close with the worst-ever statistics of declining newspaper circulation (released Monday, Oct. 26) and advertisitng revenue (expected Oct. 31).
Another Telling Number: A $1.6 Billion News Deficit
Amid all the grim statistics Poynter's Edmonds offers a new one: the shrinkage of newspaper coverage, he said, has created a $1.6 billion news deficit. That is the amount by which newspapers have reduced their annual spending on the newsroom, Edmonds calculated.
In order to quantify the loss of journalism from the down-sizing and staff-cutting in the industry's newsrooms, Edmonds determined to discover a dollar amount for that loss, and then compare that amount to what is being spent on some of the best new digital startups. What would it take for the best online news sites, he asked, to match what newspapers had been investing in their news product?
When Will Digital News Fill the News Coverage Gap?
Edmonds found that the online news ecosystem has a long way to go to "plug the gap." Using two well-known digital start-ups – MinnPost and Voice of San Diego – as models, Edmonds noted that "both operate on a total budget of little more than $1 million a year. . . It would take roughly 1,600 MinnPosts or Voice of San Diegos to replace the spending on journalism newspapers have cut," he concluded.
All of Edmonds figures and his rationale for assigning the values he used to come up with his discovery of the $1.6 billion news deficit are at Poynter Online in his column, The Biz Blog. In essence, Edmonds says that through 2006 newspapers were a $60 billion industry, which will have fallen to a $37 billion industry by the beginning of 2010. He calculates 12% of that total is spent by the industry on its newsrooms.
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