The Future of News and All That
Television news viewership is down across the board -- but YouTube is more popular than ever. Newspaper readership is way up -- online -- but newspaper company earnings are down and the financials are challenging. The online news audience has plateaued, even though broadband connections are increasing. W hat is going on here? The Project for Excellence in Journalism has published its fourth annual report on American journalism and the big question it seems to ask is, "Where is everybody?" The Web story is over as the driving force for digital news. Sites have already become repositories rather than destinations, warehouses instead of storefronts. It may not be terribly obvious yet but they are going somewhere, for sure. There is no reason to believe that there is a diminished appetite for news, however currently defined. Is it just a matter of coming up with ways of measuring user experiences with mobile phones, RSS feeds, downloads and pirated & "lent" content...