The New State of the News Media Report is Here!
Iam not a big fan of the movie “The Jerk,” a movie that is even below my sophomoric taste in films (my wife JoAnna may be stunned to know that there ARE movies that fall below my acceptability bar). But I recently thought of the scene from “The Jerk” when the new phone books arrive and Steve Martin’s character, Navin R. Johnson, jumps up and down with delight and screams, “The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!” I have a similar reaction when the Project for Excellence in Journalism releases its State of the News Media Report. There was a little less spring in my step this year when I realized that much of the information about online media came out a bit earlier in Pew Internet’s Understanding the Participatory News Consumer, which I blogged about last week.
Still there is much new meat in this report to gnaw on for a couple of weeks. Perhaps the most pressing question news organizations have is how to create a viable business model as online media are surpassing print as a major source of news. Results from this study are not too promising:
*While 71 percent of Internet users get news online each day, most go on multiple sites. Only 35 percent of online news consumers have a favorite site, but those who do are faithful as 65 percent check in with it at least once a day.
*Even among the most loyal news consumers, only 19 percent said they would be willing to pay for news online. Instead, 82 percent of them with a favorite site would go elsewhere. This translates into 7 percent of the total online news population being willing to pay for content. Ouch! Online news loyalty is not quite the same as loyalty to your favorite sports team or pet. It is more like your loyalty to most consumer products, like toothpaste. On top of that, many readers (44 percent) don’t look at stories in depth,but just read the headline and summary without clicking on the full story.
*While 81 percent of online news users do not mind online advertising because it allows content to be free, they don’t actually pay attention to the ads with 42 percent say they never click on ads and 35 percent say hardly ever. The scores are higher for heavy users who go online for 9 or more topics, get news forwarded to them through email or social network site posts, or those who use at least 6 online news sources daily, but only 37 percent of these super news junkies click on advertising.
The PEJ is not terribly optimistic about the news media’s immediate future. They conclude: “For online news to become a profitable enterprise, either consumer attitudes need to change or the industry must do more. That more could be developing new better-targeted products that people are willing to pay for; new forms of advertising that work better, including local search; or new forms of revenue other than display advertising, including perhaps online retailing.”
I have long thought that pay walls are not the answer for online media. Some sites such as Wall Street Journal and ESPN can get away with charging consumers because they offer premium content people are willing to pay for. But people won’t pay for information they can get elsewhere for free. I have thought that the notion of an online mall where media link up with major retailers on a site offers some promise; our community newspaper and two television networks are part of a community portal, Everything Lubbock.com. This does raise troublesome issues about the division between news and local businesses, but I think in reality this makes existing ties more transparent.
I think Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine advances the best future model for online newspapers: “Cover what you do best and link to the rest.” This means that news organizations act as both news producers and conduits. They focus on a niche that they can cover well and then serve as a conduit to guide readers to the very best reporting on other sites. Huffington Post already does this well and is therefore one of the top 10 most popular news sites. What do you think? Will consumers pay for content? Is there a viable business model out there? I would love to hear from you.
At a newspaper summit in Iowa where newspaper owners tried in vain to find an economic model they could adopt and find that elusive sigh of relief, I came upon one answer to the print media’s problem while in a conversation with Bill Densmore.
Eventually news media will adopt a system such as music has with ASCAP and BMI. One organization would be the repository for content from a bunch of member news organizations. Each individual reader would pay an annual fee to this organization which would give us access to content from member newspapers or other media. Whenever we download a story from this a specific newspaper or media outlet, the organization would send a fee to that outlet.
So instead of individuals paying a number of media outlets for content, we just have to pay one and that company would distribute revenue to the content producers. With few willing to pay for online newspaper content, this idea seems the most realistic.