The sixth annual State of the News Media report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, published in March 2009, opened by calling itself the bleakest of the series. Its charge was blunt: journalism, “deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology”, had let outsiders take chance after chance online, and by the time the business got serious in 2008 the global recession had made the work harder.
Two pressures had arrived together. The number of people going online for news accelerated substantially during 2008, but much of that traffic went to traditional news destinations where “the financial impact of that was a negative one”. At the same time the collapsing economy “hammered advertising and diverted attention away from innovating new revenue sources”. The result was a business facing a growing online audience and an obvious need to invest in digital platforms with less time and fewer resources to do either.
The report’s own diagnosis was narrower than the mood around it. The difficulty facing American journalism, it argued, was “not fundamentally an audience problem or a credibility problem”, but a revenue problem — the decoupling of advertising from news. Audiences had changed how they behaved, hunting and gathering what they wanted when they wanted it and passing on what they found through social networks. On the widely predicted collapse it was careful: “the death of newspapers is not imminent, despite news of bankruptcies and even some closures.” What had shortened was the time available to fund online newsgathering out of the declining revenue of the old platforms.