New Report on Media Outlines “7 Trends in Old and New Media”
Monday, November 23, 2015
SEE TREND SLIDES BELOW
As an example, since GoLocalWorcester launched approximately three years ago, the Worcester Telegram has had four different owners and cut more than 100 from its newsroom.
The seven trends outlined in the comprehensive report by Senior Fellow Elaine Kamarck and Senior Researcher Ashley Gabriele unveil important insights into how consumers now gets their news and how seriously the rapid changes are impacting everything from radio news to digital businesses.
Network TV and Radio News are Losing Audience Rapidly
The data from Brookings reinforces what everyone already know that the newspapers are in dramatic decline. One data point unveiled in the report is that the number of daily newspapers have decreased by over 75% — from 1,800 to 400 in the past 50 years.
“Americans today are more educated than they were in the past, but the decline in readership has occurred at every educational level including the most educated,” find the report.
“Fewer people today receive a newspaper than in years past, even though the population has grown in the last seventy years. That’s why the graph below, using data from the Newspaper Association of America, is so interesting. When adjusting for population growth and recalculating newspaper circulation per capita, the full extent of the decline becomes apparent. In the 1940s, somewhere over one third of Americans received a daily newspaper. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, readership was down by about half to less than 15 percent.
Radio which had been such an important source of news for many Americans is now just a tiny news source.
“The number of all-news radio stations devoted entirely to news coverage informs a meager one percent of radio listeners. So although Americans still turn on the radio during drive-time, they are opting for non-news radio, Internet radio, podcasts, and talk radio.”
The second largest radio group in the country — Cumulus — who owns WXLO, The Pike + WORC FM in the Worcester market, has seen its stock drop from over $4.50 per share to less than $0.20 — a 95% loss in value.
Network TV News
Once upon a time, the network news anchors were the best known and often the most respected in the country, but today their audiences have declined dramatically in every age segment, “These days most people don’t even know who the news anchors are and the addition of overtly partisan networks like Fox and MSNBC has made the news as polarized as the country.”
As GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™ Rob Horowitz cited in a September of 2015 column, "As the survey report notes, “When it comes specifically to news and information about government and politics, Facebook users are more likely to post and respond to content, while Twitter users are more likely to follow news organizations.” About one-third of Facebook users (32%) say they post about government and politics on Facebook, and 28% comment on these types of posts” Additionally, Facebook users are highly engaged with the site; 7-in-10 of them access it at least once a day and nearly half of users do so several times a day."
“Facebook is virtually tied with local television among “web users” when asked where they get their news about government and politics. In other words—news is still getting to people, just not through the
traditional means. Millennials aren’t necessarily less avid news consumers than generations past, but their news preferences and sources have shifted,” find Brokkings.
Is this Good News or Bad News?
The dramatic changes in media behavior raises questions about the impact. Are consumers better or worse informed? Are they better at participating in a Democracy?
The researchers conclude, “The pessimists will focus on the decline in newspaper readership, network television, and the number of professionals collecting hard news as proof that there are serious consequences to citizen knowledge as a result of the internet revolution. The optimists will point out that news is reaching people in new and unexpected ways and that the absence of traditional “gatekeepers” with the biases that all humans have (no matter how much they try to be neutral) has broadened the landscape of knowledge and opinion to which the public is exposed—with positive effects for democracy. They will also point out that the new technology allows for a two-way engagement with the news in ways that the old never did. “
Media Trend Slides November 2015
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