| Ho Hum, Print and TV News Decline Continues, Pew Advises |
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By: Doug Bedell |
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 The decline of print and TV journalism continues, and depressing as that is, there's lots to do to experience what's emerging in their place, most of it digital. It's not that we'll be without information, but it will be Internet-based information which, unless you use Google News or some other form of aggregator, means it will be fairly dispersed. Such is the Pew Center's continuing advisory on the changing "State of the News Media 2013."
In all, turning away from common, community- or nationally-based sources of information isn't a great thing. In last year's presidential campaigns, for instance, Pew notes that campaign news reporters "were acting primarily as megaphones, rather than as investigators, of the assertions put forward by the candidates and other political partisans." So who was listening to that for long, or with any great discernment?
"Estimates for newspaper newsroom cutbacks in 2012 put the industry down 30% since its peak in 2000 and below 40,000 full-time professional employees for the first time since 1978," Pew found. "In local TV...sports, weather and traffic now account on average for 40% of the content produced on the newscasts studied while story lengths shrink. On CNN, the cable channel that has branded itself around deep reporting, produced story packages were cut nearly in half from 2007 to 2012."
You want to be well-informed? You're increasingly on your own, baby. Happy surfing for what you're looking for, or need. Or maybe a subscription to whatever print media remainder satisfies you most.
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Doug Bedell has a background in journalism and PR and is the owner of Resource Relations LLC in Central PA, focusing on organizational and crisis communication. He’s the community manager of SimplyFair.net, a social network on fairness. On the Web, Doug’s at www.ResourceRelations.com. On Twitter, he’s @DougBeetle.
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