Journalism Moves From Product To Service

The Editor and a Reporter. Photograph by Vin Crosbie.

During most of the 20th century, public relations and communications professionals built relationships with journalists with the goal of placing a story in a newspaper, magazine, or on television or radio. Early in the 21st century, there’s much less courting.

Media relations remains important for PR and communications professionals. But with fewer journalists, shrinking newspapers and dwindling audiences, how journalists do their job is changing.

“Journalism, in the broadest sense, has changed today from being a product to being a service,” said Amy S. Mitchell, the deputy director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. ”It has changed from a product that I’m going to give you — here’s what we’ve produced, take it for what it’s worth — to being a service, to serving many more roles that just reporting the news.”

Mitchell spoke at the annual joint meeting of the Community Service Public Relations Council, the International Association of Business Communicators and the Public Relations Society of America on Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2011, in Frontenac, Mo.

Reporting the news is a “critical role, a crucial role,” Mitchell said. “The journalism of today must do more. Journalists today must understand their different audiences — the audiences that are going to find them through search, the audiences that turn to them every day, the audiences that are going to help contribute to their reporting.

“They need to understand different platforms to so their content is not platform-agnostic. Many people were talking about this three or four years ago and said your content could flow freely and seamlessly from one platform to another without really having it matter if it’s on your iPhone, website or in a print product. But that’s not what you want to do.  You need to make your information platform-specific. Consumers understand the difference and the different values that each platform brings. As news providers, we need to understand that difference and put information out that is built to work in that particular platform. And, yes, that means more work.”

Journalists interviewing people. Photo by Kewei Shang.

Instead of producing content for consumption by the masses, journalists must now spend more time on analyzing the value of the information they are gathering. Mitchell’s research found that the vast majority of news that’s consumed is coming from traditional news outlets.

“We’ve done a lot of different research projects that look at how news is being created and how it is getting out to people,” she said. “We tried to examine a news ecosystem and picked one city to study.”

They chose Baltimore and examined more than 60 media outlets covering the metropolitan area in some capacity. All content produced was studied during a period of a few weeks. They tracked stories to see where the content or information was first created.

“More than 90 percent of what was originally reported was coming from legacy outlets–local television, radio and newspapers,” Mitchell said. “There were a lot of other outlets that were involved in the conversation, discussion and analysis. But the actual reporting of information was coming from the legacy outlets. But those outlets are giving us information at greatly diminished capacity.”

News Consumers Are Grazers; Social Media Might Influence The Menu

Photo by Shavar Ross

People are still reading, watching and listening to news in the United States, but the way they consume news is changing. And 2011 might be the year that social media significantly influences news consumption.

Those were some highlights from a presentation by Amy S. Mitchell, the deputy director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. She spoke at the annual joint meeting of the Community Service Public Relations Council, the International Association of Business Communicators and the Public Relations Society of America on Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2011, in Frontenac, Mo.

Marketing and communications professionals must always be aware of the media landscape. Communicating through mass media is a fundamental strategy for most organizational communications plans. The Pew research shed light on shrinking newsrooms, budgets and revenues. It also provided a somewhat contradictory profile of a news consumer.

Consumption Continues

Mitchell said the average person spends 70 minutes per day consuming news. That’s an increase compared to a decade ago. They spend 57 minutes per day with radio, televisions and newspapers–the same as 10 years ago. However, consumers are spending another 13 minutes per day getting news on the web.

Photo by PennState Live

“People are not abandoning the old forms,” Mitchell said. “About 92 percent use multiple platforms – sometimes four to six platforms – on a daily basis.”

Online consumption is growing rapidly and is now closing in on television as the place people go for national and international news. Mitchell said the news consumer of today is a “news grazer.” They check the news several times per day in multiple places. The average time spent on an Internet news website is two minutes, 30 seconds–down from more than three minutes last year.

“One way to think about the traditional form of news consumption is a lean-back experience,” Mitchell said. “News today is very much a lean-in experience. Consumers know the information they want and they’re going to go find it. It’s a very different way of processing and accessing information.”

People are checking their social networks to see what their friends are reading and talking about. Mitchell said 62 percent of Internet news consumers use social networks like Facebook. Seventy-seven percent of social network users say they get their news there. Facebook is the third-highest referring site to news websites.

“This is a critical development for news providers,” Mitchell said. “What began as a pass-along effect is now evolving into a way of starting news consumption. People are asking friends and turning to friends for what news they should care about. Facebook is their trusted circle of friends — their search universe — to create their news diet.”

Amazingly Negative Numbers

Mitchell shared some startlingly negative financial information for legacy media, especially the newspaper industry:

• Newspaper revenue declined 41 percent in the last two years. “Financial analysts say half of the losses are because of the economic downturn, the other half are structural,” such as the loss of classified advertising revenue, Mitchell said. “And those dollars are not going to return. Audiences have moved online, but advertising revenues have not.”
• CNN experienced a 36-percent decline in prime-time audience.
• The rate of online advertising fell 48 percent last year. “Online ads cost a fraction of what they cost in a legacy media product,” Mitchell said. “There’s too much space online and it’s hard to find enough advertising to fill it. You can’t ramp up dollar value if you have too much to sell.”
• Approximately $1.6 billion has been lost in annual newspaper newsroom budgets since 2000. “That’s a tremendous amount of loss,” Mitchell said. “More than half of the newspapers in America no longer have a staffer in Washington, D.C. The person who is watching your Congressman or Senator may well be a wire service reporter or someone else.”

There was some good news. Political advertising revenue provided a boost for nearly all media sectors. And newspapers cannot abandon their print products because they are still producing a significant amount of revenue.

Tomorrow: Another post with Mitchell’s perspective on the evolution of journalism.

Podcast Previews Jan. 19 Presentation By Deputy Director of Pew Research Center

Amy S. Mitchell, the deputy director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, will be the speaker at the annual joint meeting of the Community Service Public Relations Council (CPSRC), Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) on Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2011.

She took a few minutes from her schedule on Tuesday to talk about her presentation entitled, ““The New News Consumer and the Future of News: Trends for 2011 and Beyond.”

Click on the link below to listen to the MP3 file or right click on the link to download.

Amy Mitchell Interview.mp3

Research Might Give Glimpse Of Mass Media’s Future

Amy S. Mitchell, deputy director, Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism

Communicating through mass media is essential to a nonprofit organization. But media is undergoing a tremendous transformation. Advertising revenues continue to decrease in the traditional channels. Newsrooms eliminated reporters and editors. It would be difficult to find a media outlet that is operating at a higher capacity than it was 10 years ago.

“The New News Consumer and the Future of News: Trends for 2011 and Beyond,” will be the topic for the annual joint meeting of the Community Service Public Relations Council (CSPRC), the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). Amy S. Mitchell, the deputy director for the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, will be our guest. Join us!

When: Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2011; registration and networking will be 11:30 a.m. to noon; program will be from noon to 1:15 p.m.
Where: Hilton St. Louis Frontenac, 1335 South Lindbergh Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63131
Cost: $30 for members, $35 nonmembers and $20 for students

Click Here To Register Through CSPRC

Ms. Mitchell is involved in all aspects of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Her primary focus is on designing and managing in-depth research reports including the Annual Report on the State of the News Media. She speaks regularly with outside groups on the changing face of journalism and consumer news habits. One of the most telling sentences in the report: “Unless some system of financing the production of content is developed, it is difficult to see how reportorial journalism will not continue to shrink, regardless of the potential tools offered by technology.”

The event annually attracts more than 100 marketing, communications and public relations professionals from across the region. Sponsorships for this event are available. Contact me for information on sponsorship levels and benefits.