By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

In 2008, the news agenda in the mainstream media shrank sharply, the press was late in picking up on the economic collapse and the war in Iraq all but disappeared from the news.

A year earlier, two stories—the Iraq war and the early days of the presidential campaign—accounted for more than a quarter of all the news coverage studied by PEJ, crowding out many other stories. That raised the question of whether these were such important stories that they demanded that level of coverage,  or whether the fragmenting media culture tended, perhaps paradoxically, to focus on a limited number of stories.

If the news agenda was narrow in 2007, it constricted considerably more in 2008. The two top events—a dramatic and precedent-setting election and a metastasizing economic crisis—filled half the total newshole studied, almost double the amount of the top two stories a year earlier, and leaving little room for much else.

To put that in perspective, in 2008 coverage of almost every topic other than politics and economics shrank. On the domestic side, that translated into diminished coverage of crime, health and medicine, disasters, and immigration as well as softer subjects such as celebrities and lifestyle. Overseas, attention to Iraq, the leading newsmaker in 2007, fell by about three-quarters. Coverage of other hot spots crucial to U.S. interests, most notably Iran and Pakistan, dropped as well—about 75% in the case of Iran and 40% with Pakistan.

Top 3 Stories: 2008 vs. 2007

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Source: PEJ, A Year in the News, 2008 Note: Election includes stories about the campaign, results, and the transition U.S. Economy includes stories about the financial crisis, economic numbers, gas/oil prices, auto industry, and Freddie/Fannie Iraq War includes stories about Iraq policy debate, events in Iraq, and Iraq homefront

A year ago in this report, the first in which we had such a comprehensive content study of the news media—some 70,000 stories—we were struck by the narrowness of the media agenda. More outlets seemed to have resulted not in coverage of more things, but more coverage of a few things. That pattern seemed to intensify in 2008. For much of the year, every story other than the election and the economic crisis was essentially a distraction.

We cannot know for certain how much of that reflected the unusual nature of news in 2008, with a historic presidential election and a profound economic crisis. But while those extraordinary events help explain the lopsided coverage, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the narrowness of the media lens is a more systemic issue, a function of some of the realities—including economic ones—in today’s news industry.

These are some of the findings of A Year in the News, a detailed examination of the content of 48 news outlets over the 12 months. Those 70,000 stories include 2,200 hours of network and cable television, 7,350 front-page newspaper stories, 600 hours of radio, and 6,500 online stories.

Among other findings:

• The presidential election—which included coverage of the campaign itself, analysis of the results, and the transition to an Obama administration — accounted for more than one-third of all the newshole studied by PEJ in 2008. That is more than twice the coverage Iraq generated as the No. 1 story in 2007. Nowhere was the fixation on the subject most obvious than on prime-time cable news, which by year’s end had filled virtually two-thirds of the time studied with coverage and commentary on the election.

• One major casualty of the focus on the election was coverage of international events, which fell by about 40% in 2008. Attention to Iraq, the top story of 2007, plunged by more than 75%. But that was not the only international story to fall below the media’s gaze in 2008. Consider that the two-week long Beijing Olympics generated more media scrutiny than such datelines as Afghanistan, where more U.S. troops died in 2008 than in any year since the war began, Pakistan and Iran. On the domestic side, fascination with the election contributed to sharply reduced coverage of topics such as government, crime and immigration.

• The financial crisis—a complex and multilayered story—proved a difficult one for the media to track. Journalists were slow to pick up on the broader implications of what emerged as a housing markets crunch in late 2007. Even though coverage intensified somewhat in early 2008, the press again drifted away from the economic story in the days just before the big September collapse. But after Lehman Brothers failed, coverage exploded, filling about a quarter of the newshole (26%) during the last three months of the year. The roller coaster trajectory of coverage in 2008 reflected press problems in anticipating the meltdown and its proclivity to frantically “flood the zone” once the dimensions of the crisis became obvious.

• Though the presidential election and unfolding economic crisis certainly were major events, the narrowness of the year’s news agenda also strikes us as a function of the current state and characteristics of the news industry. Shrinking reporting resources, a diminishing commitment to overseas coverage, a debate-driven cable and radio talk culture that amplifies the biggest story or two, and a lack of follow-up coverage in a faster-moving media culture all appeared to conspire to help create the very top-heavy news menu in 2008. Even with the election behind us, there may not be much reason to believe that basic pattern will change in the foreseeable future.

• In another indication of how the election dominated the news agenda, 12 out of the top 20 leading newsmakers in 2008 were connected in some way to the presidential election. But not all politicians enjoyed their media scrutiny in 2008. Three of the top 20 newsmaking public officials ran afoul of the law and two of those cases—involving former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich— also ended up among the top crime-related stories of the year.

Top Broad Topics: Media Over All

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Source: PEJ, A Year in the News, 2008

The 800-pound gorilla: The 2008 Presidential Election

The degree to which the American news media seized on a campaign that generated intense public interest is almost hard to conceive. The election had already become the No.  2 media story as far back as February 2007, and was the second-biggest story for that year—making the early level of coverage unprecedented by any calculation.

But in 2008, as voters finally participated in primaries and caucuses, the campaign morphed into something altogether different. It will be instructive to monitor whether we will see a single story of that magnitude again in the foreseeable future.

But in 2008, as voters finally participated in primaries and caucuses, the campaign morphed into something altogether different. It will be instructive to monitor whether we will see a single story of that magnitude again in the foreseeable future.

Top 3 Stories: Coverage Over Time

2008

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Election includes stories about the campaign, results, and the transition. U.S. Economy includes stories about the financial crisis, economic issues, gas/oil prices, auto industry, and Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae. Iraq War includes stories about Iraq policy debate, events in Iraq, and the impact of the war in the U.S.

The No. 3 story in 2008, the war in Iraq.

• Of the 15 biggest stories week-by-week in 2008, the campaign accounted for 14 of them. (The financial crisis was the other No. 1 story during the week the $700 billion bailout was passed in Congress.)
• In the two years that PEJ has produced the Index, only one other story that was not about the election or economy — the horrific massacre on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007 —accounted for more than 40% of a weekly newshole. Last year, the campaign accounted for more than 40% of a week’s news coverage 14 times. And in eight of those weeks, it represented at least 50% of all the news coverage examined.
• Even during the so-called summer doldrums—the period between the end of the Democratic primary fight and the nominating conventions, when Americans traditionally head out on vacation—the election was still dominant. In that period, it generated almost three times the coverage of the No. 2 story, the sputtering economy

Election Coverage Varied by Media Sector

The election was the top story in every media platform studied, but it in some cases it was thoroughly overwhelming. In only one media platform — newspaper front pages — did the story account for less than a quarter of the coverage, at 23%. In network television news, the race for the White House constituted almost one-third of all the news coverage, and on radio, it was more than two-fifths.

Election Coverage by Media Sector

2008

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Source: PEJ, A Year in the News, 2008

But no sector came close to equaling the cable television news networks’ relentless attention to the story. In a year in which ratings for all three major cable news outlets—Fox News, CNN and MSNBC—jumped substantially, much of that can be attributed to the 59% of their airtime that was devoted to the presidential election. And that number rises further—to 65% of the newshole—in prime time.

Those statistics raise a question: to what extent was cable covering the election versus exploiting it. The answer is probably subjective, but the measure might be how much of the time was used to offer new information as opposed to rehashing the same material because it was good for ratings.

With such a one-note news agenda, it follows that cable news channels devoted less coverage to the economy and the war in Iraq than any of the other four major media platforms.¹

The economy finally emerges as a major story

In 2008, as the U.S. economy collapsed and raised fears of a depression, it proved to be a difficult story for the press to get a handle on, a complex saga that unfolded in fits and starts and was often difficult to detect and measure in real time. That dynamic changed in the last quarter of the year, when Wall Street firms collapsed, banks failed, unemployment ballooned and officials in Washington tried to stop the bleeding with a massive financial transfusion. At that point, the dimensions of the crisis had become clear in the media narrative. (See PEJ Study on Economic coverage in the news)

For all of last year, the financial story, which included everything from energy costs and the troubled auto industry to the Wall Street bailout, accounted for 15% of the over all newshole. To provide some context, that is almost as much coverage as the Iraq war generated in 2007 (16%) and is about six times more coverage than the economy generated in 2007.

But much of that came in the last three months of the year. Although serious problems in the U.S. economy, particularly in the housing market, began to emerge in the second half of 2007, the news media were sporadic in their attention and late to connect the dots. After an initial spike in coverage in August 2007, for instance (to 5% of the newshole up from 1% in July), when the housing crisis became evident, coverage dropped again by about half over the next few months. Even in November and December 2007, when rising energy costs became a significant issue, coverage remained no more than 5% of the over all newshole.

Economy Coverage Over Time

2007 through 2008

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Source: PEJ, A Year in the News, 2008 *Includes stories about the financial crisis, economic issues, gas/oil prices, auto industry, and Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae.

Then, in 2008, coverage bumped up and down, and  it can be broken into several distinct phases that varied in both subject matter and intensity. In the first quarter of the year, the economic news grew on fears of recession, filling 9% of the newshole and emerging as the second-biggest story behind the election.²

It remained at that level (8%) in through June, but the focus shifted again, from recession fears toward an easier subject with plenty of media-friendly visuals. In the second quarter rising energy prices and “pain at the pump” accounted for nearly half—47%—of all economic news. The looming banking crisis, fueled by the collapsing housing market, was far less visible. In August, the month before the crisis emerged fully blown, only 5% of the newshole focused on the economy, down from 11% in June.

Then on Sept. 15, the prestigious investment firm Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and within days, members of Congress and the Bush administration were frantically trying to cobble together what became a $700 billion bailout package. Suddenly, fears of a recession gave way to talk of the most significant financial meltdown since the Great Depression.

For the next four weeks, from September 15 to October 12, the full-blown economic crisis dominated the news, filling more than 40% of all the coverage examined by PEJ, more than the campaign now nearing the finish line (35%).

Then from mid-October until the end of the year, the economy story fell back somewhat, accounting for almost one-quarter of the over all news studied.

In all this, one longstanding pattern in the coverage continued even late in the year. The focus frequently shifted among different aspects of the crisis. In late September and early October, the politics of the Washington bailout bill was the dominant narrative. For the next few weeks, the wild fluctuations and decline of the stock market generated more attention that any other aspect. Then in mid-November, coverage coalesced around the fate of the troubled American auto industry. And by December, some of the focus moved from Wall Street to Main Street as storylines such as unemployment numbers became more prominent.

Were the media a day late and a couple of trillion dollars short?

There is no doubt that the job of covering the trajectory of the economic collapse in 2008 presented some great challenges for journalists. Certainly, many economists and government officials—people better equipped to understand the financial system than the vast majority of journalists—were caught off guard by the magnitude of the crisis and did not ring the warning bells that might have triggered quicker media attention.  Logistically, coverage of the financial sector is complicated by the fact that earnings reports and government data lag behind real-time events. That often leaves press accounts out of sync with what is happening on the ground.

But even with those factors taken into consideration, coverage of the run-up to the September meltdown will not go down as one of the media’s finer moments. (The previous most recent challenge to the media might be journalism’s failure to scrutinize carefully enough the claims that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq war.) By and large, the press as an institution failed to function as an early warning system for what is now being called the biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression.

That can be attributed, in part at least, to the media’s overarching preoccupation with the presidential election. Yet other factors strike us as also being in play. Journalists may have failed to have their ears close enough to the ground, relying instead on official pronouncements about the state of the economy rather than on the economic realities facing the storeowner, the homeowner and the breadwinner. And cutbacks in newsrooms may accentuate all this by reducing the number of specialists who are expert in financial reporting.

Public interest in the economic story—as tracked by a series of surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press—consistently outstripped media attention the story in late 2007 and in the early part of last year. For months, the average citizen seemed more attuned to the rumblings underneath the financial landscape than the journalists.³

Hindsight is 20/20, but economic journalists themselves seem to be aware of their shortcomings last year.  According to a January 2009 survey conducted by the media consulting firm of Abrams Research, a solid majority of financial journalists who were polled (68%) were critical of the media’s performance on the economy, feeling that the press failed to recognize the magnitude of the story in the run-up to the crisis.⁴

“Lots of people saw the various pieces of the crisis just fine; it was predicting the way that events unfolded that made everyone, including journalists, look foolish,” one business reporter lamented. ⁵

The Iraq war virtually disappears

In a year in which the election and the economy consumed half the over all newshole, which stories lost out in the competition for press attention?

The most glaring example is the Iraq war. In 2008, the Iraq conflict generated about a quarter of the coverage it received the previous year—falling to 4% of the newshole from 16% in 2007. In only one media sector, newspapers, which devoted 6% of their front-page coverage to the conflict, did the Iraq war constitute more than 5% of the over all news coverage studied in 2008.

Several components of the over all Iraq story saw huge decreases in coverage—a reflection, to some extent, of changing conditions both inside Iraq and domestically. With sectarian violence and U.S. casualties down significantly (U.S. military deaths in Iraq dropped to 314 in 2008 from 904 in 2007), coverage of events on the ground in Iraq dropped by two-thirds (to 2% from 6%).

Even larger was the drop-off in press attention to the Washington-based debate over war policy and strategy—to 1% from 8% the previous year. Some of that decrease can be attributed to the fact that the war, both as a subject in the presidential campaign and as a point of conflict between the Congress and White House, diminished significantly as an issue.

Iraq War Coverage Over Time

2007 through 2008

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Source: PEJ, A Year in the News, 2008 * Includes stories about Iraq policy debate, events in Iraq, and the impact of the war in the U.S.

In 2007, the battle for control over war funding and withdrawal timetables between President George Bush and the new Democratic-controlled Congress raged for months. In 2008, it was clear that the White House would control Iraq policy until the end of Bush’s term. The war—once expected to be the burning issue in the presidential campaign—receded sharply as the economy supplanted it in polls about public concerns. Indeed, the candidates’ debate over Iraq policy accounted for only 1% of all coverage of the presidential campaign compared with 3% for the economy.

Even these numbers are somewhat misleading because the numbers were much lower for much of the year. A single event, General David Petraeus’ trip to Capitol Hill in April to testify on the war, accounted for 19% of all the Iraq policy coverage in 2008. That eagerly awaited appearance before a largely skeptical Congress was certainly newsworthy. But the amount of coverage it generated—combined with the significant drop in coverage of the situation inside Iraq—is an illustration of how much easier it is for the media to jump on a Washington-based wartime topic than to convey the facts and factions on the ground in a conflict thousands of miles away.  By year’s end, the three television broadcast networks with news programs had closed their expensive bureaus in Baghdad.

There are a number of reasons—both related to the war itself and the realities of the news business—that help explain the reduction in coverage in 2008. But do they justify the sharp drop in attention to a war zone that is still the subject of angry domestic divisions within the U.S. and where 150,000 U.S. troops were still in harm’s way at the end of the year? Just as the pack journalism impulse sometimes serves to over-inflate coverage of certain events, there seemed to be an almost collective media retreat from Iraq in 2008. The most important question raised by that is whether the press understated the newsworthiness of the story.

While the death toll may have dropped, there was still plenty of important news from Iraq in 2008—everything from a dramatic visit to Baghdad by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the passage of a security agreement that sets a deadline for U.S. troop withdrawal. There were also continued outbreaks of major violence—Turkish troops crossing the Iraq border to battle Kurds in February, a March showdown between Iraqi forces and Shiite militias, and a May bombing that killed dozens at an Iraqi wedding—that made it clear the fighting is far from over and that the country is far from stable.

That’s why many observers were shocked at the drop in coverage in 2008.  “Staggering,” said the American Journalism Review in a story simply headlined “Whatever Happened to Iraq?” The article said, “For long stretches over the past 12 months, Iraq virtually disappeared from the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and from the nightly network newscasts.”

The drop in coverage may also have had an impact on people’s knowledge of the war. As an example, in March 2008, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that only about a quarter of Americans knew approximately how many troops had died in the conflict. Six months earlier, more than half the respondents had gotten the casualty count right.⁶

Other International News Drops Even More

Iraq was not the only important global story to be crowded out of the American news in 2008.

Coverage of international affairs generally, whether it involved the U.S. or not, fell by more than 40%, to 17% of the newshole studied in 2008, compared with 29% in 2007.

Combined coverage of Pakistan and Iran—two countries that present major strategic challenges to the U.S.—fell by almost two-thirds (dropping to 2% of the newshole studied in 2008).

Coverage of the other war in which U.S. troops were fighting—Afghanistan—remained at the same low level (1%) in 2008 as 2007, but it had already almost disappeared. That despite a 2008 American death toll that was the highest in the six-year history of that conflict and continuing signs that the fighting may escalate.

Olympics: The Second Biggest Foreign Story, and One Athlete Dominated

One of the few major international newsmakers last year was a two-week-long sporting event. Coverage of the Beijing Olympic Games, the fifth-biggest story of the year, exceeded that of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and China.⁷

The Games were covered most heavily by network news broadcasts, thanks mostly to NBC, the U.S. broadcast rights holder. For the month of August, while the Olympics were filling 9% of the over all media newshole, NBC news was devoting 31% of its airtime to covering the Games and its related MSNBC.com website allotted 21% of its newshole to that subject. (The MSNBC cable channel, perhaps pre-occupied with the campaign, devoted only 1% of its August coverage to the Games).

The Olympics got virtually as much attention as the Georgia-Russia war in August, even though that event generated the most single-week coverage (26%) of any story not related to politics or the economy. While much of the Olympic coverage focused on the exploits of eight-time gold medal swimmer Michael Phelps, the U.S. media largely ignored some of the more substantive international angles.

Looking at coverage for August, which includes the run-up and postscript to the Games, American hero Phelps was the overwhelming focus of coverage, as a lead newsmaker in 14% of all Olympic stories. (The host country itself, China, was the focus of 2% of the stories.) When it came to the topics covered in news accounts, three subjects—the future of China and the Games’ impact on that, Olympic-related protests and press freedom in China —combined to account for 6% of the Olympic newshole. That’s about half the coverage devoted to the opening ceremonies alone.

What is chiefly responsible for the narrow news agenda—the news or the news industry?

The 2008 presidential election was an historic event. And given an economy widely characterized as the weakest since Great Depression, the 2008 financial meltdown may prove to be a once-in-a lifetime event. Thus it was not surprising that those two stories dominated the news. But it is important to ask to what extent the fact that two stories filled half of the news agenda reflects the news or the changing realities and shrinking resources of newsrooms.

Some evidence suggests the news—rather than the media culture—explain part of these numbers. Once the election was over, the news agenda for the remaining two months of the year became more diffuse. For example, in the weeks between November 4 and December 21, at least three and sometimes four stories each week accounted for at least 10% of the newshole. That had not happened previously since August 18.

But it is also true that some of the stories that helped fill the newshole late in the year—such as the troubled auto industry, the new Obama administration and the Rod Blagojevich scandal—were related to or offshoots of the economic crisis and the presidential election.

There are other factors that suggest the top-heavy news agenda in 2008 is a reflection of how the media now tend to function. For one thing, this shrinking news agenda did not suddenly emerge in 2008. In 2007, the basic dynamic was the same. No, the election and the Iraq war did not dominate as overwhelmingly as the election and economy did in 2008. But we now have a two-year track record, since PEJ began its News Coverage Index, of a press culture more oriented to talk shows and with depleted reporting ranks clearly focusing much of its time and energy on fewer stories.

There may also have been some basic bottom-line reasons why some media, particularly cable news, narrowed their news agenda.  In a crowded media landscape, cable news attached itself to the election and enjoyed significant, if temporary, ratings success and filled a big chunk of its 24/7 newshole with inexpensive programming in the form of pundit commentary. (See Cable Audience for more info)

Another contributing factor is the retrenchment on foreign coverage. In a time of economic hardship, many news outlets have shuttered expensive foreign bureaus, making ongoing consistent coverage of international stories much more difficult. (January saw the launch of GlobalPost, a Boston-based Web outlet dedicated to becoming a kind of clearinghouse for international news, at a time its founders say “original international reporting… has been steadily diminished in too many American newspapers and television networks.”) In the foreseeable future, there seems to be little prospect for a reversal of the trend away from global news coverage in the mainstream press.

That raises an interesting question. If another war on the scale and significance of Iraq broke out in this economic environment, would the U.S. media cover it as intensely as it did the last war, which began in 2003? That could get put to the test if the fighting and the American presence escalate significantly in Afghanistan.

Another factor that skews the news agenda is the tendency of the ideological debate-oriented venues—such as talk radio and prime-time cable news—to select and amplify one or two big stories from the news menu. What we have found in the two years of this study is that these ideological outlets often ignore news that does not lend itself to punditry and polarization. In their place, these programs tend to revisit the same themes day after day.

The Media Attention Span

And for the second year in a row, PEJ’s examination of the news agenda revealed the phenomenon of the one-week wonder. Even when a major story managed to break through the clutter of the election and economic coverage in 2008, the press quickly seemed to tire of it.

A sudden outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Georgia was the top story for a week in August when it filled 26% of the newshole and became the biggest story in 2008 not to involve politics or the economy. The following week, coverage of the conflict was down by more than two-thirds. The sexual indiscretions that brought down New York Governor Eliot Spitzer filled about a quarter of the newshole (23%) in mid-March. A week later, it had virtually vanished, to only 2% of the newshole. The drain on reporting resources may be one major reason for the lack of staying power on stories that require aggressive and sustained follow-up reporting.

The shrinking newsroom resources, identified in every sector of the media in 2008, would seem to encourage this narrowing. (See Key Indicators for more info) Fewer people in newsrooms, as we have noted in this study in past years, inevitably pulls news organizations to focus intensively on one or two subjects at a time, and then move on. They simply no longer have the resources in reporting power to push a wider agenda.

This evidence does not all tilt in the same direction, but over all it would seem to suggest some theories behind the very constricted coverage in 2008. The magnitude of the election and an economic collapse likely shrank the rest of the newshole more drastically than normal. But it is also clear that some of the institutional problems and tendencies of the media—shrinking resources, scaled-back ambition, a media echo chamber in cable and radio talk—played a role in the narrowness of the media landscape last year.

Public Responses to the News: A Desire for a More Balanced News Diet

There is little doubt that the public was riveted by the 2008 presidential campaign. In a year-end summary of news interest, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, concluded that “interest in election news remained at historically high levels throughout the lengthy campaign” and that “public interest in the primary campaigns… was higher than during previous primary contests.”

The following list comprises the sources used throughout this report.

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | R | S | T | U | V | W&X | Y | Z

A

“Robin Roberts’ Final Day of Chemotherapy,” ABCNews.com, January 16, 2008.

“ABC News Joins Forces with Facebook,” ABCNews.com, December 18, 2007.

“100 Leading Media Companies,” Adage.com: http://adage.com/datacenter/article?article_id=106352.

2008 Ad Age Advertising Jobs report: http://adage.com/images/random/datacenter/2007/annualjobs2007.pdf .

“In the largest expansion of foreign bureaus in two decades, ABC News announces the deployment of seven reporters to posts around the globe,” ABC News Media Relations, October 3, 2007.

2007 Fact Pack, Advertising Age.

Advertising Age, October 16, 2007.

Advertising Age, Digital Marketing & Media Fact Pack, April 23, 2007.

Advertising Age 100 Hundred Leading Advertisers: http://adage.com/datacenter/article?article_id=118652.

“Bi-Annual Online Video Study: First-Half 2007 vs. Second-Half 2006,” Advertising.com, 2007.

“2007 Interactive Publisher Survey,” Advertising.com, 2007.

“Online Video: Consumers Prefer News Clips, Shorter Ads,” Advertising.com press release, August 28, 2007.

Adweek, October 3, 2007.

“AdWeek to Expand Digital Offering,” AdWeek, November 20, 2007: http://www.adweek.com/aw/national/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003676050

Frank Ahrens, “FCC Chief Offers New Plan on Cross-Ownership,” Washington Post, November 14, 2007.

Frank Ahrens, “Divided FCC Enacts Rule of Media Ownership,” Washington Post, December 19, 2007.

Air America blog, April 25, 2007, http://www.airamerica.com/press.

“Air America Completes Sale to Green Family,” Air America press release, March 6, 2007.

American Society of Newspaper Editors, “Diversity Slips in U.S. Newsrooms,” press release, March 26, 2007.

Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” Hyperion, 2006; and “The Long Tail,” Wired, 2004: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html.

Peter Appert, “Newspaper Trends and Outlooks,” Goldman Sachs analyst’s report, December 12, 2007.

Peter Appert, “Reducing Estimates (Again) Given new Recession View,” Goldman Sachs analyst’s report, January 9, 2008.

“iTunes Store to Stop Selling NBC Television Shows,” Apple press release, August 31, 2007.

Tim Arango, “Presidential Primaries Lift CNN,” New York Times, March 5, 2008.

“The Infinite Dial 2007: Radio’s Digital Platforms,” Arbitron and Edison Media Research, April 19, 2007.

“Persons Using Radio Report,” Cume Rating Monday-Sunday 6 a.m.-midnight, Arbitron: http://wargod.arbitron.com/scripts/ndb/ndbradio2.asp.

“The Infinite Dial 2007: Radio’s Digital Platforms,” Arbitron, April 19, 2007.

“Public Radio Today, How America Listens to Public Radio,” Arbitron, July 12, 2007.

“Radio Today: How Americans Listen to Radio, 2007 Edition,” Arbitron, April 13, 2007.

Arbitron RADAR 93, June 2007, via Radio Advertising Bureau, “Radio Marketing Guide and Fact Book 2007-2008.”

“Harbinger Raises New York Times Stake,” Associated Press via Boston Globe,February 25, 2008.

“Owner May Sell Weather Channel,” Associated Press via Yahoo.com, January 3, 2008.

“Google’s stock surpasses $600 a share,” Associated Press, October 8, 2007.

“AOL to Cut 2,000 Jobs,” Associated Press, October 15, 2007.

“Robin Roberts to Begin Chemo Thursday,” Associated Press, September 20, 2007.

Associated Press, “News Corp. says it plans to sell 9 Fox-affiliated TV stations,” International Herald Tribune, June 13, 2007.

“News unlikely to fill TV strike holes,” Associated Press, December 23, 2007.

“ABC expands Spanish-dubbing of series,” Associated Press, July 18, 2006.

“Hispanics to pass blacks in buying power,”Associated Press via MSNBC.com, Sept. 1, 2006: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14623151/.

“NBC newscast gets new top producer,” Associated Press, March 5, 2007.

George Avalos, “KRON-TV puts itself up for sale,” San Jose Mercury News, January 10, 2008.

“Digital Consumer Behavior Study,” Avenue A|Razorfish study conducted in July 2007.

Ed Avis, “Alternative Newsweeklies: Growing Up,” Quill, January 28, 2008.

Audit Bureau of Circulations.

return to the top

B

.Katy Bachman, “Imus Gives WABC Ratings Boost,” MediaWeek, December 10, 2007.

W. Scott Bailey, “Clear Channel, Others Raise Ratings Concerns Over Arbitron System,” MSNBC, December 16, 2007.

Brooks Barnes and Emily Steel, “Lagging online, TV stations get moving,” Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2007.

Brooks Barnes, “Slowing Economy Posing Test for Disney,” New York Times, November 13, 2007.

Brooks Barnes, “A Made-for-TV Boss Helps Revive ABC,” New York Times, October 7, 2007.

Brooks Barnes, “Disney Acquires Web Site for Children,” New York Times, August 2, 2007.

David Bauder, “Data Says 2.5 Million Less Watching TV,” Associated Press, May 8, 2007.

David Bauder, “2nd place a new world for Brian Williams,” Associated Press, June 24, 2007.

David Bauder, “Nielsen TV Ratings: Top Rated TV Shows News Does Well for CBS, ABC Ratings,” Associated Press, January 9, 2008.

Anne Becker, “René Syler to Leave CBS’ Early Show,” Broadcasting & Cable, December 4, 2006.

Anne Becker, “CBS Launches YouTube Channel, “Broadcasting & Cable, October 18, 2006.

Anne Becker, “ABC News Cutting 35, Moving Assets to Digital,” Broadcasting & Cable, June 22, 2007.

Lee B. Becker, et al., “2006 Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates,” Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication, August 10, 2007.

Sharon Begley. “The Truth About Denial,” Newsweek, April 16, 2007.

“Belo to Create Separate Television and Newspaper Businesses,” press release, October 1, 2007.

BIA Financial Network database, station updates through August 31, 2007.

“BIA Financial Network Reports $22.2 billion in 2007 TV Revenues; Predicts 11% growth in 2008 due to strong political year that will affect specific DMA markets,” BIA Press Release, January 10, 2008.

“American Newspapers and the Internet: Threat or Opportunity,” The Bivings Group, July 19, 2007.

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“Google Sites Ranked by comScore as Top U.S. Video Property in March 2007,” comScore press release, June 4, 2007.

“YouTube Continues to Lead U.S. Online Video Market with 28 Percent Market Share, According to comScore Video Metrix,” comScore press release, November 30, 2007.

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Rebecca Dana, “CBS Creates ‘EyeLab’ To Woo Web Surfers,” the Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2007.

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Diane Garrett, “DVD sales down 3.6% in ’07,” Variety, January 7, 2008.

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Meg James, “Nielsen to expand its TV sample,” Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2007.

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“Teens and Social Media,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, December 19, 2007.

“Why Change the Channel?” Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, June 20, 2007.

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Views of Press Values and Performance: 1985-2007,” August 9, 2007.

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, Pew Weekly News Interest Index Poll, October 12, 2007. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=362

“Online Papers Modestly Boost Newspaper Readership,” biennial news consumption survey, Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, July 30, 2006.

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, Pew Weekly News Interest Index Poll, May 23, 2007. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=330

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Internet’s Broader Role in Campaign 2008,” January, 11, 2008. Based on polling conducted December 19-30, 2007. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=384

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Today’s Journalists Less Prominent,” March 8, 2007.

Pew Internet & American Life Project, “Demographics of Internet Users,” http://www.pewInternet.org/trends/User_Demo_6.15.07.htm, and “Daily Interest Activities”: http://www.pewInternet.org/trends/Daily_Internet_Activities_8.28.07.htm.

Pew Internet & American Life Project, “ Why We Don’t Know Enough About Broadband in the U.S”: http://pewinternet.org/pdfs/Backgrounder.MeasuringBroadband.pdf

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Views of Press Values and Performance: 1985-2007,” August 9, 2007.

18. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Internet’s Broader Role in Campaign 2008,” January, 11, 2008. Based on polling conducted December 19-30, 2007. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=384

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Views of Press Values and Performance: 1985-2007,” August 9, 2007.

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Internet’s Broader Role in Campaign 2008.,” Q43, banner C. http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/384.pdf

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Views of Press Values and Performance: 1985-2007,” August 9, 2007.Also, Pew Weekly News Interest Index Poll, November 9, 2007. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=370

PEJ, “Journalists in Iraq: A Survey of Reporters on the Front Lines.” http://www.journalism.org/files/PEJ%20FINAL%20Survey%20of%20Journalists%20in%20IraqWITH%20SURVEY.pdf

Pew Research Center for the People & Press, January Political Survey, Final Topline, January 9-13, 2008, www.people-press.org.

Pew Research Center for the People & Press, January Political Survey, Final Topline, January 9-13, 2008: www.people-press.org.

Eric Pfanner, “Financial Times Will Allow More Free Access to Web Site,” New York Times, October 1, 2007.

Podcast Alley, podcastalley.com, January 15, 2008.

Mary Ellen Podmolik, “No. 6 Meet the Press,” BtoB: The Magazine for Marketing Strategists, May 7, 2007.

Therese Poletti, “Are we in the midst of “Bubble 2.0?,” MarketWatch, October 26, 2007.

“Morris Sells News Chief, 16 Other Papers,” Polkonline.com., October 24, 2007.

“Gannett introduces ‘the newsroom of the future,’”memo from Gannett CEO Craig Durbow, Poynter Online, November 2, 2006.

LeeAnn Prescott, “Hitwise US News & Media Report,” Hitwise, April 2007.

State of the News Media 2007, Project for Excellence in Journalism, March 12, 2007.

Project for Excellence in Journalism, “The Invisible Primary – Invisible No Longer,” October 29, 2007: http://journalism.org/node/8189#_ftn2.

Project for Excellence in Journalism, “Journalists in Iraq: A Survey of Reporters on the Front Lines.” http://www.journalism.org/files/PEJ%20FINAL%20Survey%20of%20Journalists%20in%20IraqWITH%20SURVEY.pdf.

“Digital Journalism: A Topography of News Web sites,” from the State of the News Media 2007, Project for Excellence in Journalism, March 12, 2007: http://stateofthenewsmedia.org/2007/narrative_digital_findings.asp?cat=2&media=2

“The Latest News Headlines —Your Vote Counts,” Project for Excellence in Journalism, September 12, 2007.

Local TV News Projects, 1998–2002, Project for Excellence in Journalism, (http://www.journalism.org/ra_by_media/55/61/%2A?page=1)

Annual State of the News Media reports, 2004-2007, Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Publishers Information Bureau report, January 2007-December 2007 vs. 2006.

Publishers Information Bureau Revenue & Ad pages by Category 2007: http://www.magazine.org/Advertising_and_PIB/PIB_Revenue_and_Pages/Revenue___Pages_by_Ad_Category__quarterly___YTD_/25716.cfm.

Publishers Information Bureau. Revenue & Pages by Magazine Titles (Quarterly): http://www.magazine.org/Advertising_and_PIB/PIB_Revenue_and_Pages/Revenue___Pages_by_Magazine_Titles__quarterly_/24509.cfm.

Jim Puzzanghera, “Bad reviews pile up for FCC chief’s plan,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 2007.

Jim Puzzanghera, “Millions may miss the digital TV deadline,” Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2007.

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“Internet Streaming Close to Becoming a Fully Mobile Media,” Radio Business Report, November 16, 2007.

“Arbitron to Delay PPM Rollout in NYC, LA, Chicago, San Francisco and Dallas,” Radio Business Report, November 27, 2007.

“Hanson Addresses FAQ’s about Royalty Rate Decision,” Radio and Internet Newsletter, March 2, 2007.

Lee Rainie and Bill Tancer, “36% of online American adults consult Wikipedia,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, April 2007.

“NBC Universal’s Zucker dismisses sale,” October 29, 2007, Reuters.

“Digital developments could be tipping point for MP3,” Reuters, December 3, 2007.

“Hearst Buys Two Tribune Papers in Connecticut,” USA Today.com via Reuters, October 25, 2007.

J. Max Robins, “2.0 Minus 700,” Broadcasting & Cable, October 23, 2006

J. Max Robins, “New, Old Media Team Up,” Broadcasting & Cable, June 4, 2007.

Jim Romenesko, “Taking Charge of Our Future” (Harte memo), January 22, 2008.

Phil Rosenthal, “Couric feeling more at ease,” Chicago Tribune, April 22, 2007.

Phil Rosenthal, “Homogenized Radio Stations Bottle Up Growth,” Chicago Tribune, November 11, 2007.

Phil Rosenthal, “NBC looks to resuscitate Oxygen,” Chicago Tribune, October 10, 2007.

Brian Ross and Vic Walter, “To Catch a Predator: a Sting Gone Bad,” Dateline, September 7, 2007.

Randall Rothenberg, “Facebook’s Flop,” Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2007: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119760316554728877.html

Evelyn M. Rusli, “Sirius About A Merger,” Forbes.com. November 13, 2007.

Cristine Russell, “Covering Controversial Science: Improving Reporting on Science and Public Policy,” Joan Shorenstein Center, Harvard University, 2006.

Stephanie Antonian Rutherford, “Can Newspapers Survive in a Digital World?,” Battle Creek Examiner, January 11, 2008.

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S

“60 Minutes,” August 17, 2003, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/07/60minutes/main552819.shtml.

Alvin P. Sanoff, U.S. News & World Report, June 9, 1980.

Erik Sass, “LA Times Unveils New Web Strategy,” MediaPost Publications, January 25, 2007.

Erik Sass, “Dear Arbitron: Radio Industry Letter Delivers Broadside,” MediaPost, November 15, 2007.

Erik Sass, “Radio Buys: Cumulus Acquired by Private Equity,” MediaPost, July 24, 2007.

“Scarborough Newspaper Audience Ratings Report 2007,” Scarborough Research, April 24, 2007.

Jan Schaffer, “Citizen Media: Fad or Future of News?” J-Lab, February 2007.

Amy Schatz and Corey Boles, “FCC Votes to End Media Ownership Rules,” Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2007.

Michael Schneider, “Fox drops TV stations for Dow bid,” Variety, June 13, 2007.

Nelson D. Schwartz, “Is G.E. Too Big for Its Own Good?” New York Times, July 22, 2007.

“Scripps Announces Plan to Separate into Two Public Companies,” E. W. Scripps Company press release, October 16, 2007.

Steve Secklow and Martin Peers, “Murdoch’s Role as Proprietor, Journalist and Plans for Dow Jones,” Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2007.

Katharine Q. Seelye. “With Redesign of Time, Sentences Run Forward,” New York Times, March 12, 2007: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/business/media/12time.html.

“The Multicultural Economy, 2006,” The Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia.

Molly Selvin, “Challenge Authority If You Dare,” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2008.

Donna Shaw, “Really Local,” American Journalism Review, April/May 2007.

Mike Shields, “CBS to Stream on YouTube,” MediaWeek, October 9, 2006.

Annys Shin, the Washington Post, March 18, 2004.

Gail Shister, “CBS evening blues,” the Philadelphia Inquirer, April 23, 2007.

David Sifry, “The State of the Live Web,” April 2007: www. sifry.com.

Richard Siklos and Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Murdoch Offers $5 Billion Bid for Dow Jones,” New York Times, August 2, 2007.

Richard Siklos, “News Corp. and NBC in Web Deal,” New York Times, March 23, 2007.

“Analyzing YouTube’s Revenue Potential,” Silicon Alley Insider, August 21, 2007.

“Former FCC Chairman Hundt Comments on Sirius-XM Merger in Interview,” Sirius and XM press releases, November 13, 2007.

Erika D. Smith, “Emmis Again Urged to Go Private,” The Indianapolis Star, October 25, 2007.

Greg Smith, chief operating officer of Neo@Ogilvy, a digital media offshoot of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide.

StateMaster.com: http://www.statemaster.com/graph/eco_gsp_rea_gsp_con_pergdp-gsp-real-construction-per-gd

Emily Steel, “WSJ.com to Retain Subscription Component,” Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2008.

Jacques Steinberg, “Charles Gibson’s ‘World News’ Gets Rare Ratings Victory,” New York Times, February 14, 2007.

Jacques Steinberg, “A ‘Today’ at a Time, Until Finally She Has a Year,” New York Times, September 11, 2007.

Jacques Steinberg, “An Early Show Exit,” New York Times, November 29, 2007.

Brian Stelter, “MSNBC to Acquire a Chattier News Site,” New York Times, October 8, 2007.

Brian Stelter, “ABC Reshapes the Evening News for the Web,” New York Times, October 12, 2007.

Brian Stelter, “ABC News and Facebook in Joint Effort to Bring Viewers Closer to Political Coverage,” New York Times, November 26, 2007.

Brian Stelter, “‘To Catch a Predator’ Is Falling Prey to Advertisers’ Sensibilities,” New York Times, August 27, 2007.

Brian Stelter. “In Foray into TV, Google is to Track Ad Audiences,” New York Times, October 24, 2007: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/business/media/24adco.html.

Brian Stelter, “At NBC, the Brand Becomes a Slogan,” New York Times, November 5, 2007.

Richard Stengel, “A Changing TIME,” Time, January 6, 2007.

Carl Sessions Stepp, “Transforming the Architecture,” AJR, October-November, 2007.

Brad Stone and Matt Richtel, “ Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again,” New York Times, October 17, 2007.

Brad Stone, “Equity Firm Invests in NBC Universal-News Corp. Online Venture,” New York Times, August 9, 2007.

Louise Story, “How Many Site Hits? Depends Who’s Counting,” New York Times, October 22, 2007.

Louise Story, “Another Step for a Remade AOL,” New York Times, November 8, 2007.

Veronis Suhler Stevenson, “Communications Industry Forecast 2007-2011.”

Seth Sutel, “Yahoo adds 17 more newspapers,” Associated Press, November 19, 2007.

Seth Sutel, “New York Times regional papers join Yahoo newspaper group,” Associated Press, November 18, 2007.

“New study shows Americans’ blogging behaviour,” Synovate, August 30, 2007.
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T

Talkers magazine, “Top Talk Personalities,” October 2007: http://www.talkers.com/main/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=17&Itemid=34.

Talkers magazine, “The Talk Radio Research Project,” http://www.talkers.com/main/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=16&Itemid=33.

Dorcas Taylor, “Networks by the Numbers,” American Journalism Review, April/May 2005.

Ira Teinowitz, “Bush Proposes Steep Cuts to PBS Funding,” Television Week, February 5, 2007.

Television Bureau of Advertising, “2007 TV Ad Revenue Figures,” (Ad Revenue Track, Third Quarter Data), December 18, 2007: http://www.tvb.org/nav/build_frameset.asp?url=/rcentral/index.asp.

Time Warner Inc. Form 10-Q, filed November 7, 2007 for the period ending September 30, 2007; Time Warner Inc. Form 10-Q, filed November 1, 2006 for period ending September 30, 2006.

Time Warner Annual Report 2006.

“Time Warner Inc. Reports Third Quarter 2007 Results,” Time Warner press release, November 7, 2007.

“NBC Partners with TiVo on Advertising and Research Solutions,” TiVo press release, November 27, 2007: http://tivo.com/abouttivo/pressroom/pressreleases/2007/release_112707.html

Szabolcs Toth, “Chinese news network in US finds perils of facing Beijing.” Boston.com, August 24, 2003:
http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2003/08/24/chinese_news_network_in_us_finds_perils_of_facing_beijing/ .

Chris Tryhorn, “Dow Jones Signals Local Paper Sell Off,” The Guardian, November 28, 2007.

“CBS Blinks, PublicEye Goes Dormant,” TVNewser, January 2, 2008.

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U

“Annual Internet Survey by the Center for the Digital Future Finds Shifting Trends Among Adults About the Benefits and Consequences of Children Going Online,” USC Center for Digital Future, January 17, 2008.

Form 10-K for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2006, United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ending September 30, 2007, United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Univision ranked as the #1 network with an +11% advantage over its nearest competitor, Fox, and beating ABC by +43%, CBS by +42%, NBC by +57% and fully +125% ahead of CW for all adults 18-34, not just Hispanics,” Univision press release, September 7, 2007.

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V

Diego Vasquez. “Big Changes for Local Web Advertising,” Media Life Magazine: http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman2/publish/Research_25/Big_changes_for_local_web_advertising.asp

“Viacom Files Federal Copyright Infringement Complaint Against YouTube and Google,” Viacom press release, March 13, 2007.

David Vaina, interview conducted for Project for Excellence in Journalism, January 10, 2008.

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W & X

Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2006.

Mark Walsh, “eMarketer: Online Ad Spending Growth to Slow,” MediaPost, February 27, 2007.

Mark Walsh, “Media M&A Slowing in Wake of Credit Crunch,” Online Media Daily, October 31, 2007.

Mark Walsh, “Times Co. Taps Monster for Job Ads,” Online Media Daily, February 15, 2007.

Mark Walsh, “Time.com Adds Blogs, News Feed,” MediaPost, January 8, 2007.

Quote attributed to John Wanamaker: http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/John_Wanamaker/

Washington Post “Investing” column, September 25, 2007.

Washington Post Entrance and Exit Polls, 2008: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2008-presidential-candidates/primaries/exit-polls/topics/One-of-four-most-important-issue/r/ (Republican) and http://projects.washingtonpost.c om/2008-preside ntial-candidates/primaries/exit-polls/topics/most-important-issue/d/ (Democrats)

Richard Waters and Kevin Allison, “Video sites spark fears of bubble,” Financial Times, April 30, 2007.

Edward Watt, “Joel Siegel, 63, Movie Critic Who Instructed and Amused, Dies,” New York Times, June 30, 2007.

J. Webster, P. Phalen and L. Lichty, “Ratings Analysis: The Theory and Practice of Audience Research,” Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000.

Alex Weprin, “Nielsen National TV Ratings Panel Expanding More than Threefold,” Broadcasting & Cable, September 26, 2007.

Alex Weprin, “CBS Making 60 Minutes Available as Free Podcast,” Broadcasting and Cable, September 20, 2007.

David B. Wilkerson, “CBS explores radio sales in smaller markets,” MarketWatch, May 23, 2006.

“Former FCC Chairman Hundt Comments on Sirius-XM Merger in Interview,” XM and Sirius press releases, November 13, 2007.

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Y

Yahoo Finance, January 2, 2008.

“Yahoo! Reports Third Quarter 2007 Financial Results,” Yahoo press release, October 16, 2007.

Yahoo Annual Report 2006.

“CBS and YouTube Strike Strategic Content and Advertising Partnership,” YouTube.com press release, October 6, 2006.

Jeff Yang, “The AZend,” SFGate.com, January 29, 2008: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/200 8/01/29/apop.DTL.

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Kim Zetter, “Dateline Mole Allegedly at DefCon with Hidden Camera — Updated: Mole Caught on Tape,” Wired, August 3, 2007.

“Zogby Poll: Most Say Bloggers, Citizen Reporters to Play Vital Role in Journalism’s Future,” Zogby International, February 13, 2007.

Many partners contributed to this report.

Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute co-wrote the Chapter on newspapers with PEJ staff. And Rober Ruby co-wrote with PEJ the Chapter on public attitudes. The chapter on Madison Avenue was reported and written by Cathy Taylor. Andrew Tyndall of ADT Research consulted on the Cable TV and Network TV chapters.

From the Project, researchers conducted the data aggregation and did initial drafting in the following areas: David Vaina for the network and online chapters, Gauri Malhotra for the cable and local television chapters, Niki Woodard for the radio chapter and parts of the newspaper chapter, and Dante Chinni and Kenny Olmstead for the ethnic and magazine chapters. Mark Jurkowitz co-authored the report’s content analysis. The content analysis was supervised by Hong Ji and Paul Hitlin and executed by the content staff of PEJ. Cheryl Elzey managed the budget and Dana Page supervised public relations.

Jane McDonnell served as editor of the chapters. Amy Mitchell and Tom Rosenstiel supervised the project, edited the chapters and wrote the analytical components.

Irv Molotsky was the copy editor

Blattner Brunner designed the Web site. The Project’s staff put the design into effect. Programming consultant Don Bell designed and programmed the Chartland component. Wendy Kelly of WLK Design will produce the executive summary. Evelyn R. Navas will translate the report into Spanish.

Among the more than three dozen people who served as readers of the chapters were Derek Baine, Charles Bierbauer, Merrill Brown, John Carroll, Sandy Close, Wally Dean, Julian Do, Howard Finberg, Edward Fouhy, Mark Fratrik, Mark Hanzlik, Samir Husni, Mark Jurkowitz, Richard Karpel, Odette Keeley, Katie King, Bill Kovach, DC Livers, Edward Schumacher Matos, Sara Melillo, Dick Meyer, Phil Meyer, Victor Navasky, Jake Oliver, Robert Papper, Adam Powell, Lee Rainie, Sandip Roy, Alan Seraita, Frank Sesno, Neal Shapiro, Al Stavitsky, Roberto Suro, Tom Taylor, Andrew Tyndall, Dale Willman and Judy Woodruff. Their thoughtful insights and suggestions greatly improved the chapters, but the readers are in no way responsible for the analysis or narrative accounts in this report. Moreover, the readers were not sources for information, unless explicitly cited in footnotes. In no case did a reader serve as an anonymous source for anything in the report.

Finally, the project could not have been completed without the extraordinary support, both financially and personally, of the Pew Charitable Trusts, particularly Don Kimelman, a trusted editor, and Rebecca Rimel, whose idea this report was in the first place.

For the data aggregated from other researchers, the Project took several steps. First, we tried to determine what data had been collected and by whom for the eight media sectors studied. We organized the data into the seven primary areas of interest we wanted to examine: content, audience, economics, ownership, newsroom investment, alternative news outlets and public attitudes. For all data ultimately used, the Project sought and gained permission for their use.

Next, the Project studied the data closely to determine where elements reinforced each other and where there were apparent contradictions or gaps. In doing so, the Project endeavored to determine the value and validity of each data set. That in many cases involved going back to the sources that collected the research in the first place. Where data conflicted, we have included all relevant sources and tried to explain their differences, either in footnotes or in the narratives.

In analyzing the data for each media sector, we sought insight from experts (Authors and Collaborators) by having at least three outside readers for each sector chapter. Those readers raised questions, offered arguments and questioned data where they saw fit.

All sources are cited in footnotes or within the narrative, and listed alphabetically in a source bibliography. The data used in the report are also available in more complete tabular form online, where users can view the raw material, sort it on their own and make their own charts and graphs (charts)Our goal was not only to organize the available material into a clear narrative, but also to also collect all the public data on journalism in one usable place. In many cases, the Project paid for the use of the data.

The methodology for the original content analysis research conducted by PEJ follows in two parts. First is the methodology for the main study — A Year in the News. Second is a snapshot study of Spanish-language media (Spanish-Language Methodology)

A Year in the News: Content Methodology

Sampling and Inclusion

The content analysis research in the 2008 State of the News Media Report is the summation of a year’s worth of coding conducted by PEJ. The coding is continuous throughout the year, with weekly findings reported in the News Coverage Index reports (Click to read the latest News Coverage Index).

All coding was conducted in-house by PEJ’s staff of researchers.

The 2007 analysis totals 70,737 stories. This consists of 6,559 newspaper stories, 6,520 online stories, 21,320 stories from network television, 22,823 stories on cable news, and 13,515 stories from radio programs.

The central focus of study is to analyze a wide swath of American news media to identify what is being covered and not covered — the media’s broad news agenda.

The Universe: What we Studied

Because the landscape is becoming more diverse — in platform, content, style and emphasis — and because media consumption habits are also changing, even varying day to day, the analysis is designed to be broad. Therefore, our sample, based on the advice of our academic team, was designed to include a broad range of outlets, illustrative but not strictly representative of the media universe.

The sample is also by design, selected to meet these criteria rather than to be strictly random. It is a multistage sampling process that cannot be entirely formulaic or numeric because of differences in measuring systems across media. It involves the balancing of several factors, including the number of media sectors that offer news, the number of news outlets in any given sector, the amount of news programming in each outlet and the audience reach. In addition to front-end selections, we have also weighted the various sectors on the back end to account for differences in audience. The weighting process is discussed further down in this document.

The mainstream, or establishment, daily news media in the United States can be broken down into five main sectors. These are:

Network TV News
Newspapers
Online News Sites
Cable News
Radio News

Within each media sector, the outlets and individual programs vary considerably in number, as do the stories and size of the audience. We began by first identifying the various media sectors, then identifying the news media outlets within each, then the specific news programs and finally the stories within those.

The primary aim was to look at the main news stories of the week across the industry. With that in mind, for outlets and publications where time does not permit coding the entire news content offered each day (three hours of network morning programming, for instance), we coded the lead portion. In other words, we coded the first 30 minutes of the cable news programs, the first 30 minutes of the network morning news programs, the front page of newspapers, etc. This may have skewed the overall universe toward more “serious” stories, but this is also the most likely time period to include coverage of the main, national news events of the day, those that would make up the top stories each week or each month.

Below we describe the selection process and resulting sample for each main sector.

Network News

Sector Reach

Each evening, the three broadcast news programs on the commercial networks — ABC, NBC and CBS — together reach about 26 million viewers. The morning news shows on those networks are seen by 13.6 million viewers.¹ In addition, the nightly public television newscast on PBS reaches 2.2 million viewers daily, according to its internal figures. Because the universe of national broadcast channels is limited to these four outlets, it is practical to count all of the networks as our sample universe.

Sector Sample

Each of the three major commercial broadcast networks produces two daily national general interest news shows, one in the morning (such as Good Morning America) and one in evening. It is practical, therefore, to include at least part of all these news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC in our sample. (The magazine genre of programs was not included in the universe both because in most cases they are not daily, except for Nightline, and because they are not devoted predictably to covering the news of the day). At the same time, the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer on PBS is considered by many as an alternative nightly news broadcast compared to the three major networks, and because it reaches a substantial audience, we included that program.

Units of Study

For the evening newscasts, the study coded the entire program. For the morning programs, it coded the news segments that appear during the first 30 minutes of the broadcast, including the national news inserts but not the local ones. By selecting this sample of the morning shows, it is possible that we will be missing some news stories that appear later in the programs. Through prior PEJ research, however, we have learned that the morning shows generally move away from the news of the day after the first 30 minutes, save for the top-of-the-hour news insert, and present more human interest and lifestyle stories after that. The stories that the networks feel are most important will appear during the first 30 minutes and be included in our study.

The resulting network sample is:

Commercial Network Evening News: Entire 30 minutes of all three programs each day (90 minutes)
Commercial Network Morning News: First 30 minutes of all three programs each day (90 minutes)
PBS NewsHour: First 30 minutes each day

Total: 3.5 hours each day

Cable Television

Sector Reach

According to ratings data, the individual programs of the three main cable television news channels — CNN, MSNBC and Fox News — do not reach as many viewers as those of the broadcast commercial network news shows. During prime time hours, 2.5 million viewers watch cable news, while 1.5 million watch during daytime hours.² But ratings data arguably undercount the reach of cable news. Survey data now find that somewhat more people cite cable news as their first source for national and international news than cite broadcast network news.

Sector Sample

The most likely option was to study CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. These represent the dominant channel of programming from each news-producing cable company. (This means selecting MSNBC as opposed to CNBC, and CNN as opposed to CNN Headline News, and MSNBC over Headline News, which now sometimes beats MSNBC in ratings.)

Units of Study

Since these channels provide programming round the clock, with individual programs sometimes reaching fairly small audiences, it was not practical for us to code all of the available shows. There is a great challenge in selecting several times out of the day to serve as a sample of cable news over all.

On the other hand, earlier studies have shown that for much of the day, one cable news program on a channel is indistinguishable to most people from another. If one were to ask a daytime viewer of cable news which program he or she preferred, the 10 a.m. or the noon, you might get a confused look in response. For blocks of hours at a time, the channels will have programs with generic titles CNN Newsroom, Your World Today or Fox News Live. Our studies have shown that there are four distinct programming sectors to cable — early morning, daytime, early evening and prime time.

Working with academic advisers we weighed various options. A selection based on the most-watched programs would result in the O’Reilly Factor (1.8 million viewers a night) for Fox and Larry King Live (500,000 viewers a night) for CNN. However, some of these shows are not news programs per se, but rather their content derives from the host’s opinions and guests on any given day. Separating news and talk also proved problematic because it is often difficult to distinguish between the two categories, while several programs offer both news and talk in the same hour.

The best option, we concluded, was to draw from two time periods:

1. The daytime period, to demonstrate what live events are being covered. The study includes two 30-minute segments of daytime programming each day, rotating among the three networks.

2. Early evening and prime time (6 to 11 p.m.), together as a unit, rather than separating out talk and news or early prime and late prime. Within this five-hour period, we included all programming that focuses on general news events of the day. Basically, this removes three programs: Fox’s Greta Van Susteren, which is focused on crime; CNN’s Larry King, which is focused on entertainment or personal stories rather than news events, and MSNBC’s documentary program. Because MSNBC’s audience numbers are so much lower than those for Fox or CNN, we also decided to include slightly less of its programming. Even though CNN trails Fox in Nielsen ratings, its monthly cumulative, or “cume,” audience figure is higher, so the two are sampled equally.

To include the most cable offerings possible each week, the study coded the 30 minutes of selected programs and rotated them daily. Morning shows were not included because those shows are run at the same time for every part of the country, meaning that a broadcast that starts at 7 a.m. on the East Coast will begin at 4 a.m. on the West Coast. Those programs appear far too early for much of the country to actually view. This is in contrast with the broadcast morning programs, which are shown on tape delay in different parts of the country, in the manner of other broadcast programs.

This process resulted in the following cable sample:

Daytime

Rotate, coding two out of three 30-minute daytime slots each day (60 minutes a day)

Prime Time

Three 30-minute segments for Fox (90 minutes)
Three 30-minute segments for CNN (90 minutes)
Two 30-minute segments for MSNBC (60 minutes)

The index rotates among all programming from 6 to 11 p.m. that was focused on general news events of the day. excluding CNN’s Larry King and Fox’s Greta Van Susteren.

Both CNN and MSNBC made some programming changes during 2007, and the replacement shows are included when appropriate.

= 5 hours each day (including daytime)

Newspapers

Sector Reach

About 54 million newspapers are sold each weekday.³ This number does not include the “pass along” rate of newspapers, which some estimate, depending on the paper, to be approximately three times the circulation rate. In addition, specific newspapers, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, have an influence on the national and international news agenda even greater because they serve as sources of news that many other outlets look to in making their own programming and editorial decisions. So while the overall audience for newspapers is declining over recent years, newspapers still play a large and consequential role in setting the news agenda that cannot be strictly quantified or justified by circulation data. There is a growing body of data that the total audience of newspapers, combining their reach in print and online combined, may actually be growing slightly.

Sector Sample

To create some representation of what national stories are being covered by the 1,450 daily newspapers around the country, we divided the country’s daily papers into three tiers based on circulation: over 650,000, 100,000 to 650,000, and under 100,000. Within each tier, we selected papers along the following criteria:

Papers needed to be available electronically the day of publication. Three Web sites, including www.nexis.com, www.newsstand.com and www.pressdisplay.com, offer same-day full-text delivery service. Based on their general same-day availability (excluding non-daily papers, non-U.S. papers, non-English-language papers, college papers, and special niche papers) a list of U.S. general interest daily newspapers was constructed. The list included seven papers in Tier 1 , 44 papers in Tier 2, and 22 papers in Tier 3.

Tier 1: Due to its national prominence and readership, and the desirability of having at least one newspaper that was coded every day without any interruption due to rotation (in the same way the network newscasts are coded), we decided to code the New York Times each day (Sunday through Friday). We then wanted to include a representation from the other large nationally known or distributed papers, so each day we coded two out of four of the largest papers, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal.

Tier 2 and 3: Four newspapers were selected each from Tier 2 and Tier 3. To ensure geographical diversity, each of the four newspapers within Tier 2 and Tier 3 was selected from a different geographic region according to the parameters established by the U.S. Census Bureau, i.e., Northeast Region, Midwest Region, South Region and West Region. An effort was also made to ensure the ownership diversity. One selected newspaper was found too difficult to capture during our testing, and it was replaced by another newspaper from the same region within the same circulation category. We rotated two of the four newspapers in Tier 2 and Tier 3 each day.

This process resulted in the following newspaper sample:

First Tier

The New York Times

The Washington Post

The Los Angeles Times

USA Today

The Wall Street Journal

Second Tier

The Boston Globe

The ( Minneapolis) Star Tribune

The Austin ( Texas) American-Statesman

The Albuquerque Journal

Third Tier

The ( Attleboro, Mass.) Sun Chronicle

The ( Ashtabula, Ohio) Star Beacon

The Chattanooga Times Free Press

The Bakersfield Californian

Units of Study

For each of the papers selected, we coded only articles that began on page A1 (including jumps). The argument for this is that the papers have made the decision to feature those stories on that day. That means we did not code the articles on the inside of the A section, or on any other section. The first argument for ignoring these stories is that they will be unnecessary for our index, which measures only the biggest stories each week. If a story appears on the inside of the paper, but does not make A1 at any point, it would almost certainly not be a big enough story to make the top list of stories we will track each week. The weakness of this approach, arguably, is that it undercounts the full news agenda of national and international news in that it neglects those stories that were not on Page 1 on certain days but were on others. While this is less pertinent in the weekly index, perhaps, at the end of the year, when trying to assess the full range of what the media covered, the stories that spent time on the inside of the paper but did not disappear were undercounted.

Part of the reasoning for excluding those national and international stories that begin inside the front section of the paper is practical. Coding the interior of the papers to round out the sample for year end purposes is an enormous amount of work for relatively minimal gain.

The other argument for forgoing national and international stories that fail to make Page 1 is more conceptual. We were measuring what newspapers emphasize, their top agenda. Given the cost versus the benefit, capturing the front page of more newspapers seemed the better alternative. In the same regard, we were not coding every story that might appear on a Web site, an even more daunting task, and recorded just the top stories.

The other challenge with newspapers that we did not face with some other media is that we will only include stories that are national or international. National is defined as a story being covered by newspapers from different locations, as opposed to a local story that is only covered in one paper. The only local stories included in the study are those that are pertain to a larger national issue — how the war in Iraq is affecting the hometown, for instance, or new job cuts at the local industries because of the sliding economy.

This resulted in the newspaper sample of about 25 stories a day.

Online News Sites

Sector Reach

About 30 million Internet users go online for news each day.⁴ About 6.8 million people read some blog each day, some of the most popular of which are news-oriented.⁵ Both online news sites and blogs are becoming more important in the overall news agenda. Any sample of the modern news culture must include representation of some of the more popular examples of these sectors.

Sector Sample

The online news universe is even more expansive than radio and has seemingly countless sites that could serve as news sources. To get an understanding of online news sources, we chose to include several of the most popular news sites in our universe as a sample of the overall online news agenda. We also wanted balance in the type of online news sites, between those that produced their own content and those who aggregated news from throughout the Web.

To choose the sites we were to include in our sample, we referred to the list of the top 10 news sites with the most unique visitors according to the Nielsen/NetRatings from September 2006. Out of that list, we choose five sites that represented a mix of sites that either created their own material for their Web site (MSNBC.com, CNN.com), popular sites that aggregated material from other Web sites (Google News, Yahoo News), and a site such as AOL News, which usually uses material from news wire services but also creates some unique material at times as well.

The sites that were coded were as follows:

Units of Study

For the online news sites, the study captured the site once a day from 9 to 10 a.m. Eastern time. For each site capture, we coded the top five stories, as those are the most prominent as determined at that point in time by the particular news service. As is true with our decision about page A1 in newspapers, if a story is not big enough for the online sites to highlight it in their top five stories, it is likely not a story that will register on our tally of the top stories each week.

This resulted in a sample of 25 stories a day.

Radio

Sector Reach

Radio is a diverse medium that reaches the majority of Americans – 94 percent of Americans 12 years and older listen to traditional radio each week.⁷ Approximately 16% of radio listeners tune into news, talk and information radio in an average week, which ranks it as the most popular of all measured radio formats.⁸ Many more Americans get from news headlines while listening to other formats as well.

The challenge with coding national radio programs is that much of radio news content is localized, and the number of shows that reach a national audience is only a fraction of the overall programming. On the other hand, our content analysis of radio confirms that news on commercial radio in most cities has been reduced to headlines from local wires and syndicated network feeds, plus talk, much of which is nationally syndicated itself. The exception is in a few major cities where a few all-news commercial radio stations still survive, such as Washington, D.C., where WTOP is a significant all-news operation.

Sector Sample

The Index includes three areas of radio news programming.

1. Public radio: The index includes 30 minutes of a public radio’s broadcast of National Public Radio’s morning program, Morning Edition, each day. Note: NPR produces two hours of Morning Edition each day, which also includes multiple news roundups produced by a different unit of NPR. Member stations may pick any segments within those two hours and mix and match as fits their programming interests. Thus, what airs on a member station is considered a “co-production” of NPR and that member station rather than programming coming directly from NPR.

2. Talk radio: The index includes some of the most popular national talk shows that are public affairs or news oriented. Since the larger portion of the talk radio audience, and talk radio hosts, are politically conservative, we included more conservative than liberal hosts.

Each day we coded the first 30 minutes of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, which is heard by more listeners than any other talk show, according to Talkers Magazine (December 2006). We also rotated each day between the two next most popular conservative shows, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage. Since the liberal audience for talk radio is smaller, we only coded one liberal talk show a day, rotating daily between Ed Schultz and Randi Rhodes, two of the top liberal radio hosts based on national audiences. The Arbitron ratings, according to Talkers Magazine online, for spring 2006 are as follows:

Minimum Weekly Cume (in millions, rounded to the nearest 0.25, based on Spring ’06 Arbitron reports)⁹

Rush Limbaugh 13.50

Sean Hannity 12.50

Michael Savage 8.50

Ed Schultz 2.25

Randi Rhodes 1.25

Alan Colmes 1.25

3. Headline feeds: Hourly news feeds from national radio organizations like CBS and CNN appear on local stations across the country. These feeds usually last five minutes at the top of each hour, and are national in that people all over the country get the same information. They frequently supplement local talk and news shows.

To get a representation of these feeds, we coded two national feeds, each twice a day (9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern time). The networks that were included were CBS Radio and ABC Radio. The stations that were used to capture the CBS Radio headlines, primarily KKZN in Colorado and WCBS in New York City, each generally carried five minutes of CBS Radio headlines, while the stations used primarily to capture the ABC Radio headlines, WMAL in Washington, D.C., and WLS in Chicago, generally carried two minutes of syndicated news headlines.

The stations that were used to capture each program were selected based on the availability of a solid feed through the stations’ Web sites. We also compared their shows to that of other stations to ensure that the same edition was aired on that station as with others carrying the same program.

This resulted in the following sample:

News: 30 minutes of NPR’s Morning Edition each day, as broadcast on a selected member station.

Headlines: Four headline segments each day (two from ABC Radio and two from CBS Radio), about 14 minutes.

Talk: The first 30 minutes of three talk programs each day — two conservative (Rush Limbaugh and either Sean Hannity or Michael Savage) and one liberal (Ed Schultz or Randi Rhodes). About 2.5 hours a day.

Universe of Outlets

Newspapers (Sunday to Friday)

The New York Times every day

Coded two out of these four every day

The Washington Post

The Los Angeles Times

USA Today

The Wall Street Journal

Coded two out of these four every day

The Boston Globe

The ( Minneapolis) Star Tribune

The Austin ( Texas) American-Statesman

The Albuquerque Journal

Coded two out of these four every day

The Sun ( Attleboro, Mass.) Chronicle

The ( Ashtabula, Ohio) Star Beacon

The Chattanooga Times Free Press

The Bakersfield Californian

Web sites (Monday to Friday)

CNN.com

Yahoo News

MSNBC.com

Google News

AOL News

Network TV (Monday to Friday)

Morning shows

ABC – Good Morning America

CBS – Early Show

NBC – Today

Evening news

ABC – World News Tonight

CBS – CBS Evening News

NBC – NBC Nightly News

PBS – NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

Cable TV (Monday to Friday)

Daytime (2 to 2:30 p.m.) – coded two out of three every day

CNN

Fox News

MSNBC

Nighttime CNN – coded three out of the four every day

Lou Dobbs Tonight

Situation Room (6 p.m.)

Paula Zahn Now/Out in the Open

Anderson Cooper 360

Nighttime Fox News – coded three out of the four every day

Special Report With Brit Hume

Fox Report With Shepard Smith

O’Reilly Factor

Hannity & Colmes

Nighttime MSNBC – coded two out of the four every day

Tucker Carlson (6 p.m.)

Hardball (7 p.m.)

Countdown With Keith Olbermann

Scarborough Country/Live With Dan Abrams

Radio (Monday to Friday)

News Radio

Headlines – every day

ABC Radio headlines at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.

CBS Radio headlines at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.

NPR’s Morning Edition – 5:00-5:30 a.m. as broadcast on an East Coast member station.

Talk radio

Rush Limbaugh every day

One out of two additional conservatives each day:

Sean Hannity

Michael Savage

One out of two liberals each day:

Ed Schultz

Randi Rhodes

That resulted in 35 outlets each weekday, and seven newspapers were included only on Sundays.

Universe Procurement and Story Inclusion

Newspapers

For each of the seven newspapers included in our sample, we coded all stories where the beginning of the text of the story appears on the front page of that day’s hard copy edition. If a story only had a picture, caption or teaser to text inside the edition, we did not include that story in our sample. We coded all stories that appeared on the front page with a national or international focus. Because we were looking at the coverage of national and international news, if a story was about an event that was solely local to the paper’s point of origination, we excluded such a local story from our sample. The sole exception to this rule was when a story with a local focus was tied to a story that we determined to be a “Big Story” – defined as one that has been covered in multiple national news outlets for more than one news cycle. For example, a story about a local soldier who has come back from the Iraq War has a local angle but is related to a national issue and was important in the context of our study.

We coded the entirety of the text of all the articles we include. If an article included a jump to an inside page in the hard copy edition, we coded all the text including that which makes up the jump.

When possible, we subscribed to the hard copies of the selected newspapers and had them delivered to our Washington office. This was possible for national papers that have same-day delivery (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today). For these papers, we used the hard copy edition to determine the placement on the front page of the edition and to get all the text we coded. One element of the hard-copy stories we were not able to achieve easily with those editions was the word count of each article. For that, we used the LexisNexis computer database to determine the word count for each of the stories coded.

For all of the other papers that we are not able to get hard copies of within the same day of publication, we took advantage of Internet resources that have digital copies of the hard copy editions. Pressdisplay.com and Newsstand.com offer services where we could subscribe to digital versions of the hard copy and get them the same day. From these digital versions, we got the text of the relevant articles and also determined the word counts. To get the word counts, we copied the text of the articles (not including captions, headlines, bylines or pull-out quotes) into the Microsoft Word software program and ran the word count function to get the number. When necessary, we went to the paper’s Web site in order to find the text of articles that were not available on either of the two Web services. Through prior experience and through examination of each individual article, we were able to determine when the text of the article on the Web site was the same as it would be on the hard copy of the paper.

Network and Cable Television

For television programs, we coded the first 30 minutes of the broadcast, regardless of how long the program lasts. As with newspapers, we coded all stories that are news reports that relate to a national or international issue. Therefore, we did not code stories that are part of a local insert into a national show. For example, NBC’s Today Show cuts each half-hour to a local affiliate that will report local stories and weather. We did not include those local insert stories.

We also excluded from our sample commercials, promos and teasers of upcoming stories. We were interested only in the actual reporting that takes place during the broadcasts.

Any story that fit the above criteria and began within the first 30 minutes was included in the study, even if the story finished outside of the 30-minute time period. A three-minute story that began 28 minutes into a program was be coded in its entirety, even though the final minute ran after our 30-minute cutoff mark. The exception to this rule was when a television station showed a speech or press conference that ran longer than the 30-minute period (often much longer). In those cases, we cut off the coding at the 30-minute mark in order to prevent that event from unduly impacting our overall data.

The method of collection of all television programs was the same. PEJ is a subscriber to the DirectTV satellite television service and we have nine TiVo recording boxes hooked up to the DirectTV signals. Through these TiVo boxes, we digitally recorded each broadcast and then archived the programs onto DVDs. There is redundancy in our recording method so that each show is recorded on two machines to prevent an error from causing problems in our capture.

Occasionally outlets deviated from the regularly scheduled news programs. When the deviation was a special program produced by that news outlet (such as “A Special Look Into Iraq With Wolf Blitzer”), we coded the same 30-minute period that we would have coded otherwise in order to get a realistic account of what news would be available to the consumer who tuned in at that time. However, when a show was pre-empted for a special live event, such as a presidential campaign debate or the State of the Union address, we did not include that period as part of our sample.

There were 261 weeknights in our 2007 sample of the network nightly newscasts. On three nights (January 1, November 23 and November 25), ABC did not air its regular nightly newscast, and on two nights (November 22 and 23), CBS did not air its regular nightly newscast. On most occasions, the newscasts were pre-empted by sporting events.

Radio

The rules for capturing and selecting stories to code for radio were very similar to television. We coded the first 30 minutes or each show regardless of how long the show lasts. We also excluded local inserts from local affiliates and continued coding any story that ran past the 30-minute mark.

For each of the radio shows selected, we found national feeds of the show that were available on the Web. As with television, we have two computers capturing each show so as to avoid errors if one feed was not working. The actual recording is done using a software program called Replay A/V, which captures the digital feeds and creates digital copies of the programs onto our computers. We then archived those programs onto DVDs.

Online

For each of the Web sites we included in our sample, we captured and coded the top five stories that appeared on the site at the time of capture. Our captures took place from 9 to 10 a.m. Eastern time each weekday. The captures physically occurred with a coder going to each site using an Internet browser and saving the home page and appropriate article pages to our computers, exactly as they appeared in our browsers at the time of the capture. We relied on people rather than a software package to capture sites because some software packages interfere with the operation of Web sites.

As with newspapers, some stories are longer than one Web page. In those cases, we included the entire text of the article for as many Web pages that the article lasted.

Because each Web site is formatted differently, we came up with a standard set of rules to determine which stories were the most prominent on a given home page. We spent a significant amount of time examining various popular news sites and discovered patterns that led us to the best possible rules. We ignored all advertisements, audio/visual features, or extra features on the sites that were not news reported stories. We were interested only in the main channels of the Web sites where the lead stories of the day were displayed. We determined the top “lead” story. That was the story with the largest font size for its headline on the home page. The second most prominent story was the story that had a picture associated with it, if that story was different than the story with the largest headline. By considering many sites, we realized that a number of sites put pictures with stories they find particularly interesting but are clearly not intended to be the most important story of the day. We wanted those stories to be in our sample, however, because the reader’s eye is often drawn to them.

Having figured out the first and second most prominent stories, we then relied on two factors to determine the third. We considered the size of the headline text and then the height on the home page. Therefore, for determining the third most prominent story, we looked for the story with the largest headline font after the top two most prominent stories. If there are several stories with identical font sizes, we determined that the story that is higher up on the page is more prominent. In cases where two articles had the same font size and the same height on the screen, we chose the article to the left to be the more prominent.

Coding Procedures and Intercoder Reliability

A coding protocol was designed for this project based on PEJ’s previous related studies. Eighteen variables were coded, including coder ID, date coded, story ID number (these three were generated from the coding software automatically), story date, source, broadcast start time, broadcast story start timecode, headline, story word count, placement/prominence, story format, story describer, big story, sub-storyline, geography focus, broad story topic, broadcast story ending timecode and campaign mention.

Variable source includes all the outlets we coded. Variable broadcast start time applies to radio and TV broadcast news and gives the starting time of the program in which the story appears. Broadcast story start timecode is the amount of time a story appears after the start of the show, while broadcast story ending timecode is the amount of time a story appears when the show ends. Variable headline determines whether the story is part of a regular news roundup segment. Variable story word count designates the word count of each individual print/online news story. Variable placement/prominence designates where stories are placed within a publication, on a Web site, or within a broadcast. The location reflects the prominence given the stories by the journalists creating and editing the content. Story format measures the type and origin of the text-based and broadcast stories, which designates, at a basic level, whether the news story is a product of original reporting or drawn from another news source. Story describer is a short description of the content of each story. Big stories are particular topics that occurred often in news media during the period under study. Sub-storyline applies to stories that fit into some of the long-running big stories or other common storyline, reflecting aspects, features or development of some big stories. Variable geographic focus concerns the geographic area to which the topic is relevant in relation to the location of the news source. Variable broad story topic determines the type of broad topic categories addressed by a story. Variable campaign mention determines whether the story has any mention at all of a U.S. campaign or election.

The team responsible for performing the content analysis was made up of 13 coders, a coding administrator and a senior research methodologist. Five of coders have been trained extensively since the summer of 2006.

Two major tests of intercoder reliability were conducted over the past year in order to ensure accuracy among all the coders. The first test was conducted just prior to the launch of the weekly News Coverage Index reports beginning in January 2007.

For the first test, two random datasets were combined for running intercoder reliability statistics. In total, 126 stories from 16 outlets within various media categories (newspapers, online, television, radio) were randomly selected to assess the reliability, resulting in roughly 9% of one week’s total story count (one week’s total story count ranges from 1,200 to 1,400). Over all, 22 stories were coded by seven coders (17%), 66 stories were coded by six coders (52%), and 38 stories were coded by five coders (30%).

For the more difficult or subjective variables, including story format and broad story topic, we conducted furthering testing. Ninety stories from 10 outlets within various media sectors were randomly selected for reliability assessment for these variables as well as for a newly added variable campaign mention. Most of the coders coded all of these stories. Data shows that the percent of agreement for all the variables in the index were above 80.

A second test of intercoder reliability was conducted in April and May of 2007. For this test of intercoder reliability, we divided the variables into two groups and tested those variables separately as to ensure the accuracy for each variable.

Housekeeping Variables

The first group of variables we tested for was called housekeeping variables. These are variables that are necessary for each story, but often involve little to no subjectivity from the coder. For this test, we selected a random sample of 151 stories from each of the five media sectors we covered. Each story was coded by two coders.  This represented more than 10% of the number of stories we code in a given week.

Of those stories, 32 were print stories (newspaper and online) and 119 were broadcast stories (television and radio). For our housekeeping variables, we achieved the following levels of agreement:

Print (32 cases)
Story Date: 100%
Source: 100%
Story word count (+- 20 words): 90%
Placement: 94%

Broadcast (119 cases)
Story Date: 100%
Source: 100%
Broadcast start time: 100%
Headline: 100%
Story start time (+- 6 seconds): 91%
Placement: 93%
Story end time (+- 6 seconds): 92%

Main Variables

The second group of variables we tested are referred to as the main variables, and are variables that take more training to utilize and comprehend. Having already demonstrated that we had a high level of agreement for all of our housekeeping variables, we then had the coders participate in an additional test to determine the level of agreement for these main variables.

We randomly selected 116 stories from both print and broadcast mediums, which represented about 8% of the stories we code in a typical week.  The level of agreement for each of our key variables was as follows:

Format: 89%
Big Story: 91%
Sub-storyline: 87%
Geographic Focus: 91%
Topic: 85%

All the percentages of agreement for the above variables were calculated using a software program available online called PRAM (See “The Content Analysis Guidebook,” by Kimberly A. Neuendorf, Sage Publications, 2002.).

Throughout 2007, as new coders were hired and included in the coding process, they were given extensive training from both the coding administrator and from other experienced coders. New coders were not allowed to participate in the weekly coding for the News Coverage Index until they had demonstrated a level of agreement with experienced coders for all variables at an 80% level or higher.

Each coder worked between 20 and 37.5 hours a week in our Washington and was trained to work on all the mediums included in the sample. The schedule for each coder varied, but since all of the material included in the index is archived, the actual coding can be performed at any point during the week.

To achieve diversity in the coding and statistics, generally no one coder coded more than 50% of a particular sector within one week. And each coder coded at least three mediums each week. In the case of difficult coding decisions about a particular story, the final decision was made by either the coding administrator or a senior member of the PEJ staff.

The physical coding data was entered by the coders into a proprietary software program that has been written for this project by PEJ Phase II Technologies. The software allows coders to enter the data using the appropriate conditions for each variable, and also allows coders to review their work and correct mistakes when needed. The same software package compiles all of the coding data each week and allows us to perform the necessary statistical tests.

Total Media Combined: Creation and Weighting

The basis of measurement for top stories is time in broadcast and cable and words in text-based media. Thus for cable news, for example, we refer to the percent of total seconds that a certain story received. In other words, of all the seconds analyzed in cable news this week, ground events in Iraq accounted for xx% (or xx seconds out of a total of xxx). The industry term for this is “newshole” — the space given to news content.

The main index considers broadcast and print together, identifying the top stories across all media. To do this, words and seconds are merged together to become total newshole. After considering the various options for merging the two, the most straightforward and sensible method was to first generate the percent of newshole for each specific medium. This way all media are represented in the same measurement — percent.

Next, we needed to create a method for merging the various percentages. There were several options. We could have run a simple average of all five. We could have averaged all print and all broadcast and then average those two? Or should we apply some kind of weight based on apparent audience?

Because each medium measures its audience differently (ratings per month in television, daily circulation in newspapers, unique visitors in online), it is nearly impossible to create a reliable system based on audience figures. Nonetheless, several of our advisers thought some kind of weight should be applied. Various options were considered, including a combination of different metrics, such as actual data alongside supplemental survey data. One consistent measure is that of public opinion surveys. The same question is posed about multiple media. Two such questions are asked regularly by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. One asks about “regular usage” and the other asks where people go for “national and international news.”

Before arriving at a method, we tested multiple models:

Model 1: Compile percentages for big stories for each of the five media sectors (newspapers, online sites, network television, cable television and radio), and then average those five lists into one final list.

Model 2: Divide the media sectors into two groups, text-based media (newspapers, online sites) and broadcast (network television, cable television, and radio). Average the lists of percentages between the two groups to get one final list.

Model 3: Compile percentages for big stories for each of the five media sectors, and then add the weighted five lists together into one final list. The weights given to each media sector were calculated by averaging three most recent survey data in terms of where people get news about national and international issues, collected by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press (August 2006, November 2005 and June 2005). First, we take the average response for each media across the three time periods. Next, we rebalance the average percents to match the five media sectors in the index — newspapers, Internet, network television, cable television and radio — to equal 100%. In this calculation, the weight for newspapers is 0.28, for Internet 0.16, for network television 0.18, for cable television 0.26, and for radio 0.12.

Model 4: Compile percentages for big stories for each of the five media sectors, and then add the weighted five lists together into one final list. The weights assigned to each media sector were generated based on the regularly media usage survey data, collected by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in its Biennial Media Consumption Survey 2006. In this, the weight for newspaper is 0.307, for Internet 0.218, for network television 0.165, cable television is 0.201 and radio 0.109.

By testing two trial weeks’ data, we found that the lists of top five stories were exactly the same (top stories’ names and their ranks) using all four of these models, although some percentages varied. In the end, the academic and survey analysts on our team felt the best option was Model 3. It has the virtue of tracking the media use for national and international news, which is what the index studies.

Spanish-Language Coverage of the Immigration Bill: Methodology

Sample

PEJ studied the period June 25-29, 2007. In print we studied the front-sections of three Hispanic papers — La Opinión, El Nuevo Herald and El Diario-La Prensa – and three English-language papers — the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. In broadcast we studied the three English-language commercial television network evening newscasts and the PBS NewsHour and two Spanish-language evening newscasts, on Telemundo and Univision.

During this period all stories that were at least 50% about the issue of immigration were captured for analysis.

Story Capture

Five of the six papers — La Opinión, El Nuevo Herald, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times — were collected by conducting a simple LexisNexis search, which allowed us to determine the word counts and placement of each story. Since El Diario-La Prensa was unavailable on LexisNexis, hard copies of the papers were obtained from the New York Public Library archives and all relevant articles were obtained. PEJ collected and studied all stories on the immigration bill appearing in the front section of each paper. The papers were selected based on circulation and geographic relevance to show the differences between different Hispanic markets, since Hispanic newspapers do not circulate nationally.

The broadcast stories were obtained from National Aircheck, a broadcast media monitoring firm. English broadcast stories were collected from PEJ’s news index archives, which contains daily network broadcast news programs. PEJ’s normal practice is to code only the first 30 minutes of a news broadcast if the program airs for over one hour, but in the case of all broadcast sources in English and Spanish, save for PBS NewsHour, all programs air for thirty minutes. In the case of PBS, PEJ coded only the first half hour.

Coding Design

Once the stories were collected, PEJ used the content analysis method employing original software designed to organize the stories according to specific variables. We selected several different variables that would allow us to measure each article quantitatively and qualitatively. For this project, the English-language stories had already been coded and identified in the News Index as being on the discussion of the immigration legislation, and PEJ went back in the database and isolated those stories and combined them with the Spanish-language stories in the database. The stories were categorized by:

• program or publication
• date
• word count
• format
• story describer
• three main sources

The story describer serves the purpose of allowing us to quickly identify a story based on content and gives a brief description of the material covered in the article. The three main sources variable specifies where the reporters obtained their information from when they relied on an outside source. Quotes from politicians or activists, statistics from organizations and interviews with citizens all are considered sources.

The qualitative aspect of the project focused on examining the articles for tone, language use and any other similarities or differences found in both print and broadcast. The stories were compared to one another in their respective languages and mediums and were then compared in English and Spanish to draw comparisons.

All stories were coded in their original language.

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INTRODUCTION

Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008.

It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.

The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.

Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years.

This description is a composite. It is based on face-to-face interviews conducted at newspapers across the country and the results of a detailed survey of senior newsroom executives. In total, more than 250 newspapers participated. It is, we believe, the most systematic effort yet to examine the changing nature of the resources in American newspaper newsrooms at a critical time. It is an attempt to document and quantify cutbacks and innovations that have generally been known only anecdotally.

The study, by journalist Tyler Marshall and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, captures an industry in the grips of two powerful, but contradictory, forces. On one hand, financial pressures sap its strength and threaten its very survival. On the other, the rise of the web boosts its competitiveness, opens up innovative new forms of journalism, builds new bridges to readers and offers enormous potential for the future. Many editors believe the industry’s future is effectively a race between these two forces. Their challenge is to find a way to monetize the rapid growth of web readership before newsroom staff cuts so weaken newspapers that their competitive advantage disappears. In recent weeks—after this survey was completed—a new round of newsroom cutbacks, made against a backdrop of steadily deteriorating advertising revenues and rising production costs, intensifies the difficulty of the challenge.

This report is an attempt to document where newspapers are in that race. As editors cut back on coverage and staff, while at the same time building up their capacity online and in multi-media, what is being gained and what is being lost?  What coverage is disappearing and what beats are considered sacrosanct?  What new expertise has come into the newsroom, and what knowledge has been lost? In short, where is the industry headed?

The Key Findings:

• The majority of newspapers are now suffering cutbacks in staffing, and even more in the amount of news, or newshole, they offer the public. The forces buffeting the industry continue to affect larger metro newspapers to a far greater extent than smaller ones. In some cases, these differences are so stark it seems that larger and smaller newspapers are living two distinctly different experiences. Fully 85% of the dailies surveyed with circulations over 100,000 have cut newsroom staff in the last three years, while only 52% of smaller papers reported cuts. Recent announcements of a further round of newsroom staff reductions at large papers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post, indicates these differences may be widening further. Our survey found that more than half of the editors at larger papers and a third at smaller ones expect more cutbacks in the next year. But a weaker-than-expected economic performance during the first half of 2008 and grimmer forecasts for the rest of the year suggest some of those cutbacks have already been implemented and darken these projections even further.

• Papers both large and small have reduced the space, resources and commitment devoted to a range of topics. At the top of that list, nearly two thirds of papers surveyed have cut back on foreign news, over half have trimmed national news and more than a third have reduced business coverage. In effect, America’s newspapers are narrowing their reach and their ambitions and becoming niche reads.

• The culture of the daily newspaper newsroom is also changing. New job demands are drawing a generation of young, versatile, tech-savvy, high-energy staff as financial pressures drive out higher-salaried veteran reporters and editors. Newsroom executives say the infusion of new blood has brought with it a new competitive energy, but they also cite the departure of veteran journalists, along with the talent, wisdom and institutional memory they hold as their single greatest loss. Clearly stretched to describe what is unfolding in their newsrooms, editors use words like, “exciting,” “extraordinary,” “nerve-wracking” and “tumultuous.”

• Newspaper websites are increasingly a source of hope but also of fear. Editors feel torn between the advantages the web offers and the energy it consumes to produce material often of limited or even questionable value. A plurality of editors (48%), for instance, say they are conflicted by the trade-offs between the speed, depth and interactivity of the web and what those benefits are costing in terms of accuracy and journalistic standards. Yet a similar plurality (43%) thinks “web technology offers the potential for greater-than-ever journalism and will be the savior of what we once thought of as newspaper newsrooms.”

Amid these concerns—and despite the enormous cutbacks and profound worries—editors still sense that their product is improving, not worsening. Fully 56% think their news product is better than it was three years earlier.

“I believe the journalism itself is discernibly better than it was a year ago,” said the editor of a large metropolitan daily, whose paper last year lost 70 newsroom employees. “There’s an improvement in enterprise, in investigations and in the coverage of several core beats.”

How such upbeat assessments stand up in the face of new staff cuts and more pessimistic economic projections is unclear. Several editors lamented the attendant loss of time to organize a thoughtful attack on a story, to think through precisely why a story is being done or how to make the story more meaningful. “There is a huge pressure to rush to publish,” one editor added in a comment on the survey.

Overall, newsroom executives say they feel broadly unprepared for the changes sweeping over them and seem uncertain where the changes would lead. Only 5% of those responding to the survey said they were very confident of their ability to predict what their newsrooms would look like five years from now.

“I feel I’m being catapulted into another world, a world I don’t really understand,” said Virginian-Pilot Editor Denis Finley. “It’s scary because things are happening at the speed of light. The sheer speed (of change) has outstripped our ability to understand it all.”

These are some of the findings of the study, which is based on interviews at newspapers in 15 different cities from four distinct regions of the country and a survey of senior news executives from 259 newspapers. That sample of newspaper executives includes more than half of all newspapers over 100,000 in circulation, and roughly one-third of those with circulations between 50,000-100,000. In total, more than one in every five of the nation’s 1,217 daily newspapers participated, making it one of the broadest surveys of its kind in recent years.  The survey was executed online with the help of Princeton Survey Research Associates during the first quarter of 2008.

In this report we divide the analysis into six main areas:

I. Cutbacks, which examines the depth of staff reductions and how larger and smaller newspapers have been affected;

II. Changing Content, which looks at what topics are losing space and resources, which are growing and which are holding steady;

III. The Changing Newsroom, which charts the transformation of newsroom skills, demands and culture;

IV. The Influence of the Web, which studies the enormous impact newspaper websites are having on newsrooms and on daily newspaper journalism;

V. Citizen In the Newsroom, which explores the growing influence and impact of journalism produced by non-professional journalists; and

IV. The Future, which weighs the implications of smaller newsrooms, greater innovation, more financial pressures and the struggle to monetize the web.

I. STAFF CUTBACKS

There is a little doubt that American newspapers are cutting back.

Well over half (59%) of the 259 newspapers participating in the survey have reduced full-time newsroom staff over the past three years, mainly because of financial pressures. Roughly the same number (61%) also reported a decrease in their overall newshole—the physical space in the paper available for stories.

The hammer has hit newspapers with circulations of over 100,000 significantly harder than those with smaller circulations. Fully 85% of these larger papers have reduced newsroom staff in the past three years, compared with 52% at the smaller papers.  The cuts made by larger papers have also been marginally deeper than those carried out by their smaller counterparts and newshole shrinkage has been more dramatic.

At the same time, fewer large newspapers (7%) have added staff than their smaller cousins (16%) and when they have added, the additions have been smaller. Editors at larger papers also envision a gloomier future. Over half (56%) the newsroom executives responding from larger papers said they anticipated further newsroom cuts over the next 12 months compared to just 30% of editors from smaller papers.

More broadly, the study suggests two very different experiences, with smaller newspapers apparently better anchored into their communities and with more deeply involved readerships, enjoying greater stability.

II. CHANGING CONTENT

What Topics Are Losing Space and Resources

If the papers are smaller in the number of pages and the staffs producing them are shrinking as well, what is being lost and what is being gained? The survey and the in-depth interviews suggest that more is disappearing than is being added.

The survey used three different measures to probe the question. It asked about space devoted to a range of topics. It asked about the amount of reporting resources assigned to cover each topic. And it asked how essential editors thought each topic was to their paper’s identity.

By all three measures, international news is rapidly losing ground at rates greater than any other topic area. Roughly two-thirds (64%) of newsroom executives said the space devoted to foreign news in their newspaper had dropped over the past three years. Nearly half (46%) say they have reduced the resources devoted to covering the topic–also the highest percentage recording a drop. Only 10% said they considered foreign coverage “very essential.”

This decline in foreign news occurs as U.S. armed forces confront stubborn insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Administration talks of a global war on terrorism and international trade increasingly impacts the everyday lives of Americans.

Surprisingly, there has been an almost identical level of decline in international news among smaller newspapers and the country’s larger metropolitan dailies, many of which historically have valued foreign correspondence highly enough to underwrite their own foreign reporting staffs. Among the larger papers, 65% say they have cut space, and 46% say they have decreased reporting resources to it—virtually no different from their smaller counterparts.  And barely a quarter (26%) of editors from these larger papers still considered foreign news as “very essential,” compared to just 6% of their colleagues from smaller dailies. Several papers, including the Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, and Newsday—all with proud traditions of foreign correspondence—have closed their last overseas bureaus in the past three years and now rely mainly on the shrinking number of other outlets for their international news.

This doesn’t mean these larger papers have entirely abandoned original reporting from abroad. For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer (circulation: 334,000) closed the last of its foreign bureaus in November, 2006, yet it still maintains money in its editorial budget for staff foreign travel. Inquirer Editor Bill Marimow said this money is tapped when editors conclude a staff reporter can add significant value to a story.

The fall from favor of national news was similar, albeit slightly less pronounced. Well over half (57%) of newsroom executives said they had reduced the space devoted to national news during the past three years. Four out of ten (41%) said they had cut reporting power devoted to national government/politics and only 18% of editors considered national news “very essential.” This decline came despite one of the most compelling presidential primary races in decades.

Several editors also noted that the national and foreign news that does make it into their papers, is often displayed less prominently. Stories in these categories that were once considered worthy of front page display now frequently appear inside the paper.

“Maybe there was a spot on the front page that everyone considered was the foreign or national story of the day, but that’s changed,” said Sharon Rosenhause, managing editor of the Ft. Lauderdate Sun-Sentinel (circulation: 218,000). “That story is still in the paper, but it’s just inside. To make the front page, it has to be a significant development or a story that we can see through Florida eyes or some kind of Florida prism”

This decline in national news coverage appears to be part of a larger trend in which America’s dailies have begun reducing routine staff coverage of events outside their immediate circulation area. The editor of a large metro daily said he still sent his paper’s movie critic to cover out-of-town film festivals, but now limited the assignment to only a few days instead of the full event.

“We still have the coverage,” this editor said. “But instead of the full ten days, we’ll go for five.”

Other events that once rated staff coverage are now left to wires.

“There was a time we’d cover big national stories, but we rarely do that anymore,” said this same editor. “In sports, for example, we’ll go to fewer big, out-of-area college basketball, football or auto racing events or games that don’t involve a local team. We take all the major wires, so that’s what we use.”

When editors feel national stories do require staff coverage, many now say they try to find a way to do something entirely unique-to make it part of their distinct franchise. The St. Petersbur Times (circulation 316,000), for example, decided against putting its Washington bureau chief and some members of its political team on the presidential campaign trail, but instead assigned them to an exclusive feature called “PolitiFact,” which effectively runs truth tests on the statements of candidates. The feature, replete with detailed explanations and a “Truth-O-Meter,” rates a comment as true, mostly true, mostly false, false or-if egregiously false- a “pants on fire.”

Space and resources devoted to the coverage of science, business, the arts, and lifestyles have also fallen over the past three years.

Newsroom executives who say they have eliminated jobs that cover specialized beats, such as film or music critics, book reviewers, columnists, national or foreign correspondents, said they had in many cases replaced newsroom-written contributions with syndicated or news agency content—content they get at a fraction of the cost of producing it with staff.

Such tactics have probably stemmed the loss of coverage, but they do carry other costs. Editors say such staff losses reduce their ability to shape coverage to fit the community’s specific interests or needs. For example, offering special treatment to an election in a far-off country that has a large immigrant population locally is no longer in the hands of the paper’s senior editors. Instead, those editors are reliant on agency offerings over which they have far less control. The decline of prestigious newsroom jobs also affects recruitment of new talent, the brightest of which are drawn to newspapers with a broad range of challenging jobs.

At another level, this shrinkage of specialized beats reduces the marketplace of ideas and interpretations as more newspapers decide to cut plum (and thus, expensive) jobs because they can “buy the content elsewhere.”  Such a process concentrates the power and the responsibility that goes with reporting these areas into the hands of those organizations that still provide such coverage.  One executive editor remarked how, after being forced to lay off the paper’s art critic, the choice of a further staff cut then focused on either the resident film or music critic.

“I hated to make that cut,” the editor said. “I read all these things about how cutting film critics is a good choice because you can get film criticism from other places, but those are the same arguments you hear about foreign coverage, national coverage or state government coverage. Eventually, you wake up one day and find there is no somewhere else because everyone has done the same thing you’ve done. It’s very troubling.”

Science reporting is one such example. Research conducted by Cristine Russell of the Shorenstein Center on the state of science journalism estimates that of the 95 newspapers that published special science sections in the 1980s, only about 35 still do so today. If editor enthusiasm is any measure, a reversal of this trend seems unlikely. Only 10% of editors responding to the PEJ survey said they considered science and technology reporting “very essential” to the quality of their news product.

In making these cuts, editors also don’t necessarily eliminate subject matter altogether. Instead, they tend to dilute it.

Reporters who once concentrated on one beat or specialty now frequently have two or three. Newspapers, for example, that had one reporter assigned to cover local courts might now also assign the same reporter to cover city hall or education after laying off those who covered those beats. In interviews, editors of newspapers that had undergone significant newsroom cuts repeatedly found themselves hard-pressed to name beats that had been abandoned completely. But they agreed the coverage had become thinner and, because of that, its quality had diminished.

Stories are not the only things being downsized to accommodate a smaller newshole. Editors said they are reducing the size of the daily crossword, eliminating stock tables and other tabular material, or scrapping the daily television listings (while keeping the Sunday TV supplement that contains the week’s listings). Yet editors told us these sorts of cuts have frequently been met with intense reader protest, even though the material remains available online. Conversely, more draconian measures, such as cutting foreign news, eliminating or merging features sections, laying off the staff science writer or downsizing the editorial pages have produced comparatively modest reader reaction.

Said Diane McFarlin, publisher of the Herald-Tribune Media Group in Sarasota, Florida (Herald Tribune circulation:114,904), “I’ve gotten no letters from people saying, I don’t think you’re covering as much local news or not doing enough investigative pieces. What I get is hate mail about taking the TV listings, cutting the size of the crossword or moving the comics around. That’s what enrages people.”

But she also cautioned, “The industry may think it’s getting away with eroding local news coverage because it’s an incremental loss and readers don’t react as vociferously and immediately as they do to the loss of daily standards like TV listings and comics.”

What Topics Are Growing

As editors struggle to manage loss, they are also searching for the “franchise” elements of coverage that give people a reason to still read their paper. What is the essential niche? To many editors, the key task is identifying what issues matter most to readers and improving coverage of them—both in print and online—as they trim elsewhere.

The reporting and survey data suggest that this search is leading daily newspapers to focus their diminishing resources closer to home. A whopping 97% of editors rated local news “very essential” to their news product—by far the highest percentage of any news category. Even America’s largest newspapers—those with the greatest reach—gave their highest “very essential” rating (94%) to local news. However, larger and smaller papers diverged sharply on the importance of closer in, even more local, neighborhood, or so-called “hyper-local” news. By nearly a 2-1 margin (83% to 48%), editors from smaller papers placed greater value on neighborhood news than their counterparts from larger papers.

Editors’ responses also indicated that community news is the biggest overall gainer in space. At a time of shrinking newshole, nearly two-thirds (62%) of those responding to the survey said they had increased the amount of space devoted to community and neighborhood news. Among smaller papers, this number was even higher at 67%.

In each of seven specific topic areas where editors said they had added reporting power over the past three years there was a strong local news component: local government and politics, education, the environment, police, sports, obituary writing and investigative reporting. Education was the biggest gainer, with 36% of newsroom executives saying that had added reporting power in this area Lisa Walker, executive director of the Education Writers Association in Washington, DC, described today’s daily newspaper education beats as increasingly “very local”, with less emphasis on broader context and less coverage of national trends than was once the case.

Staffing for coverage of sports, local government and politics, police and investigative reporting, all grew in 30% of the newsrooms surveyed.  Although not specifically measured in the survey, anecdotal evidence suggests that at least some of these gains have been driven by pressure to provide web content during the course of the day. Some of this content is often then “reversed published” back into the newspaper.

The focus on local news is also driving changes in zoned editions, those sections of the papers focused on specific communities or areas. Editions catering to the outer fringes of a paper’s circulation area are being closed as new ones are launched with content targeted for communities and neighborhoods within the core circulation area. Nearly four in ten editors surveyed (37%) said they had increased the number of zoned or targeted neighborhood editions they produce, while 25% had reduced them. And the push toward local sections is even higher for smaller circulation papers (44% are increasing, versus 20% reducing them).

Investigative Teams—and Their Stories—Survive

One area that most editors insist they will not cut back on is investigative or watchdog work. Those who manage papers both small and large seem to believe this is an essential part of a paper’s role, and one that fits with whatever their future business model will be.

In face-to-face interviews, editors from both larger and smaller papers invariably stressed their belief that strong investigative, explanatory, reporting remained at the core of daily newspaper journalism. This collective opinion was reinforced by the survey results, where 91% of all newsroom executives said they considered investigative or enterprise reporting either “very essential” or “somewhat essential” to the quality of their news product.

The survey data, however, suggest that larger papers are more committed to the watchdog role than smaller papers. Despite financial pressures and newsroom cuts elsewhere, half the editors from these papers said they had increased their investigative reporting staff over the past three year—twice the figure for smaller papers (24%). Over 90% of newsroom executives from larger papers considered investigative reporting “very essential” compared to just over half (52%) of their counterparts from smaller papers.

In interviews, several newsroom managers declared that their investigative reporting teams would be the last hit by newsroom downsizing. To be sure, they admitted that financial pressures today force them to be more selective in their choice of such labor-intensive editorial projects. They also noted investigative stories tend to run shorter than they did a few years ago and cost more to produce because of additional editing time required to package them for both print and web presentation. But there was evidence that advances in information technology, such as the ability to mine new electronic data bases, has enriched this genre and opened new doors for newspapers to explore important issues.

One editor of a large metropolitan daily contended this move toward smaller and stronger larger stories mirrored the trend of technology itself, where consumers are happy to watch a film on a two-inch iPhone or a 70-inch mega-screen, but find the 26-inch screen passé.

Together, these two developments—shorter news stories and richer enterprise—reflect part of a new, evolving role of the print newspaper in an era of growing online access to news virtually as it happens. In this environment, the role of the print edition of daily newspapers is becoming less a vehicle to convey news developments and more a source for analysis, texture and context to help readers better understand those developments.

Led by papers such as the New York Times (circulation: 1.1 million), editors in recent years have tended to place more analysis or enterprise stories tied to the news on the front page, while often placing the news story itself inside. The Virginian Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia (circulation: 175,000) is a leader in page one experimentation. It has repeatedly published dramatic front pages that are closely tied to the day’s news, yet contain no story in conventional format. On Memorial Day this year, for example, the Pilot devoted its entire front page to an illustration of a local Vietnam War hero’s gravestone, his Medal of Honor citation, and a single paragraph of text noting the holiday that concluded with the exhortation: “Honor them.”

Story Length

Editors indicated they also had become more selective, not just in what stories to cover and how to cover them, but also on story length. A story marking an incremental development—say, on a running city hall squabble that might have warranted a 12 to 15-inch third-day story a few years ago—is part of a dying breed. Today, such developments are either judged unworthy of coverage at all or are covered by a beat reporter in a quick-hit couple of paragraphs that are posted on the website. Depending on the weight of news day, the story either dies there, or can be “reverse published” into the newspaper as a 6-inch short or a brief.

Secondary national or international developments given modest stand-alone treatment a few years ago, have suffered a similar fate. As a result, the quantity of briefs appearing in today’s daily newspapers has risen, but so too has the quality. They have become more than fillers.

“Cut the 15-inch story to 6 for the paper, let the reporter put the other nine in his (on-line) blog for a reader who wants more information and everybody wins,”  summed up Mark Zieman, editor of the Kansas City Star (circulation: 252,000) for over a decade before being named the paper’s president and publisher last March.

St. Petersburg Times Executive Editor and Vice President Neil Brown said he believed shorter story length is also the result of more disciplined editing. “We’re more rigrous in our editing now,” he said. “We recognize that some of those stories may have been marginal, or even filler. So the 25-inch story is down to 10, 12, or 6 inches.”

The Washington Post’s (circulation: 673,000) presidential election campaign coverage is an example of this trend. Summaries of campaign highlights are collected into a series of briefs and run under a distinct logo dubbed “The Trail.” The Trail also appears as a blog on the paper’s website, washingonpost.com. Related developments or themes that touched several primary campaigns were collected together and written into a single roundup rather than as a series of disconnected stories. Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., said that during the campaign four years ago, most of what today is covered as briefs or in single roundups would have run as separate, medium-length stories. He described the 2008 election coverage format as a prototype for presenting other news elsewhere in the paper.

Such approaches help explain why, at a time of shrinking newshole and newsroom staffs, a large majority (75%) of editors said their story counts—the number of stories appearing in the paper—had either increased or remained the same during the past three years. As a result, today’s readers receive a similar, or even greater, breadth of coverage in their daily paper than a few years ago, however much of it comes in more of a digest form.

Editors differed in their views of what has been lost in this condensation of stories. For some, it is important background, context, additional sourcing and interesting ancillary points that have gone—losses that significantly devalue the shorter story. Others, however, dismissed the lost material as, more often than not, either arcane detail written into the story by a reporter trying to impress his sources or padding to give the story the appearance of greater importance than it actually was. Either way, the content lost in the print version of the story doesn’t always disappear completely. Instead, much of it migrates to the web as beat reporters write these minor twists and turns of a running story either into their own blog or as short, stand-alone website stories.

In interviews, editors generally seemed accepting of the trade-off. “It’s part of what’s enabled us to have new forms of political coverage that convey more information than we’ve ever had before,” Downie said. “Stories are definitely shorter—unless they need to be longer, such as profiles.”

III. THE CHANGING NEWSROOM

As newsroom staffs decline in numbers and the content they produce changes, the skills—indeed, the very culture—of the newspaper newsroom is undergoing its own transformation. Although less visible, the implications of this change are every bit as important as other shifts now underway. In the churn of cutbacks and the arrival of new hires, some skills are in decline as veterans depart, while, at the same time, fresh, young blood brings in new skill sets and aptitudes.

What is disappearing?

At the top of the list, the ranks of editors who check stories prior to publication are thinning. Four out of ten newspapers (42%) reported that they have reduced the number of copy editors in the last three years, while just 12% have increased. And the pressure is even worse at larger papers. There, fully 67% say they have cut back on copy editors, versus just 2% that report increases.

Similarly, about twice the number of papers reported decreasing their ranks of general editors than said they had increased (30% v. 16%). The same was true for specialized editors (27% vs. 12%), and graphic artists, (23% report cutting back vs. 14% increasing).

Another diminishing skill set, interestingly, is photographers. Overall, 31% of newspapers say they have cut back on photographers in the last three years, vs. 12% that had made net increases. At the biggest papers, this trend is more pronounced, with the majority reporting cutbacks on photographers (52%) and just 6% saying they had made net additions.

Loss of Experience, Loss of Talent

Yet, the loss lamented most by newsroom executives is one far harder to quantify—the draining away of institutional memory—as older, and often more expensive, journalists are encouraged to leave through structured buyouts.

In interviews, editors said those leaving generally are among the most experienced and the most talented. As many of these veteran reporters go, they take with them the knowledge of their beat and their community, a deep loyalty to core journalistic values, and expertise so important to understanding stories. When an experienced editor leaves, the editing process weakens—and with it, a degree of the paper’s collective wisdom and judgment.

While such renewal has always been a natural process, it can pose dangers to an institution undergoing such accelerated change. This is especially true for an institution whose role includes that of being a knowledgeable, authoritative voice for the community.

In survey responses, the loss of talent and experience was ranked as the number one concern when editors were asked to volunteer what has hurt their newsrooms the most. Fully 41% of editors surveyed offered comments that fell into this category. That was closely followed by the more general loss of staff overall (37%). Next, as a distant third, came less space (6%).

“When you have to let go someone who has been in a job for 5, 10 or 20 years, you lose something that cannot be recouped by the people who are left behind in the newsroom,” commented one editor, who counted the passing of institutional knowledge as the newsroom’s biggest loss.

Occasionally, the sheer pace of change sweeping through the industry has taken a toll in confidence levels and such fundamentals as the clarity about the role of the journalist.

When asked to cite the newsroom loss that hurt the most, one editor answered simply, “The concept of who and what we are.”

Added another, there is a “loss of stability—none in this business can predict with confidence where change is taking us.”

The bottom line culturally is this: In today’s newspapers, stories tend to be gathered faster and under greater pressure by a smaller, less experienced staff of reporters, then are passed more quickly through fewer, less experienced, editing hands on their way to publication. Some editors—but far from a majority of those interviewed—said they could see the costs.

“I read the stories (in my own paper) today and I see more holes, questions I want answered that are not,” lamented the editor of a large metropolitan newspaper. “I see more stories…that aren’t as well sourced as I’d prefer.”

What Skills Are Being Gained

The loss of institutional memory, and the erosion of the ranks of skilled editors and photographers, is part of a generational shift toward a more modern newsroom with more versatile, more tech-savvy reporters armed with new skills, higher production rates and an ability to multi-task.

Exactly what are these new skills?

By far the sharpest newsroom increases recorded in our survey were for the two web-related jobs measured: videographers and web-only editors. Fully 63% of editors surveyed had increased the amount of “editorial power” in videography. Another 57% said they had increased the resources devoted to “web-only editing.” And in hiring new staff, 90% of editors surveyed said they considered multi-media skills “very” or “somewhat essential” for the job.

Today, reporters who once carried with them little more than a pencil, a notebook and their newspaper’s first edition deadline time, are taking on new responsibilities at a dizzying pace. Anders Gyllenhaal, Executive Editor of the Miami Herald (circulation: 240,000) listed six distinct venues for which Herald newsroom staffers were expected to provide content: the print newspaper, the paper’s website (miamiherald.com), an entertainment/leisure time site launched recently by the paper (miami.com), the local PBS station for which the Herald provides news content, a web-linked television operation owned by the paper and the Herald’s instant news service, packages of brief news stories sent to Internet subscribers during the course of the day.

These tasks, together with new blood and the competitive juices stoked by a faster pace and constant deadline pressure, appear to have re-focused newsrooms. Asked to cite the newsroom change that most contributed to their ability to be competitive, editors used words like “urgency,” “excitement,” and “new enthusiasm” in describing a newly energized staff.

“New young reporters and editors who bring new skills and outlooks to those who have been here a long time,” responded one editor.

“(The) change in mindset and culture on the part of reporters and editors,” added another. “Our staff has a keen understanding of the need to out-report and out-hustle our competitors.”

Almost without exception, these gains are tied to the place where America’s newspapers, amid wrenching cutbacks, are trying to build anew: the Worldwide Web.

IV. THE INFLUENCE OF THE WEB

Together with the impact of steadily increasing financial pressures, the growing influence of the web is the second major factor driving the change of newsroom culture. News people are stretched to the limit trying to feed the seemingly insatiable appetite of the web for content—immediately. The enormity of its impact on the industry—both real and potential—is hard to overestimate.

The web has opened new vistas for daily newspapers, enabling them to offer video content that competes directly with television. It provides newsrooms the ability to establish a genuine two-way conversation with readers in a newspaper’s own community while at the same time extend the reach of the paper’s circulation to anyone with an Internet connection, whether they are in Hong Kong, Helsinki or Hoboken. Today’s savvy news junkies know that if a big news story breaks, it’s a good bet the website of the nearest newspaper will have timely, exclusive content. The Internet has also helped facilitate collaborative efforts such as that between the St. Petersburg Times and the Congressional Quarterly’s CQ Weekly to produce the “PolitiFact” feature.

Although several editors voiced concerns about the web as a distraction that deflects resources from the print edition, overall, the view of the web appears to be increasingly positive.

Editor’s responses indicated, often with a sense of surprise, that the growth of newspaper websites has also had a positive impact on the content of the newspaper itself. 

Interviews and survey results strongly indicated that—contrary to early conventional wisdom—the print and website versions of today’s daily newspapers can be complementary and mutually strengthening.

In interviews, for example, newsroom executives said their website readers want strong visuals, concisely-packaged information and easy navigation—all preferences that have begun to influence the presentation of print newspapers as they work to lure an Internet-savvy generation of potential readers to a more user-friendly experience. As a result, many newspapers today emphasize visuals, including improved graphics, more white space and better sign-posting.

Increasingly, the web today is seen as a newspaper’s ally, not an adversary. Because of this, it is helping counter sagging morale as newsrooms shrink. At larger papers, where staff cuts have been deepest and the newsroom moods darkest, fully 57% of those surveyed say “web technology offers the potential for greater-than-ever journalism and will be the savior of what we once thought of as newspaper newsrooms.” By contrast, just 4% expressed worry that the web’s pressure on immediacy might undermine the accuracy and values of journalism.

The optimism also exists at smaller papers, but not as strongly. Only 40% agree with the “savior” description. Industry-wide, nearly half of all editors responding (48%) admitted they were conflicted about the web’s impact.

Whatever their feelings, there is no doubt that the web has been accepted as a fact of newsroom life. Today, editors said they no longer ask reporters if they have time to file for the web before embarking on their story for the print edition. Filing first for the web is a given. Editors also noted that exclusive material is no longer kept off the web as it was just a few years ago to protect the print edition impact. Today, it is posted immediately.

To meet new challenges, some newsrooms have completely reorganized to provide a variety of written and visual content more efficiently to both the website and the paper.

“Newsrooms have traditionally been built around sections of the paper (and this) led to newspaper-centric thinking, production-oriented thinking,” said Charlotte Hall, editor of the Orlando Sentinel and 2008-2009 president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. As part of the revamp, the Sentinel (circulation: 228,000) eliminated traditional newsroom departments, scrapped the Metro and Features desks, and “flattened” the newsroom accountability structure by eliminating editing layers. The reorganization also cut more editing than reporting positions and reformed journalists into flexible teams of “news gatherers,” equally responsible for providing content to the web and the print editions of the paper. All were encouraged to be “web-first” thinkers on breaking news and visuals.

“We were very newspaper-production driven and I wanted to see ourselves in the new world as driven by news gathering across platforms,” she explained. “We needed to be a much more multi-media newsroom.”

The Data Challenge

Learning to use new technological tools to capture and present newsworthy data to readers in interesting, relevant ways is viewed by editors as a major challenge for American newspaper newsrooms over the coming decade. Some viewed data presentation as the next great frontier of the information age, one newsrooms needed to dominate to retain their role as the premier sources of news and information in the years ahead.

“We must have this franchise because so many others are after it,” said Janet Coats, Executive Editor of the Tampa Tribune (circulation: 221,000). “If we lose this, I really worry about our relevance.”

Some newsrooms have specifically targeted this area for development.

Orlando Sentinel editor Charlotte Hall called the creation of a data team the “single most significant innovation” to come out of the paper’s 2007 reorganization in terms of generating new reporting skills for both the web and print versions of the paper. The team brought together everyone at the paper responsible for gathering data for listings, then melded them with library researchers and archivists, a reporter trained in computer-assisted reporting (CAR) plus an editor who had been a high-level database researcher. Their job, she said, is to mine data, then work with other teams across the paper to develop stories based on that data. Initial results have included front page enterprise stories on local restaurants and housing foreclosures.

For the restaurant project, which brought a business reporter and the restaurant critic into the team, the paper put together a database of local restaurant health inspections, then produced a Sunday front page story under the headline, “How Safe Is Your Restaurant?” It told readers that 30-40% of Orlando’s licensed eating establishments had been cited for serious health violations, including some of the area’s most exclusive dining locations. Findings, broken down by neighborhood, were posted on paper’s website, as was the entire database from which the story was written. Driven largely by the Sunday front page treatment in the newspaper, the on-line database drew over a quarter of a million page views during the first few days, Hall said.

Working with data on housing foreclosures, the team produced a two-day front page package that mapped foreclosures in the Orlando region. The on-line version of the story allowed readers to zoom in by zip code or street name using an interactive map.

Other databases produce lighter fare but still draw large reader interest. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (circulation: 217,000) created a database of all 442 touchdown passes thrown by Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre, enabling readers to determine, for example, how many of them came at home and how many away, how many were over 20 yards in length or came in the 3rd quarter when the temperature was below freezing.

Early Teams and the Return of Newspapers to the Field of Breaking News

Among its many achievements, the web has restored the time competitiveness of daily newspaper newsrooms, an edge eroded first with the advent of radio nearly a century ago, then effectively erased in the 1960s as network television news became a major force.

One sign of this new competitiveness is the advent of newspaper “early teams”, groups of journalists usually comprised of an editor and a few reporters, who begin anytime around dawn or before and work through the early afternoon, reporting and writing content exclusively for the website. In many respects, these early teams represent a kind of resurrection of the old afternoon newspaper: starting early to package today’s news today—or, more precisely, packaging this morning’s news this morning.

Early teams are part of a broader repositioning of newsrooms for a 24-hour news cycle capable of feeding the web constantly. More than four of every ten (42%) papers surveyed have already added early teams and another 17% are planning to add them.  Among larger papers, a remarkable 80% already employ such teams. Although not measured specifically in the survey, anecdotal evidence and interview comments suggest that staffing of these early teams is an important component for those who say their newsroom staff has increased.

Much of the material produced by these early teams is routine—traffic tie-ups or pile-ups, police matters, late night local government meetings or sports results, fires and court appearances. Because of this, early team stories tend to have a short shelf life and are often overtaken by other, more significant news during the day. Occasionally however, they are strong enough to update and rewrite for the following morning’s newspaper.

Working from website traffic data, more newsrooms now target de facto deadlines to make sure fresh content is up for periods when traffic spikes, including 6-7am (as people wake up), 8:30-9am (as they get to work), around 11:30am (before they go to lunch) and around 2pm (when they return from lunch). The editor of one large metropolitan daily spoke of “website edition times.”

The creation of early teams has changed the role newspapers now play in covering and providing news to their community. Miami Herald newsroom executives say local television news teams frequently find themselves sourcing the Herald’s website, MiamiHerald.com, when reporting new developments on a breaking story. The reason: the paper can deploy more reporters onto the story than the smaller TV newsrooms competing for the same story. And as a new generation of newspaper reporters is trained and equipped to shoot and post video when deployed onto a breaking story, newspapers suddenly have the capability to post dramatic footage online immediately. Even if television newsrooms can match the newspaper staff’s footage, TV news directors are often left with just two choices. They either wait for their own regularly scheduled newscasts, a decision that means allowing themselves be scooped by the newspaper’s website site, or they post the footage immediately on their own site, a move that means scooping their own next scheduled newscast. Occasionally, there is no choice. When a Kansas City Star staffer captured a brawl on video that broke out during a late evening meeting of county legislators, local television stations—which rarely staff such events—turned to the Star for their footage.

The web’s arrival as a major force also has effectively redefined the universe within which daily newspapers operate. When asked about competitors, Washington Post editor Downie answered, “Any news organization with a website.” One example: in the early hours following the November, 2007, slaying of professional football star Sean Taylor, the Miami Herald broke developments on the case because the shooting occurred in Miami where the paper was well-sourced with the police and emergency response teams. However, once the focus of the story shifted to the question of Taylor’s survival, the Washington Post, one thousand miles north, took the lead because new information was coming from the family via executives of Taylor’s team, the Washington Redskins.

The Advent of the “Mo Jo”

Demands for content and quick website postings have also given birth at many newspapers to the mobile journalist—dubbed “Mo Jo’s.” More than three-quarters (78%) of those editors in newsrooms where reporters had been trained to shoot and file video footage from a remote location said they found “Mo Jo’s” contributed either “some” or “a great deal” of value to the news product. Among  editors of larger newspapers, the positive response was even higher at 90%. This figure is possibly linked to the disproportionate investment by larger papers in “early teams,” whose members often work in a similar manner.

Anecdotal evidence suggests “Mo Jo’s” are usually deployed to cover geographical rather than themed beats and tend to act as carpet sweepers, reporting and filing a stream of short, quick stories for the paper’s website on minor or routine developments during the course of the day. The true “Mo Jo” rarely appears in the newsroom, is equipped with a cell phone, laptop, digital and video cameras along with the means to file content directly to the website. When a larger story breaks, the “Mo Jo” files repeated updates for the website, and may then be asked to write a longer story for the following day’s print edition. Interviews and survey results indicated a division of opinion on the value of such reporters. The News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida, judged an initial experiment was so productive that all the paper’s reporters have since been converted into “Mo Jo’s” with considerable success, according to editors there. At the other extreme, the editor of a large circulation paper dismissed the entire concept as “some kind of cartoon character.”  Some newsroom managers said they wanted to deploy more “Mo Jo’s” but had failed to get management approval to finance the necessary training and equipment.

Micro-Sites

Another change afforded by technology is the ability to target specific audiences with specific content. Much effort is aimed at shaping content for a range of very narrow, specifically tailored interests—giving readers news of their community, their favorite sport or their preferred leisure time activity. It provides the ability to create what one executive called “The Daily Me.” Often this is reflected in so-called mini or micro sites built as distinct pages within a paper’s main online website. They can be tailored to events in specific communities or neighborhoods or to other narrowly focused interests.

One in three papers surveyed report they already have micro-sites and say they are planning to add more, while another 21% say they are developing them. As in other areas of web development, data suggest larger papers have moved more quickly to develop micro-sites than their smaller counterparts.

Arrival of the Staff-written Blog

Newspapers have also used the web to assimilate ideas from new media that a few years ago might have been considered heretical. Probably the most common of these is the rise of the staff-written blog—a space on the paper’s website where a member of the newspaper’s staff posts comments and other information usually related to his or her beat and engages readers in a free-wheeling electronic conversation.  After beginning as a feature of citizen journalism, the blog—the word is short for Web Log—has quickly become a highly successful feature of mainstream institutional journalism. The blog’s more relaxed, informal format, coupled with the ability of readers to respond quickly to a staffer’s blog entries, have accelerated and broadened the flow of information and reduced the distance between the newspaper and its readers.

Fully 70% of the newspapers participating in the survey run staff-written blogs on their websites, with nearly one-third of those papers now publishing 10 or more. And, interviews with senior newsroom managers suggest the genre is likely to grow further in the future. More than a quarter of those from newspapers with 100,000-plus circulations said they hosted 30 or more staff blogs.

Despite—or perhaps because of—their proliferation, these blogs are not getting nearly the kind of supervision or editing of the rest of the newspaper. Over half of all editors and two-thirds of those editing larger papers, said that these blogs were only edited after publication, if at all.

Many of these blogs focus on sports or specialty beats such as crime or education. Although primarily written for the web, several editors said blog content is now frequently republished into print editions. In an example of the complementary relationship of daily newspaper web and print content, Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel managing editor Rosenhause said that web traffic on one blog jumped dramatically after it was promoted in the print edition.

Blogs have also extended a paper’s reach, creating global communities of conversation.

After a web producer at the Orlando Sentinel began writing a blog for the paper’s website about his free time passion of soccer, newsroom managers were curious to see spikes in traffic to the blog at unusual times, including the pre-dawn hours. It became apparent the blog was being read worldwide, with the pre-dawn jump in traffic most likely driven by Europeans curious about new developments in the soccer world as they got started during their morning. The newspaper, which has not covered soccer as a beat, now republishes portions of the blog in its Sunday print editions.

In another example, when a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sports section blogger threw out a question asking readers how they became Green Bay Packer fans, the result was an avalanche of responses from just about every corner of the globe, according to Online Editor Michael Davis.

How Merged Is the New Merged Newsroom?

Blogs, Mo Jos, Micro-Sites, Early Teams, and more, are evidence of an important change underway in newsrooms across the country, one in which a growing number of publishers and editors, having concluded the era of print newspaper domination has ended, now believe the future of their newsroom depends on how well they can do two things:

(1) Establish themselves as strong, relevant web content providers for a generation of online news consumers; and

(2) Maintain relevant, compelling content for the newspaper’s print edition that remains the industry’s primary, albeit diminished, cash cow.

This shift of focus towards the web is accelerating at an enormous pace, driven by an alarming plunge of print edition advertising revenues, sagging stock prices and rising web traffic statistics.

Orlando Sentinel editor and ASNE president Hall talks of “huge strides” in digital journalism made during the second half of 2007 and the first half of 2008, both in her own newsroom and at many others.

“In the last year, we have made a great leap forward in Web journalism—in our fluency, the integration of our workflow and our newsroom culture,” she said.  As evidence she pointed to a 57% jump in page views at OrlandoSentinel.com in June, 2008, compared to the same month last year.

This new focus is predicated on an act of faith—that somewhere, a key exists that can unlock the secret to monetizing web content. At most larger papers, the repositioning is already well under way.  Interviews and survey responses indicated that, in a growing number of newsrooms, the website editor now has the role of a deputy managing editor—a kind of super department head, who often reports directly to the editor.

Four out of five editors (81%) today view their organization’s website and its newspaper as a single integrated product tailored to different formats, survey results showed. But accomplishing that may be easier said than done. Most editors (63%) say they still focus more of their time on the newspaper than the website. Just three in ten say the focus of senior newsroom executives was now equally divided between the two.

And most editors do not appear to be poring over traffic data from the web on a continual basis. A plurality, 42%, said they look at the data less than once a day. Just over a third (35%) look once a day. Only 22% look more often than once a day.

Although editors at times seemed wary of the web, they were simultaneously coming to realize the potential benefit, sometimes showing a sense of surprise at discovering that print and website can indeed reinforce each other.

In interviews, there were unmistakable signs that the growing demands of the web on newsrooms at times sapped attention and energy from the print edition and the conventional reporting and story telling that is focused there.

“The demands of producing more web content are diminishing the print product,” complained one editor. Still, there are strong indicators that editors are beginning to see the web’s advantages and warm to its potential.

Print editions can also take advantage of the web’s saturation coverage during the early hours of a major news development to move beyond the straight news leads even on their first cycle. In such instances, today’s print edition dailies fulfill a role similar to that of the afternoon paper in an early era when a news break occurred in time for the morning papers to catch the basic details but none of the color, context or analysis.

After an early morning gas explosion ripped through a factory in Milwaukee two years ago, newsroom staffers at the Journal Sentinel used the paper’s website to post eyewitness accounts and official statements, along with photos, video and audio content throughout the day. Meanwhile, editors assigned a reporter to focus solely on writing a narrative that would lead the next day’s paper. The result: the paper led its first print edition after the explosion with a compelling, anecdote-rich narrative, heavy with texture, mood, and the drama of the moment. The story was unencumbered by much of the factual detail available for many hours on the newspaper’s website and in other media. Street sales of the print edition the following morning were up strongly, said Journal Sentinel Editor and Senior Vice President Martin Kaiser.

The newsroom of the Arizona Republic (circulation: 413,000) deployed in a similar manner last August after two media traffic-watch helicopters collided in mid-air over Phoenix and crashed as they were tracking a lunchtime police car chase through the city. Instead of a standard wire-service lead the following morning, the Republic also led its print edition with a narrative drawn in part from the transcripts of transmissions between the two helicopter pilots.  Editor and Vice-President/News Randy Lovely said what surprised him most about that day was that the early intense reporting and writing for the paper’s website had actually accelerated rather than slowed preparation for the print edition.

“We literally had our front page nailed down and were fine tuning two hours before deadline,” he said.

In a sharp departure from the traditional daily newspaper story placement, two days following the April, 2007, Virginia Tech campus shootings that claimed 32 lives, the Norfolk-based Virginian Pilot published a simple, stark front page, listing the names and ages of the victims in enlarged typeface along with references to individual profiles on inside pages, all under a commemorative looped ribbon in the school’s colors. The effort won applause from readers.

V. CITIZEN IN THE NEWSROOM

The web is catalyzing another revolution in America’s newspaper newsrooms: readers have become active participants in producing the news.

Even in what is arguably the most traditional venue for journalism, the daily newspaper, readers now provide stories and photographs for publication. Four in ten newspapers said they host citizen-written blogs. The Kansas City Star, for example, hosts a blog called Mom2Mom where mothers can chat among themselves, then once a week poses a question asking how to deal with a specific issues. The responses appear in the paper’s print editions.

But the readers of America’s daily newspapers today interact with newsrooms on several other fronts, too. They offer tips and leads on fast-breaking news developments and have been invited to act as sources for investigative stories.

Still, survey results indicate editors don’t seem to see citizen journalism as the silver bullet some predicted a decade ago—a source of content that could one day replace reporters. While a quarter of editors describe it as valuable, nearly six out of ten describe it in more qualified terms as only “somewhat” valuable.

In another question, a plurality of editors (46%) believes citizen-produced content is “an essential ingredient for the website and newspaper of the future (…).” But nearly as many of those responding (42%), expressed reservations, agreeing with the statement describing citizen journalism as “an interesting, but limited concept in which citizen input is kept to very small stories or to basic informational material (…).”  Only a quarter of the survey respondents described citizen content as “very valuable.”

In interviews, a majority of editors, both at larger and smaller papers, tended to share the more cautious assessment, casting initial expectations as inflated and siding with those survey respondents who saw its role as interesting, but limited. Several complained that getting acceptable written content—e.g. stories—from citizen journalists usually required significant investments of newsroom staff time to train, coach, educate, confirm and edit.

“It’s not the answer,” said Miami Herald executive editor Gyllenhaal. “The idea that all you must do is open the gates and copy flows in is not right. Like anything good, it takes work, a lot of time and a lot of thought.”

Still, some newsrooms—especially those serving smaller circulation markets with well-educated populations and a developed sense of community— have had highly rewarding experiences with other forms of citizen participation.

The editor of one large metropolitan newspaper said his reporters had details of a major highway pile-up, including the names of victims, several hours before the same information was released by police merely by posting a reporter’s email address and phone number on its website along with an invitation for anyone involved in or around the accident to make contact. However, the editor stressed that all information received from the public was first confirmed by a newsroom staffer before it was posted and the names of victims were held back until authorities had notified families.

Photos

In interviews, editors invariably said the easiest, most successful form of user-generated content has been weather-related photographs, which have the perfect mix for a citizen’s contribution: they require little expertise, attract broad interest, their content is easily verifiable and they tend to be non-controversial. Weather photos also seem to generate a timely and strong citizen response. Gannett vice-president Kate Marymont discovered this last year during her tenure as executive editor of the News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida (circulation: 92,000) after a tornado touched down in the Cape Coral region of the paper’s circulation area.

“We got hundreds of photos,” she said. “A year ago we’d have asked readers for photos, but now we don’t have to ask. They just send them. It’s not that we’ve gotten wise, it’s just the way the world is behaving. People are more interactive.”

Crowd Sourcing

Under Marymont’s leadership, the News-Press operated at the experimental cutting edge in several areas, including its use of citizen journalism. While many newspapers have reached out to readers for tips on a fast-breaking news story where the public is involved, the News-Press has used crowd sourcing effectively in developing showcase investigative stories.

When, in July, 2006, the News-Press began investigating reasons behind a sharp jump in property owner assessments for new sewage and potable water lines being installed in the Cape Coral area, it issued a three-word invitation to readers, “Help us investigate.” It then followed with a four-word question, “What do you know?”  Marymont said the reaction was immediate. Within the first 12 hours, the paper received 68 responses from residents, who shared personal stories, steered reporters to documents they had not known existed, “and loaded us with questions to ask.”

Within 24 hours, the paper was quietly offered an audit of the project that the city had ordered but never released. When the News-Press published the audit, work on the project was halted and only resumed after a reduction of property-owner assessments. The paper used similar tactics during an investigation of major discrepancies in the amounts victims of four 2004 hurricanes were reimbursed for roof damage by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Editors say the success of such efforts depends largely on the degree of public motivation.

“You’ve got to find the (public’s) ‘passion point’ and that usually means a pocketbook issue,” said Arizona Republic editor Lovely. “That’s what worked in Cape Coral. People were angry and just needed an outlet.”

The News-Press has also experimented with another dimension of crowd sourcing. It called for volunteers to help with stories, then installed 20 of them—all local citizens—as de-facto technical advisors to the paper. The group, called “Team Watchdog,” included a retired police chief, an accountant, a retired military officer and a former state Supreme Court clerk. Volunteers work closely with reporters, helping them study databases, decipher public records or delve into specialty subjects. They were also formally introduced to the newsroom staff, given classes in ethics and research techniques. Team Watchdog members carry a News-Press ID card identifying them as members of a citizen journalist panel that works with the News-Press and its website, news-press.com.  The implicit endorsement of the paper conveyed by such an ID raised concerns on the part of some at the paper, but so far, no significant problems had stemmed from this, Marymont said.

The Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World (circulation: 19,000) has approached citizen journalism in another way. Working together with the University of Kansas School of Journalism and Mass communication, it first offers a five-week evening course at a ‘Citizen Journalism Academy’ to groups of about 25 volunteers interested in learning more about the journalistic process. Then, after completing the course, it offers participants the opportunity to write for the paper, the website, or submit photos.

“There’s (been) no obligation to do anything, but there are opportunities if they want to try them,” said the paper’s Special Projects director Ralph Gage. Beginning this fall, however, Gage said the paper would alter its approach, seeking out citizens with specific areas of expertise in the expectation that, after completing the course, they would assist the paper in its coverage.

VI. THE FUTURE

In part, this report is a portrait of how those papers are pushing the boundaries of innovation at a pace unthinkable a decade ago. At the same time, however, it documents the crippling impact of cutbacks triggered by the erosion of once-solid financial fundamentals. As we noted in introducing our findings, these two contradictory forces have effectively placed newspapers in a race—a race between innovating and cutting back. How quickly can newspapers invent a new journalism online, build an audience and find a way to monetize the product? And in the time it takes to do this, how much will further staff losses, and the accompanying loss of institutional memory and community knowledge, undermine their biggest competitive asset—the size and strength of their newsrooms?  How much will they have to cut back on key subject matter? Will audiences drift away because their old economic model is shrinking more quickly than their new one is growing? Or will the investment in new technologies generate the income needed to sustain staffs large enough to produce outstanding journalism?   Winning this race, editors sense, involves innovating quickly—on both business and editorial sides of the paper—with one hand and fighting off excessive cut backs with the other.

The $64,000 Question: How to Monetize the Web?

In interviews, many were optimistic. Some, for example, argued the ability of technology to track readership of specific stories has given editors a powerful weapon in future financial battles, for the first time making an indisputable link between strong editorial content and the kind of higher readership that attracts advertisers. Now, editors stress, their colleagues must use this connection in financial battles.

“Too many editors are great with anecdotal stories but they don’t really measure what’s working and what’s not,” said Kansas City Star’s Zieman, who earned an MBA last year while still editor specifically to arm himself for the financial battles to come. “If you don’t know the numbers you won’t be invited to the table where these decisions are made.”

Convincing newspaper advertising sales staff to become more active in selling to the web is also viewed as an essential, overdue step, even if it’s not easy. Roughly 90% of advertising sales remain with the print media. In interviews, newsroom executives complained that advertising departments traditionally have been far more resistant than their editorial counterparts to the changes brought by the Internet Age. Understandably, there is less incentive to go after a pot containing 10% of the revenues than to go after one with 90%. But some editors warn that if advertising staffs don’t shift their focus now, they could end up with nothing in a matter of years because there would be no print edition left.

Still, there are signs of progress, at least anecdotally. The Journal-World, for example, has developed a software called Marketplace for potential advertisers that blends the format of electronic yellow page-type directories with strong, local community knowledge, offering local companies the ability to post commercials, profiles and other information, including store hours and photos, and coupons. In its first six months, developers claimed a single ad salesperson in a relatively small market brought in nearly one-half million annualized dollars, mainly from advertisers who had not previously done business with the paper.

The trick, said Dan C. Simons, Electronics Division president of The World Company, publisher of the Journal-World, was the neighborhood focus of the advertising.

“If we can make $450,000 in six months, Chicago can make $20 million. It’s completely scalable,” said Simons. Programmers are currently working on a point of sale inventory, enabling a potential customer to check online if their local store has a specific product in stock.

Lowering the Wall

One implication of running in this race, editors told us, is that the once-formidable wall that divided the news and business sides of the newspaper has been substantially lowered. While that may not mean business people are roaming the newsroom influencing the product, there is evidence it does mean that the news people are busy trying to imagine new ways of making money.

Fully 97% of editors responding to the survey said they were active, at least to some degree, in the search to develop new revenue streams. One editor noted how his paper had offered a premier investigative package for sale on Amazon.com.
At papers both large and small, this has included launching tabloid sections aimed at specialized audiences. Over half those surveyed (55%) said they had launched new tabloid products, usually narrowly targeted to youth, minorities or other specific demographic groups. Just over four in ten (42%) said they had re-launched existing broadsheet sections or editions in tabloid format.

Is this lowering of the wall bothering editors? Less than some might have imagined. Among larger newspapers – e.g., those under greater financial strain—a majority of editors surveyed (57%) said they were either “not very concerned” or “not at all concerned” about lowering this wall in search of new revenues, while just 41% expressed worry. At smaller papers, the level of concern is higher. Fully 63% of editors surveyed were concerned about the lowering of the wall, while just 35% said they were not overly worried.

In interviews, several editors said they encouraged discussions between the two departments to a degree they had not done previously, with one admitting, “I never thought ten years ago that I’d be suggesting some of the things that I have.”

But the survey results suggested a sense of disillusionment among newsroom executives that their organization has been slow to recognize and adjust to a new business climate. Only a small minority (14%) of those responding to the survey agreed with the notion that their organization had anticipated and planned “very effectively” for the changes needed to remain competitive.

In addition to reducing staff and newshole, newspapers have also tried to cut costs other ways. Chief among them is efforts to economize on newsprint, a step that has taken on added urgency with a steady rise in newsprint prices that began last fall and at mid-year stood at their highest levels in over a decade.  Today, the newsprint is thinner than it was a few years ago and newspapers are actively reducing the number of pages to counter the cost increases. Tribune Co., recently announced it planned to cut as many as 500 pages per week from the Los Angeles Times. And, as a metaphor of the times, the physical size–the so-called web width—of America’s daily newspapers is shrinking. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of those editors participating said their papers had reduced web width in the past three years as a newsprint cost-saving measure.

A Stubborn Optimism

In the end, one of the key elements determining the race’s outcome will be how well the quality of the journalism produced in America’s daily newspaper newsrooms can be sustained and whether the people who run these newsrooms have a vision for the future.

When it comes to the first of these questions, the quality of the work, many of the editors express a remarkable—at times almost eerie—optimism despite the adversities they have faced. In general, the editors we talked to tend to look beyond what their newsrooms have lost in recent years and instead focus on the new vistas that technology has suddenly opened to them and the new energy and purpose of a faster-moving newsroom. In interviews, a majority of editors said that, on balance, they believed the journalism produced by today’s smaller newsrooms was as good as or better than a few years ago.

Survey responses reflected this same view. By sizable majorities, editors rated the accuracy, depth and comprehensiveness of the newsroom’s reporting and the quality of its writing as good as or better than three years ago. Despite the cutbacks in staffing and space, by 54% vs. 32%, clear majorities of editors said the comprehensiveness of their news coverage had either significantly or somewhat improved, despite the cutbacks, in the last three years. By a 58% vs. 25% margin, editors also thought “the depth of their newsrooms” reporting had improved. A majority of editors (53%) also thought their paper’s writing had improved, despite the shift toward younger staff. An overwhelming 94% of editors said their papers were as accurate as or more accurate than three years ago. And a solid 56%, taking it all in, said the “overall quality of their news product is now better than it was before.”

Kaiser of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, agreed that “less could never be more,” when it came to newsroom size, but said he too was convinced his paper was stronger despite the loss of 20 newsroom staff positions over the past two years. The Journal Sentinel recently was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.

“Let’s say we’re better focused, we do better projects,” he said. “We have to talk about the newsroom, not just the paper because we produce the website and other things, too.”

David Wilson, Managing Editor/News of Miami Herald, a paper that has seen its circulation and the size of its newsroom staff decline sharply in recent years, echoes Kaiser’s comment: “Through all that’s happened over the last few years, the quality of our work is among the best I’ve seen—and I’ve been here 31 years.”

How can this be? One explanation is just what editors have said—crisis has focused their thinking and made them sharper. Another factor may also be psychology. These are the editors who remain, who are facing this challenge. As newsroom leaders, their job is to build staff morale and combat defeatism. A sense of optimism is essential in doing that. On top of that, they are working hard, innovating, making changes. They may have fewer reporters and less space to work with, story by story, they are certain that what they are producing today is better than what they produced a few years ago.

Uncertainty

Despite all this, editors were far less certain an improved editorial product would be enough to guarantee a bright future. Doubts about their organization’s ability to make the changes needed to remain competitive were especially noticeable among those whose organizations had failed to anticipate change effectively in the past.  Among this group of editors, only 28% thought their organizations were up to the task. By contrast, among editors who believe their organizations were somewhat, or very, effective in the past in anticipating changes, 63% expressed confidence they would again take the right steps.

When asked directly about their own confidence in imagining the future, editors seem cautious and only marginally more confident than not. Only 5% say they can predict with any certainty what their newsroom will look like in five years. Another 46% said they were “somewhat confident” in their ability here, but an equal number (46%) said they were either “not very confident or not confident at all.”

In the face of such uncertainty, several editors cited their staff’s willingness to accept change and embrace new technology as the factor contributing most to their competitiveness.  “Flexibility,” summed up one newsroom executive.

CONCLUSION

The explosion of readily available news and information on the web has, at least in part, eclipsed the long-held role of daily newspapers to deliver the news, but has yet to touch their unique contribution to the American democratic process: the ability to explore in depth highly complex subjects of public interest.

As a rule, the newspaper editors interviewed and surveyed for this report believe that no other medium has the ability to take a complicated, sophisticated, important issue and examine it in all its nuances.

One editor cited a package of stories in his own newspaper that day that explored a dispute over the hiring of minorities at a prestigious, publicly-funded downtown convention center construction project. The package included a story on the problems of recruiting minorities into construction trade apprentice programs and another on obstacles faced by contracting firms owned by African-Americans.

In a world where much of the new, fast-proliferating information available to the consumer stems from Internet sources that undergo little or no quality control, guarding the newspaper’s objectivity and credibility is considered crucial.

More than immediacy, editors said they believed these qualities were essential to the newspaper’s quest to remain relevant. Gage, the special projects editor at the Journal-World, speculated that if immediacy were to diminish as the most-valued quality for daily newspapers, they could eventually revert to late afternoon delivery.  Such a development could potentially be a windfall, he says, because it would reduce the need to work unsocial hours and possibly draw more bright young people—who have traditionally been turned off by the hours— to the craft.

In the end, however, editors remain convinced the key to their survival is a good business model and strong journalism. As one editor interviewed for this named three basic ingredients needed “not just to survive, but thrive:” excellent journalism, strong investment to stay on the cutting edge of technology, and aggressive marketing of the product.

“If we do all those things, we’ll be fine—whether we’re 80% print and 20% web, 80% web and 20% print or 2% print and 98% web,” this editor said, though he asked that his comments be on background. “The profit margins may never be Gannett-like at 40-45% of revenue, but I think you can have a healthy business.”

Some editors predicted the future of newspapers will eventually be decided, not in print, but in a cyberspace fight for advertising between sites that provide entertainment and social networking on one side, and those that provide information and analysis on the other.

“There’s never been a greater need for good journalism,” said Miami Herald executive editor Gyllenhaal. “We’re in a global world and it’s complicated. What happens in Caracas really affects us here. But advertisers don’t care what gets them in front of people and if they all migrate to MySpace, Facebook or eBay and that weakens journalism to a point we can’t have 375 or 400 reporters on the street, then we won’t be able to deliver.”

Lawrence Journal-World editor Dolph C. Simons, Jr., put it in simpler terms: “I believe there’s a very strong place in our society for the printed word.  It’s up to us to find out how best to utilize that opportunity. If we’re going to succeed, we have to drive with our brights on.”

METHODOLOGY

This study is based on two primary sources of information.

The first source is extended face-to-face interviews with editors and other newsroom executives at 15 daily newspapers across the United States. Interviews, conducted by Tyler Marshall, occurred between early November, 2007 and mid-January, 2008. Everyone interviewed for this report spoke initially on background. Where comments and thoughts are attributed by name, specific permission was received. Circulation figures of specific newspapers noted in the report are from the Audit Bureau of Circulations website and represent the average weekday circulation, rounded up or down to the nearest thousand, through the six months ending March 31, 2008.

The second source of information is the responses to a 43-question survey, administered by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI) and sent to the editors of 1217 daily newspapers. The 259 replies included over half (55%) of all papers with circulations of more than 100,000, as well as nearly one-third (30%) of all papers with circulations between 50,000 and 100,000. Among the country’s far larger number of papers with circulations below 50,000, 177, or just over 17%, responded to the survey. Face-to-face interviews were conducted at newspapers in each category. The largest newspaper visited had a circulation of more than 670,000, the smallest around 20,000. All responses to the survey were anonymous. A complete methodology of the survey follows below.

Survey of Editors

This survey is based on responses from 259 top editors and news executives at U.S. daily newspapers.  It was administered online by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI). The surveys were completed from January 29 through February 29, 2008.

Requests for participation were sent to a total of 1,217 individuals via e-mail, with a link to an online Web address where the survey was hosted by PSRAI. Each respondent had a unique identification number with which he or she could log in to the survey.

Definition of Population Universe and Contact Procedures

The universe of potential respondents was defined as editors and senior news executives at all U.S. daily newspapers, regardless of circulation size, including those in Alaska and Hawaii. Weekly, ethnic and alternative newspapers were excluded from the definition.  Editors were excluded if they did not have a valid email address available.

The sample was drawn from the online directory Cision Media Source (formerly Bacon’s Media Source). After ineligible organizations were excluded, this list covered 1,265 U.S. daily newspapers. All qualified editors at eligible dailies were pulled from the Cision directory and were included in the sampling frame. Qualified editor titles included: editor, editor-in-chief, co-editor, editor/publisher, executive editor, and managing editor.

One individual editor per organization was selected for the sample. If an organization had multiple qualified editor titles, the senior-most title was selected. This resulted in a list of 1,265 top editors.  After editors who did not have email addresses were eliminated, the final list consisted of 1,217 editors.

Editors were first emailed on January 29, 2008, explaining the study and requesting their participation. Emails included a link to the online survey as well as a unique password to gain entry into the web instrument. Follow-up emails were sent on February 5 to those who did not already complete the survey or did not refuse to participate. Where possible, follow-up telephone calls were made to editors to encourage their participation in the survey.

By Robert Ruby and the Project for Excellence in Journalism

Ask the public for its opinion of the press, and the responses are chastening.

Most Americans believe the news media are politically biased, that their stories are often inaccurate and that journalists do not care about the people they report on.

And in 2007, the public’s overall view of the press remained by many measures as negative as in the recent past and notably worse than in the mid-1980s.

There are nuances to the public’s skepticism. People continue to like what they actually watch, read and know best. They dislike and distrust the hypothetical monolith – the behemoth called the news media.

What is growing is the extent to which partisanship is creating distinct audiences. It has reached the point where ideology is now as strong an indicator of an individual’s likes and dislikes about the press as any other basic demographic measure. Increasingly, there are Republican views of the news media and Democratic views, and they differ sharply. Political independents have their own distinct attitudes about the media – and they grew more negative in 2007.

This divide was evident in views of coverage of the war in Iraq. Democrats express greater confidence in the media’s performance there than do Republicans.

But the partisan divide is not as sharp when it comes to coverage of the presidential campaign. Nearly everyone tended to think there was too much early handicapping of the race, too little coverage of so-called minor candidates and too little coverage of what the candidates were saying. And those views could deepen given that so much of the press’ early handicapping proved wrong — the writing off of John McCain and Mike Huckabee, the love affair with Fred Thompson and the advance anointing of Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani.

Another worry is that the Internet news audience is particularly skeptical — and this is a group that is growing, is younger and is better educated than the general population. It is the press’ future base. This audience is especially critical of the mainstream media’s fairness and accuracy.

And the rise of blogging has added to this perception. Bloggers on both the right and left acidly criticized mainstream news outlets for their coverage of politics in 2007 and the war in Iraq. Newspapers, magazines and television duly reported the bloggers’ criticisms. (One wire service headline declared, “The blogs flunk the media again.”¹ Online editors meanwhile apologized for instances of inaccurate reporting on their Web sites.

One other factor probably added to the mix: the host of growing problems in newsrooms.

In every part of the industry, journalists themselves experienced the turmoil generated by another year of reorganizations and cutbacks. New owners took control of several major news organizations, including Dow Jones & Co. (publisher of the Wall Street Journal) and the Tribune Company (publisher of the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday and other major newspapers). Anyone paying attention to what the press reported about itself could have detected the insecurity. As the industry is buffeted by new technology and as audiences fragment further, some critics portray the turbulence as confirmation of what they see as the press’ failings.

Nearly every news organization seemed anxious to revise its playbook. The press – the fragmented, challenged industry that regularly reported on threats to its own prosperity – wanted to expand here, contract there, master social networking, become a community bulletin board, serve as a national forum, list the financial contributors to every presidential campaign, shrink stock tables, expand a broadcast, close a news bureau, expand a Web team, merge copy desks, reorganize the ad sales team.

An important question for the coming year is whether that turmoil is seen by an already skeptical public as panic or openness to change. The news media may risk seeming like just another industry anxious about its products, its customers and its future.

General Trust

The 20-year trend of public dissatisfaction with the press showed few signs of reversing course in 2007.

Majorities of Americans continued to say that journalists are often inaccurate (55%), do not care about the people they report on (53%), are biased (55%), one-sided (66%) and try to cover up their mistakes (63%). Those sentiments, all more prevalent than in the 1980s, have become entrenched.²

There was similarly no real movement in the slim pluralities who believe the press is moral (46%) or protects democracy (44%), again lower figures than a two decades ago.³

Persistent Criticisms of the Press
Percent of Survey Respondents

Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Views of Press Values and Performance: 1985-2007,” August 9, 2007

There may be some comfort for the press in knowing that even fewer people think favorably of other organizations. More people have positive opinions of their daily newspaper than of the Supreme Court. Substantially more people think well of network news programs (71%) than of Congress (45%), the Democratic Party (55%) or the Republican Party (42%).⁴

And some of the declining trust is associated with views of the institution rather than of a single news media company or journalist.

Most people say they dislike Congress, yet most individual members of that body consistently win re-election. Similarly, people dislike the media but like the media they pay attention to.

But these criticisms of the press have become part of a larger suspicion of the press, and believability of the press is lower than in the 19990s.

No major category was exempt from the public’s broad criticism in 2007, but cable television news and network television news have suffered the greatest recent loss of good will. From 2005 to 2007, the percentage of people who held a favorable opinion about cable and network television news dropped 4 percentage points (down to 75% for cable, 71% for the networks).⁵

At first glance, major national newspapers such as the New York Times fare worse than television. Only 60% of the public has a favorable opinion of national papers, but the erosion of support has slowed; the latest figure is a drop of only 1 percentage point in the last two years.⁶ And survey data leaves unclear how many of the people offering opinions actually see those newspapers.

There are a few bright spots in the data in 2007, and these seem to offer hints of the media’s value — and perhaps to how the press might work to rebuild its bond with the public.

More Americans than in the five previous years regard the press as highly professional. In a 2007 Pew Research Center survey, the figure rose to 66%, up from 59% in 2005.⁷

By nearly 2 to 1, Americans still believe in the watchdog role of the press in keeping leaders from doing things they shouldn’t.

And a larger percentage than was the case five years earlier believes the press is careful to avoid political bias.

But a majority still considers the press biased (55% in 2007; 59% in 2002).⁸

And the press has done nothing to regain the momentary surge in confidence it enjoyed in the weeks following the September 11 attacks on the U.S.⁹

The data suggest the public most trusted the press – believed it professional, accurate, generally unbiased, even moral – when the public depended on it most for information and perhaps reassurance.

Liking the Familiar

Despite their general distrust, however, people like the news media that they seem to know best, although even these numbers are falling. About 80% of Americans have a positive opinion of their local television news and of their local daily newspaper. The public also does not always endorse the story choices made by editors. In particular, a substantial part of the public (40%) believes celebrity news gets too much attention. No other topic is cited by even half as many people as getting too much play.¹⁰

Many people also say they want a different kind of reporting on presidential politics, at least based on what they saw and read during the early months of the current campaign. A Pew Research Center survey found that about 8 in 10 people wanted more coverage of the candidates’ positions on issues. Our analysis of campaign coverage during the first five months of 2007 found that most stories focused, instead, on political fundraising, tactics and polling.

People were well aware they were not finding the coverage they wanted. A majority rated campaign coverage as only fair or poor.¹¹

Television

In general, news programs on network, cable and local broadcast television retain an enviable position in terms of public trust.

For national and international news, most Americans turn on their televisions. About 6 out of 10 people say television is their main source for that information. For this type of news, the public by a small margin favors the networks over cable.¹²

But usage patterns are changing, and they bring changes in attitudes about news organizations. Consider, for instance, differences between adults and school-age children in their news habits. Most children, like most of their parents, turn to television as the main source of national and foreign news, although the children do not watch as much of it. Among that younger generation, the percentage that relies on television is 55% for the children and 60% for adults.¹³

In second place – for adults as well as children – is the Internet. One survey found newspapers tied with the Internet, while others place newspapers third. We do not know how many of those Internet users are, in fact, clicking on Web sites maintained by television news organizations or by newspapers.

Among young people, the Internet also is gaining over television as a source of presidential campaign news. Six in 10 of those 18 to 29 years old cite television as one of their two main sources for election news, down from 75% in 2004. Over that time, the proportion citing the Internet has more than doubled – from 21% to 46%.¹⁴

For all parts of the television news industry, another possible warning sign is the diminished star power of on-air journalists. That may seem counter-intuitive, since many anchors, correspondents and talk show hosts surely qualify as celebrities; their employers advertise them as brand names. But none have as much prominence in the role of a journalist as did some of their counterparts in the mid-1980s. Compared to then, a smaller part of the public can name the journalist they admire most. None are named by more than 5% of the public.

America’s Favorite Journalists: Then and Now
Percent of Survey Respondents

Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Today’s Journalists Less Prominent,” March 8, 2007.
Note: Figures for 2007 total more than 100% because respondents could name more than one journalist.

In 1987, Dan Rather as anchor of the CBS Evening News was named by 11% of the public as their favorite journalist. In 2007, CBS anchor Katie Couric topped the list, but with only 5%. She was closely followed by Fox’s talk show host Bill O’Reilly and ABC news anchor Charles Gibson. The top 10 also included Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s satiric news-related Daily Show.¹⁵

Attitudes of Internet Users

Roughly a quarter of all Americans now get news on a daily basis from the Internet, a figure bolstered by half the U.S. population now having broadband at home.¹⁶

This audience is more critical of traditional news sources than other Americans. About 4 out of 10 have unfavorable opinions of national newspapers (43%), network television news (39%) and cable television news (38%).

Three out of 10 in the Internet news audience have a low opinion of their local television news (32%) and their local newspaper (29%). Those, too, are higher percentages than among people who depend on traditional media.¹⁷

For traditional news organizations, the problem may not be as ominous as it seems. At least some Internet users rely for news on Web sites maintained by the news organizations that the users say they otherwise dislike.

For example, one out of four Americans (26%) mention the Internet either first or second as their main source of presidential campaign news. Of those, more than half (54%) cite at least one of these three Web sites – MSNBC.com, CNN.com and Yahoo News. Both MSNBC and CNN are divisions of mainstream news organizations; many headlines and stories on Yahoo News, too, come from traditional news organizations.¹⁸ That points to a finding, long seen in the data and often not well understood: trust in the press does not correlate necessarily to usage. Often some of those most distrustful of media are its heaviest consumers.

And the findings about Internet users raise an intriguing question: what if some of the concerns people have with traditional journalism are ameliorated by the Web technology?

The public values the Internet in part because of its convenience. People like the ease with which they can find what they want, when they want. And some Internet users clearly prefer the Web as their news source for those reasons. It is less important to them that the Web sites may largely replicate the coverage being broadcast on television or published on newsprint — same content, different format, apparently different levels of satisfaction.

Partisan Gap among the Public

Then there is the question of partisan divide. With growing intensity, Republicans express more skepticism than Democrats about the fairness and accuracy of the media, and in 2007 some of those gaps grew to record size.

A far larger percentage of Republicans than Democrats regard the press as too critical of the United States, 63% vs. 23%, a gap of 40 percentage points.

The polarization is nearly as sharp in opinions about different news outlets. A smaller percentage of Republicans than Democrats express positive views about their daily newspaper (68% of Republicans, 86% of Democrats). Fewer like the national papers (41% vs. 79%). The same goes for network television news (56% vs. 84%).¹⁹

The partisan divide changes, however, depending on which party holds the White House. During Democratic administrations, Republicans are more supportive than Democrats of the press’ watchdog role over government. When the GOP controls the White House, more Democrats than Republicans endorse that function.

Thus in 2007, a majority of the public (58%) believed press criticism did more good than harm, but there were significant differences among Democrats (71%), Republicans (44%) and independents (60%).²⁰

View of Watchdog Press Varies by President
Percent Saying Press Criticism Does More Good than Harm

Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Views of Press Values and Performance: 1985-2007,” August 9, 2007.

The ideological differences extend to perceptions of political bias. Sharply higher numbers of Republicans than Democrats consider the press biased in its reporting (70% of Republicans vs. 29% of Democrats).²¹

But while the partisan divide over bias exists when it comes to the coverage of politics itself, here it is much less pronounced. In 2007, 41% of Americans saw no bias in the election coverage, but that figure included a significantly smaller percentage of all Republicans (28%) than Democrats (47%) or independents (43%).

Where did people think the bias tilted? Here the public is not so split. If there is a bias, more people think it is liberal. Fully 50% of all Republicans say they detect Democratic bias. But only 16% of Democrats (and 8% of independents) saw a tilt toward the GOP.²²

Fewer See Pro-Republican Bias in Campaign Coverage
Percent of Survey Respondents

Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Views of Press Values and Performance: 1985-2007,” August 9, 2007.

Despite the growing divide, people have not lost faith in the idea of an independent press. Fully 67% of Americans say they prefer to get news that has no particular point of view, and the balance of opinion has not changed on this since 2004.

What is more, there are no significant differences on this by party. About two-thirds of Democrats (65%), Republicans (66%) and Independents (70%) say they like getting news that has no point of view, rather than news that reflects their own political outlook, although they might disagree as to which news reports are neutral.²³

Iraq

Partisanship extends to opinions about press coverage of Iraq. Even if the public sometimes seemed to argue about the press’ role as a surrogate for arguing over the war itself, the debate still hints at the concern about press bias and the media’s role in a democracy.

A series of Pew surveys in 2007 consistently found that about 4 out of 10 Americans believed the press was providing an accurate picture of events in Iraq, and results from other polling organizations were about the same.

More people have confidence in the military (55%) to give an accurate picture of the war than the press (42%).²⁴

Journalists themselves give their coverage higher marks, a difference that is a reminder of the contrast between how the public views the media and how journalists view their own work. In a PEJ survey of journalists with recent experience in Iraq, 70% believed their coverage over all gave an accurate picture of events there. About one in six (15%) believed the coverage made the situation look better than it was. Hardly any (3%) believed it was too negative.²⁵

Conclusion

Nothing occurred in 2007 to change the now deep impression that Americans have formed that the press is an institution of immense power that should be viewed with suspicion. And looking ahead, the even more skeptical view of the Internet audience, and the problems and cutbacks facing the profession, offer a grim forecast that this might somehow quickly change.

But one impression that people may have is false: Since the new millennia, and as the media began to undergo an extraordinary revolution, those views have not changed or gotten more negative.

Despite what some might think, the view of the press heading into 2008 has in many ways become stable.

Footnotes

1. McClatchy Washington Bureau, Nov. 30, 2007. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/234/story/22376.html

2. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Views of Press Values and Performance: 1985-2007,” August 9, 2007.

3. Ibid

4. Ibid

5. Ibid

6. Ibid

7. Ibid

8. Ibid

9. Ibid

10. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, Pew Weekly News Interest Index Poll, October 12, 2007. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=362

11. Project for Excellence in Journalism, “The Invisible Primary – Invisible No Longer,” October 29, 2007. http://journalism.org/node/8189#_ftn2

12. In three polls conducted during 2007 by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, those relying on television for national and international news ranged from 56% to 62%.

13. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, Pew Weekly News Interest Index Poll, May 23, 2007. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=330

14. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Internet’s Broader Role in Campaign 2008,” January, 11, 2008. Based on polling conducted December 19-30, 2007. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=384

15. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Today’s Journalists Less Prominent,” March 8, 2007.

16. About 70% of American adults use the Internet, and of those, 37% on a typical day use the Internet to get news. Pew Internet & American Life Project, “Demographics of Internet Users,” http://www.pewInternet.org/trends/User_Demo_6.15.07.htm, and “Daily Interest Activities.” http://www.pewInternet.org/trends/Daily_Internet_Activities_8.28.07.htm. Broadband figure from Pew Internet & American Life Project, Why We Don’t Know Enough About Broadband in the U.S.http://pewinternet.org/pdfs/Backgrounder.MeasuringBroadband.pdf

17. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Views of Press Values and Performance: 1985-2007,” August 9, 2007.

18. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Internet’s Broader Role in Campaign 2008,” January, 11, 2008. Based on polling conducted December 19-30, 2007. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=384

19. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Views of Press Values and Performance: 1985-2007,” August 9, 2007.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Internet’s Broader Role in Campaign 2008.,” Q43, banner C. http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/384.pdf

23. Ibid., page 22.

24. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Views of Press Values and Performance: 1985-2007,” August 9, 2007.Also, Pew Weekly News Interest Index Poll, November 9, 2007. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=370

NBC News /Wall Street Journal poll, conducted by Hart and Newhouse Research Companies, April 20-23, 2007. Gallup Poll, December 18-20, 2006.

25. PEJ, “Journalists in Iraq: A Survey of Reporters on the Front Lines.” http://www.journalism.org/files/PEJ%20FINAL%20Survey%20of%20Journalists%20in%20IraqWITH%20SURVEY.pdf

By Cathy Taylor and the Project for Excellence in Journalism

For the first three quarters of 2007, the U.S. advertising market was basically flat. But those numbers tend to hide, rather than reveal, some of the bumpiest terrain the media marketplace has ever seen.

Drill below the figures, and, in the summation of one ad executive, the ad market as we’ve known it — where a 30-second commercial is the coin of the realm — is in “chaos.”¹

Talking to ad executives, one gets the sense that few know how to cope even with the changes to the media landscape that have already happened, let alone the ones that are still to come.

Simply put, the concept of mass media has ended. It is less clear what will replace it and how advertising will play a role.

What was once a matter of big media companies handing out content when and where it was most advantageous has morphed into a lengthy menu of à la carte options, with consumers deciding when, where and how they see, hear or read their selections.

For users of media, this opening of the floodgates may well create information and entertainment nirvana. But, for advertisers, what was once the fairly easy job of planning and buying across a handful of options has turned into a Rubik’s Cube of twisting and turning possibilities.

An advertiser of a deodorant targeted toward teen males may still advertise on network television, and may even fork over several million dollars for ads run during the Super Bowl. But given the well-documented flight of teen males to video games, the Internet and text messaging, the same advertiser might question whether it is better off embedding its brands into a gaming environment, developing its own game, posting its commercials on YouTube, or sponsoring mobile phone delivery of sports scores. It also might decide to avoid network entirely in favor of teen male-targeted cable programming such as Spike TV.

“We used to be in the trucking business. We used to take ads and commercials and deliver them,” says Charlie Rutman, CEO of North American Operations at MPG, which controls over $3 billion in U.S. ad spending annually. (For more details on the emergence of media agencies, see below.)

While ad executives know that trucking analogy is no longer accurate, they aren’t really sure what is replacing it.

It is even less clear if advertisers need news and entertainment media at all anymore. In the Internet age, advertisers often reach consumers with on their own Web sites, post their commercials to YouTube or engage in word-of-mouth campaigns. Advertisers no longer have to depend on paid media to distribute their messages.

While this might seem an opportunity, the reality is that the advertising world is no better prepared to deal with this rapid-fire change than are the news media.

For the moment, we are mostly seeing change that comes in fits and starts. Meanwhile, massive changes are occurring at the consumer level.

By the Numbers

When taken over all, the numbers for 2007 seem less remarkable.

According to TNS Media Intelligence, only three of the broad categories it measures show an increase in spending over the first three quarters of 2007.² Its latest available data show magazines up 4.7%, the Internet up 17.2% and outdoor up 4.4%. Television, with the exception of cable, is down, with network television showing the biggest decline, 3% for the year. Radio is showing slight slippage, down 1.8% over all.

Freestanding inserts — such as Sunday circulars — are down by 1%, and then there are newspapers, which show the biggest declines of all. TNS pegs the entire category as down 5.2% for just the first three-quarters of 2007, following a decline of 2.4% for all of 2006. “That’s a bad business to be in right now,” says Jon Swallen, TNS’ senior vice president for research.

The upward tick in magazine spending, which may seem somewhat of a surprise given recent headlines about the decline of print, obscures some weaknesses, particularly in business-to-business magazines, down 5.5%, and local magazines, down 3.4%. According to data from the Publishers Information Bureau, the growth comes in big, mainstream advertisers that often target consumer magazines; 9 of the 12 major magazine advertising categories were up. The top spending category — drugs and remedies — increased by 7.1% to nearly $2.6 billion.³

The underlying reason for many of the downward spending trends is digital technology, which has, effectively, splintered mass media.

Usually, when people hear the word digital, they think of the Internet. But as it applies to media, the Internet is only one example of how digital is changing everything. This is the technology that has allowed the increasing penetration of digital video recorders (such as TiVo), which make possible what is known as time-shifting (the practice of watching a television program after it’s aired, rather than live). It’s one reason that the print versions of newspapers, whose content can now be found more quickly online, have been so hobbled. It’s also behind the resurgence in outdoor advertising, since digital technology allows companies like ESPN to beam sports stats to the tops of taxi cabs.

Accountability

With all that complexity, digital technology also brings the advertising industry closer to its holy grail: to finally know whether and which ad expenditures are working, and whether the prices that media companies demand for their time and space are reasonable.

Is it possible an advertiser such as Procter & Gamble can actually spend almost $5 billion annually — in the U.S. alone — and not know whether it was worth the investment?⁴ The answer is a (qualified) yes. In fact, perhaps the best-known quote in the advertising business isn’t Nike’s iconic campaign theme “Just do it,” but this: “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half,” attributed to John Wanamaker, the Philadelphia retailer who died in 1922. In 2007, that would still hold true.⁵

Television commercials and whimsical print ads may have sold a lot of VW Beetles, but advertisers have never been able to draw direct lines between cause (the running of an ad) and effect (whether and how it moved product), at least not without relying on spottily accurate consumer studies. An advertiser may, for instance, have been able to see an up-tick in sales after spending tens of millions of dollars to get the word out about a new product, but not whether the ads it bought on ABC during “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” were more effective than the print ad it ran in People magazine, or the cable buy that ran on the Lifetime and TLC channels.

With digital, in contrast, advertisers can more accurately than ever before track the number of people who viewed an ad, clicked on it and maybe even bought product online. This also gives advertisers a clearer picture of what they should pay for an ad.

In online search (see sidebar), for instance, specifically the “sponsored link” advertising that is dominated by Google, advertisers can now tell precisely which of their search ads are working. To put it simply, if consumers are interested in an ad, they click; if not, they don’t.

Even YouTube gives advertisers a tantalizing proxy for their ads’ popularity, albeit through data that are strictly unscientific. YouTube is also a way for advertisers to skip traditional media, including journalism, to disseminate their messages. One Starburst commercial from 2007, which featured a strange little lad who loves the new Berries ’n’ Crème flavor, resulted in at least 10 million hits on YouTube alone — and consumers posted the ad to YouTube before the ad agency did. The chilling aspect of that for media companies is that not one media dollar changed hands in exchange for all those eyeballs.

This ability to get much more granular data and the pressure felt by chief marketing officers to justify their ad dollars have made ad spending accountability the No. 1 priority among marketers today.

“Accountability has gone from a buzzword to something that is much more expected in marketing and advertising spend,” says Matt Freeman, CEO of Tribal DDB, a digital offshoot of the ad agency DDB Worldwide, part of Omnicom Group. “That has led to a client shift to more addressable media.” More addressable media usually means anything digitally trackable, from online display ads to offline ads that ask cell phone users to text-message the advertiser to win a prize. Adds Denise Warren, chief advertising officer of The New York Times Media Group, “The [chief marketing officer] has to really show that their marketing spend is delivering results.”

Why Madison Avenue Is Slow to Change

The revolution, however, may not happen as fast as some might think. Traditional media having trouble transitioning to the new landscape may be heartened by the fact that the advertising world is also not changing business models as fast as consumers are adapting to new technologies. Asked how well the advertising community is adapting to change, Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group, responded, “Badly. The structure of the agency business has not kept pace with the needs of marketers.”

And it’s not just agencies – it’s every industry associated with advertising, be it measurement companies, media companies or marketers. One reason is the sheer complexity of steering the business models of mammoth organizations toward a digital world that is itself constantly evolving.

This is how Greg Smith, chief operating officer of Neo@Ogilvy, a digital media offshoot of WPP Group’s Ogilvy Worldwide that announced a top-to-bottom structural overhaul, sketches out the differences in how traditional media and digital media would tackle buying advertising: In traditional media, five people might be responsible for spending $100 million in network and cable television, a task that requires planning and buying the media, ensuring the commercials get to the networks in question and measuring traffic. In digital media, those same five people might be responsible for a budget of only $1 million that involves 1,000 ad placements, the buying of 5,000 keywords on search engines, and tracking and changing the campaign based on the data that come back. Some marketers do this on a daily basis, and many more weekly, making this a continuing, time-consuming task.

Given that agencies have traditionally been compensated as a percentage of the overall media spend, digital media present a mind-bending challenge. As the person in charge of day-to-day operations, Smith has to constantly assess and question whether the agency operates in ways that make sense in an ever-changing digital world. “Boy, does that make me popular around these halls,” says Smith.

The other issue is the number of bodies advertising and media companies can throw at the transition.

According to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by Advertising Age, as of October 2007, the number of jobs in advertising and marketing services was down 1.1% from its peak during 2000, the year the Internet bubble burst, and one of every eight jobs in media has vanished.⁶

And the skill set most in demand — digital technology savvy — is also the hardest to come by for both marketers and agencies. Says Steve Farella, president and CEO of the media boutique TargetCast tcm, “Digital agencies or digital groups [within marketers], no matter where you are, are probably understaffed by 15 to 20 to 25%, so that’s actually holding us back.”

In the near term, industry insiders expect how advertising is bought will remain bifurcated, despite advertiser passion for new media options. The rise in digital media and its promise of accountability have prompted advertisers to send more and more of their dollars there. But the marketplace is slow to change, both because of institutional resistance and the lack of a fully realized model that gives advertisers a completely accurate account of consumer viewing and decision-making.

With the Internet far and away the most built-out digital advertising platform, it’s clear that it is the tail wagging the old media dog, and nothing on the horizon, save for a micro-chip shortage, could conceivably change that.

With that, let’s take a look at how individual media are faring and why.

Internet

The Internet’s influence on other media is far greater than the actual dollars that, at this point, go toward it.

Internet spending accounted for only $8.4 billion of the $108 billion in total ad spending during the first three quarters of 2007, or less than 8%, surpassing only radio (at $8 billion), and less significant media such as outdoor and freestanding inserts.⁷ But that statistic comes with a rather large caveat: It does not include search advertising. That in itself illustrates how companies have not kept up with the digital explosion. TNS hasn’t yet perfected its ability to track searches, or other even newer ad forms, such as online video.

Numbers from Nielsen Monitor-Plus, which also do not include search, are even less generous, but confirm the general trend. They put Internet spending at $5.4 billion during the first three quarters of 2007, for a year-on-year increase of 15.9%.

A more complete number is provided by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which releases online ad revenue on a quarterly basis from PriceWaterhouseCoopers. It pegs Internet spending for the first three quarters of 2007, including searches and online video, at $15.2 billion, up almost 26% from the same period in 2006. Even comparing that larger figure against TNS numbers for other media, online doesn’t yet approach the spending figures for newspapers ($19.2 billion), and magazines ($21.8 billion), and is still a far cry from network television ($46.4 billion).

Advocates of the Internet as an advertising medium believe that should change. The reason, they say, is that the amount of money that goes to online advertising spending in no way matches consumer consumption of it. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau’s Rothenberg, on average people spend 22% of their day online. Even taking the Internet Advertising Bureau’s more comprehensive spending number for TNS’ more limited estimate, only about 13% of ad spending goes online

There’s no law that says ad spending by medium should match consumer consumption, but still the gap between consumer and advertiser reality here is sizable. Wouldn’t advertisers want their messages to be placed in some rough approximation of where the consumers are?

Ad executives say the reasons for the gap have to do with the nature of change. Jeff Lanctot, senior vice president of global media at digital agency Avenue A/Razorfish, says marketers lag in reacting to revolutions in consumer behavior. “When they double their [digital] budget from 2006-07, they think that’s very aggressive,” Lanctot says.

As one indicator of the gap, Nielsen Monitor-Plus’ list of the top 10 advertisers in the U.S. bears little resemblance to the list of top online advertisers from Nielsen Online, AdRelevance. It might make sense for many of the biggest overall ad spenders to also be the biggest spenders online. Instead, only one advertiser, AT&T, was recently on both lists. While the overall list was dominated by companies such as Procter & Gamble, General Motors and Verizon, the online list included digital-friendly advertisers such as Experian, Countrywide Financial, Netflix and Dell.

Despite the gap, advertisers are well aware that consumers are gravitating to the Internet. “The biggest shift we have seen is the consumer is spending more and more time online. We are seeing significant growth in digital and it continues to grow year on year,” says Michele Hughes, director of interactive marketing for global business services and consumer solutions at P&G. “The other key difference is that with so many media options, the consumer can now engage on their own terms. Our challenge and opportunity is to be accessible to the consumer when and where they are most receptive.”

The gap may close more quickly now that the Internet is no longer a dial-up medium for most consumers. With broadband penetration in the U.S. currently hovering at about 50%, according to the Pew Internet Project, advertisers can now use the Internet for video, text or display.⁸

That in turn should lead to more video. The Internet’s ability to provide advertisers with sight, sound and motion has led to predictions of explosive growth in online ad video. The research firm Borrell Associates predicted in a 2008 outlook report that local online video will more than triple this year, jumping from slightly more than $400 million to $1.3 billion.⁹ According to figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, broadband video accounted for only 1%, or $100 million, of total online ad revenue in the first half of 2007.¹⁰

And then there’s accountability. Even when consumers don’t click on the ads they see — and for the most part, with a click rate at well under 1%, they don’t — the Internet can give much more voluminous data than older media. “It’s very measurable, so that makes it easier to justify your buy,” explains Christine MacKenzie, executive director of multi-brand marketing and agency relations at Chrysler.¹¹

Nielsen, though highly regarded, still determines billions of dollars in television ad spending based on a panel of approximately 10,000 U.S. homes. Although there are certainly other companies that help advertisers determine offline advertising effectiveness, an Internet advertiser can learn how many users saw its advertising in a dizzying number of ways: across multiple sites, whether a user clicked on it, the amount of time spent with an individual ad, where they came from and went to, and many other variations on data. They can target sports enthusiasts in Dallas whose online behavior indicates they are deep in the process of buying cars, or pregnant women in Maine looking for baby furniture, by buying ads that will only be displayed in the areas of sites, such as NBC’s iVillage, that focus solely on the topic.

As with television, most online display advertising is bought solely on the number of impressions — in other words, the number of people who actually saw it. Where the Internet differs substantially from television is that players such as Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore that tally Internet traffic aren’t nearly as important — they are only two among many in a much more complicated measurement universe. Companies such as Microsoft’s Atlas and DoubleClick, which Google set out to acquire in 2007, pending regulatory approval, serve clients’ ads to sites and also track them, making it easier to change campaigns as they proceed.

Thus, it’s what can be learned from the volumes of data, not the buying procedure, that makes the difference.

Network TV

Despite the evidence that a search-style ad auction market is spilling over into other media, one medium that seems immune to new ad buying models is network television.

If old habits die hard, than they die hardest in the ad industry when it comes to buys on ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and Time Warner’s CW. Not only is business conducted much the same as it has been for years, but the networks are also somewhat unaffected by their own declining audience.

According to TNS Media Intelligence, network television spending was off by 3% for the first three quarters of 2007. Nielsen has network television suffering a 2.5% decline. That’s nothing to write home about, of course, but the declines don’t compare to continuing drop-offs in viewership.

For the first 11 weeks of the 2007-08 television season, prior to the effects of the fall 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, Nielsen data show viewer declines for the crucial 18-to-49 age group of 19.4% for NBC, 16.7% for CBS, 10.5% for ABC and 28.6% for CW.¹³ Only Fox improved, with a 3.4% gain. (The ratings have been partly affected by a change in how television is measured by Nielsen, (see Measurement, below ), now expanded to include DVR viewing in the first three days after a program airs, and to rate commercials, rather than programs.)

Why would advertisers pay more, or the same, for less?

It would be easy to pin the answer on habit, but, with billions of dollars at stake, that’s too simplistic. The best explanation is that it’s hard to find anyone, even among the most digitally savvy, who doubts television’s persuasive power. “Television is the only medium where a mediocre commercial can sell a lot of product,” says Gene DeWitt, a media agency executive and founder of DeWitt Media Strategies.

And although network television is by no means as powerful as it was, advertisers don’t have another place to turn to get out that big message created to reach millions. The Internet, despite its popularity, is not that medium. It splinters its audience in millions of directions from the moment they log on, so while it is great for targeting to ever-smaller niches, television still excels at blasting out a huge, quick message. The first step to buying a product is knowing it exists, and television is still seen as the leader in doing that en masse.

There’s no more high-profile example of this than the Super Bowl, which has evolved since the mid-1980s into the annual premier advertising showcase and, not coincidentally, also draws the biggest television audience of the year. The 2008 Super Bowl saw the price for a 30-second spot hit $2.7 million; in 2007 it was around $2.4 million, and those in the market see no indication that the big game — one of the last live, must-watch annual television events — will lessen in advertising importance.¹⁴ “People don’t time-shift and watch the Super Bowl three days later,” says Francois Lee, vice president and activation director at media buying agency MediaVest, a unit of Publicis Groupe.

Advertisers’ continuing ardor for television is best expressed in the way the entire ad market is conducted, and that’s primarily through the advanced selling season held each spring, known as the upfront, which dictates much of the television networks’ financial fortunes for the next year. (For more details on how the upfront works, see sidebar.) Most of the networks’ inventory of advertising time is sold during the upfront. The remainder is sold closer to airtime in what’s known as the scatter market, which is usually more expensive, and offers advertisers decreased options.

The upfront “sort of stabilizes the market,” explains Jonathan Nelson, who advises advertising holding company Omnicom Group on its digital strategy. “The networks like to know what their revenue is going to look like, and in exchange for that they’re willing to discount.”

The television networks don’t operate with immunity, however. The writers strike potentially threatened the networks not only with large amounts of make-good air time for lost commercials but also with mass refunds to advertisers. (NBC did give out fourth-quarter refunds to some advertisers in December 2007.) And even the traditionally lavish upfront productions are in jeopardy in 2008, as at least one network, NBC, reassesses whether the costly spectacle is worth its expense in advertisers and press. The upside is that 2008 is a quadrennial year, with the summer Olympics in Beijing and, to a lesser extent the presidential elections, expected to boost network fortune.

According to CBS Chief Research Officer David Poltrack, the networks’ de facto forecaster, network revenues will increase by 7% with an underlying growth rate of 5%, adjusted for the Olympic boost. TNS is more cautious at 2.7%. Either way, the broadcast networks should do better than they did last year.

Cable TV

The outlook for cable advertising is one of the strongest over all.

Its numbers for the first three quarters of 2007 show a 4.7% increase to $12.7 billion, according to TNS Media Intelligence, while Nielsen Monitor-Plus reported a more meager 1.2 % increase.

According to analysis from the medium’s trade group, the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau, cable’s share of the overall television advertising pie grew from 36.8% in the second quarter of 2004 to 40.3% three years later. During the same period, network television dropped to 51.2% from 54.1%.

Still, like the Internet, cable television lags in terms of ad spending vs. viewership.

More people at any one time are now watching commercial cable television than broadcast network. During the last week of December 2007, for instance, 60.8% of the overall television audience was watching cable, according to data from Nielsen’s Galaxy service. (That does not mean the average cable channel’s ratings are comparable to a broadcast network’s. On cable, the audience is scattered over dozens of channels, not among four or five network channels.)

The spending on cable advertising thus has room to grow. “Nationally, cable in prime-time TV probably has 62% of the salable GRPs [Gross Rating Points],” said Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau. “Right now, we’ve got 52% of the dollars.”

Some think the gap will close.

Cunningham said the Olympics and the presidential elections in 2008 will create high demand for ads on the broadcast networks, causing dollars to flow to cable. Also, as network television deals with the large volume of make-goods caused by the writers’ strike, the availability of advertising time will tighten, Cunningham said.

Cable viewers also do more “live” viewing and new data show that people are more apt to watch commercials when they aren’t watching something they have recorded on DVR, said Cunningham, adding that that’s a lure for advertisers.

TNS’ Jon Swallen says local television money also has been drifting to cable, as smaller advertisers realize they can get a national footprint and distribution for the same amount they would spend targeting individual markets. “Local TV stations — particularly in larger markets — have been facing increasing competition from an unlikely source,” he says. “And that unlikely source is cable networks.”

Local TV Advertising (Spot)

Jon Swallen’s insight may make it sound as though things are bleak for spot TV, the industry term for advertising sold on local stations. Not so, at least for 2008: TNS Media Intelligence believes spot TV ad spending will increase by 9.9% this year, second only to the Internet.

Spot may be the most cyclical of ad media, since its fortunes wax and wane with election years. A presidential election year like 2008, with no incumbent and an open field, may be optimal, since the candidates pour money into advertising on local stations during the primary season.

It certainly has been a boon to television stations in Iowa, where TNS estimates candidates spent $40 million leading up to the January 2008 caucuses, three times more than four years ago.¹⁵ “We will outperform the ad market in ’08, whatever it is,” predicts Chris Rohrs, president of the Television Bureau of Advertising, the trade organization that represents local broadcasters.

But the medium’s cyclical nature also contributed to its posting the biggest declines in the television industry. TNS puts the drop in ad revenue at 6.8% to $11.2 billion in the first three quarters of 2007, and Nielsen Monitor-Plus estimated a 5% decline in the top 100 spot markets alone.¹⁶

The other culprit, according to Rohrs, was a decline in automotive spending, which contributes much to the bottom line of local stations, mostly in the form of dealer advertising. “We did not anticipate the softness in the automotive business,” he said.

The automotive industry, particularly the domestic carmakers, may be the best poster children for the changes in media as a whole. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, beset by such factors as bulging healthcare costs for retirees and intense foreign competition, have been cutting their budgets substantially and putting more of their advertising money in digital channels.

GM’s budget for the first nine months of 2007 was down a stunning 22.2% to $1.4 billion; Ford shaved its budget by 4.3% to $1.2 billion, and Cerberus, now parent company to the Chrysler brands, slashed its budget by 11.3%, to $865 million. (Toyota did, too, in the same time frame.)¹⁷

During the first 11 months of 2007, according to Nielsen Online AdRelevance, Ford increased its online ad budget to $128 million, a gain of nearly 130%; GM to $121 million, for a gain of 38%, and DaimlerChrysler by 16.5% to $30.4 million.

The Internet is the first place serious car buyers go to look for information. Thus, automotive advertisers have usually led the way in exploring digital technologies.

In marketing, cars (along with other goods and services such as computers and travel) are called “considered purchases” since they require a high degree of mulling by consumers. The Internet, with its ability to help people through the purchase process with car configurators, financing calculators and detailed specifications, is their medium of choice. “For our category, it’s critical for us because we know that that’s about the first place consumers go,” explains Betsy Lazar, executive director for advertising and media promotion of General Motors.

What that means for advertising in other media, over the long term, is hard to say. Rohrs sees much potential for local television stations in their burgeoning online channels, which may help counter-balance the dollars flying out of station owners’ pockets.

Radio

Compared to categories like network television and the Internet, radio is an also-ran.

According to Mary Bennett, executive vice president of marketing for the Radio Advertising Bureau, the medium is facing a by-now-familiar challenge. “All traditional media have their challenges,” she said. “It’s called the upstart darling: the Internet.”

In fact, the strongest growth story in the radio universe is the Internet.

In 2003, the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) began to track what it terms “non-spot revenue,” which is revenue streams apart from traditional advertising. The lion’s share of that money is advertising from a radio station’s Web presence, which rose from $1.3 billion in the first year of tracking to $1.5 billion in 2006, growing by more than 15%. That trend continued into 2007, with non-spot growing by 10% in the first three quarters of the year compared to the year earlier.

The problem is that non-spot is one of the smallest revenue generators in radio. Of the $21.7 billion the RAB says the medium tallied in 2006, non-spot totaled only 7%.

Network radio, which is the category of ad spending that comes from syndicated programming such as “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” is radio’s other growth story, but it, too, is not a huge contributor to its bottom line. For instance, 71% of revenue came from local advertising, such as car dealers and retail outlets, in 2006. Network’s contribution to the overall radio revenue pie in 2006 was 5%, or $1.1 billion. In the first three quarters of 2007, network revenue grew by 5%.

As for radio’s other revenue categories, they’ve barely budged since 2003.

National radio advertising, which pools and sells ad time from some of the big station groups such as CBS Radio and ABC/Disney, has ranged between $3.4 billion and $3.5 billion between 2003 and 2006, while local radio fluctuated from $15.1 billion to $15.6 billion. For 2007, Bennett says “the flagging economy [and] sub-prime market has consumers worried beyond belief about the next step.”

TNS’ Jon Swallen sees the problem as “the comparatively antiquated, backwater media measurement system that the radio industry is saddled with.” Radio still relies on panel-based written diaries to determine its ratings. In a world of trackable media, that is quickly becoming a “competitive disadvantage,” Swallen said.

Moreover, an attempt by Arbitron, the Nielsen of the radio business, to launch a new, theoretically more reliable measurement system in 2007 has stalled.

The Arbitron Portable People Meter calls for a panel of listeners to carry a device with them each day that can detect radio signals and transmit the data back to Arbitron. (See Radio.) In December, Arbitron retrenched after initial ratings — in some cases coming in quite a bit lower than the diary-based ratings — angered some stations.

“If you’re going to make a transition of this magnitude that’s going to change the way you do business,” Arbitron spokesman Thom Mocarsky said, “the industry should be cautious.”

Newspapers

Listen to advertising executives talk about the future of newspapers, and often they start with a long sigh.

The first problem the medium faces is that now people can easily find the content of newspapers elsewhere, specifically online. “The substitutability paradigm hits newspapers harder than anybody else,” said TNS Media Intelligence’s Senior Vice President of Research Jon Swallen.

And that habit is particularly true among young people, who get their news quickly and conveniently on the Web. This fundamental shift in consumer behavior may be irreversible.

According to TNS’ figures for the first nine months of 2007, every subcategory — local, national and Spanish-language — was down, with the medium’s domestic ad spending dropping from $20.3 billion in the first nine months of 2006 to $19.2 billion. The category’s overall decline was 5.2%. (For more details, see Newspaper Chapter.) And that came after a 2.4% decline in 2006 and a gain of only 1.1% in 2005.

Those longer-term numbers give a sense that the end of newspapers as pre-packaged parcels delivered to our doorsteps may not be far off. “Newspapers as we know them haven’t done anything wrong,” says Charlie Rutman, CEO of North American Operations for media buying agency MPG. “They haven’t gone backwards, but all these other things have encroached on their territory.”

Chief among these many “other things”: Web sites, like Craig’s List, that draw away classified ad customers. To that, add the movement of some bedrock newspaper advertising categories to other media.

At UBS’ Annual Global Media Conference in December 2007, the Newspaper Association of America’s vice president for business analysis and research, Jim Conaghan, explained, “Local auto dealers are actually shrinking their advertising budgets and, within those shrinking budgets year to year, are changing the media mix.” As we’ve seen, the main place those budgets are going is online.

Other categories have slashed newspaper budgets. As one example, Macy’s dropped its budget by 22.3% in the third quarter of 2007, according TNS. One bright spot is telecommunications; Verizon and Sprint both increased advertising budgets in the same time frame, by 14.9% and 3.7%, respectively. However, AT&T, which put a lot of money into a branding campaign, chose to put that money in online and television. In the third quarter, it cut its newspaper budget by almost 20%.

“We’re going to see some major metros collapse,” predicts Dave Morgan, who in February 2008 left AOL, where he was executive vice president for global advertising strategy and worked closely with many newspapers on online ad revenue efforts. “The costs they cannot control are just extraordinary.”

And easily overlooked is the medium’s lack of accountability compared to other, particularly digital, media. TargetCast tmc’s Steve Farella said of one major metropolitan daily, “They can’t tell you what the demographics of the sports section [are]. That’s huge.”

Michael Zimbalist, vice president for research and development operations for the New York Times Company, disagrees with the assertion that newspapers lag in accountability. “Of the traditional media,” he said, “newspapers have generally been some of the more trackable in many respects…. Retailers will tell you that you run ads in the newspaper and you will see foot traffic in stores.”

Nonetheless, the pull toward online is inevitable. Newspapers are investing there — to the extent that their shrinking coffers allow. “It’s a generational thing, and I think both [magazines and newspapers] are working feverishly to move their content online as quickly as possible,” said Brad Adgate, senior vice president for research for Horizon Media.

So will online advertising get to the point where it can revive newspapers, as a mainly digital product?

The Newspaper Association’s Conaghan believes the answer is yes.

“ What you’ve seen up to this point at many newspapers is really adding the online buy to the print buy,” he said at the UBS conference. “I think what you’re increasingly going to see in the near-term and longer term future is that online sale being made first and then kind of the print buy being an add-on to the online buy.” For instance, if an advertiser was interested in using a newspaper property to launch an online promotion, it might first decide that the ad should appear in targeted portions of the newspaper’s Web site — a sports advertiser, for example, might buy only in the sports section. Once visitors clicked on the ad, they would go to a mini-site to register for the promotion. The role of print in that scenario might be to drive online traffic to the promotion, but it’s clearly secondary.

Some old-media companies are adapting to meet advertisers’ multimedia needs. At the New York Times Company, for instance, the sales force works with a customer to present and customize all options, rather than sell them a particular one.

But there is a very long way to go. Although the Times reported that its Internet revenue — which includes both its newspaper Web sites and the content “guide” site About.com — was up 26.5% to $79.7 million in the third quarter of 2007 compared to the same period in 2006, it still makes up only 10.6% of the total revenue, up from 8.5% the year before.¹⁸

Conaghan said at the UBS conference, “ I would expect as digital businesses grow in all media, it will keep increasing to take a larger and larger composition of newspaper ad spending. When it reaches 20%, when it reaches 25%, I really don’t know. I don’t think anybody else does either.”

Ultimately, there appears to be only one certainty. “The only way to get through this transformation,” says Morgan of AOL, “is to get in front of it.”

Magazines

It might be time to ask the question: What is a magazine?

Judging by ad spending in 2007, the medium by and large is healthy. But there was more talk than ever of magazine-as-brand, as some leading publications crossed platforms to gain readership — and advertisers.

According to the Magazine Publishers of America, magazines over all announced 207 digital initiatives in 2007, ranging from integrated marketing programs to building social networking tools. That number is up from 155 in 2006.¹⁹

There was no one big event in 2007 to single out. Instead, the year saw a slow drip, drip, drip that has resulted in most magazines trying to grasp audience wherever it is and through means they once would have pooh-poohed.

The role of digital media is “to take the brands strength and deliver it to people in a 24/7 manner,” said Ellen Oppenheim, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of the Magazine Publishers of America.

Some examples:

• Forbes launched an online audience network to cull impressions from a number of sites that would make attractive buys for advertisers.
• Wired built a dedicated production studio to produce its own online video. It also integrated its Web and magazine staffs during the course of the year.
• Vanity Fair now has exclusives on its Web site. Visitors, for example, could see unpublished photos from the print story about January 2008 cover girl Katherine Heigl.

For some magazines seeing downward trends in ad spending, these changes are crucial. For others, having a healthy online presence is a way of hedging their bets.

For 2008, TNS predicts that the basic trends of the past year will continue, with consumer and Sunday magazines up a total of 3.6% and business-to-business magazines experiencing a miniscule 0.1% decline.

So why is the medium’s overall performance so full of peaks and valleys?

To TNS’ Jon Swallen, it’s an example of what he calls the concept of “substitutability” — the easier and faster it is to replicate what an older media property delivers in another medium (usually, these days, the Internet), the more vulnerable the property is. Thus, advertisers are losing interest in the print newsweeklies, both business-to-business and consumer.

Print ad revenue statistics from the Publishers Information Bureau for the full year 2007 tell the story. BusinessWeek’s ad revenue dropped 12.9% and Fortune by 10.5%, with only Forbes bucking the trend among the major business newsweeklies, with a 7.9% gain. Time’s revenue was off 18.3% and Newsweek’s revenue dropped slightly, by 1.8%.²⁰ On the b-to-b side, one notable trade magazine, Nielsen-owned Adweek, said late in the year that it would decrease its frequency to 36 issues a year to focus more on producing online content.²¹

One way the category’s relative vibrancy shows up is in the continuing quest by entrepreneurs to start up new magazines. “We’re always being asked to add new magazines [to what we track],” said Brian Lane, senior vice president of client strategy and product development at Nielsen Monitor-Plus. “There are always new magazines out there.” Despite the bright spots, however, even non-newsweeklies are facing increasing pressure to make money — or else. Among the notable shutdowns in 2007 were Time Inc.’s monthly Business 2.0 and Condé Nast’s House & Garden magazine, which had trouble competing in a market chock-a-block with shelter books.

Another bright spot is niche magazines that have a dedicated loyal audience for a specific topic.²² Some examples: Audubon experienced a 29.7% growth in ad revenue in 2007 compared to 2006; Fit Pregnancy saw a 22.8% gain and Road & Track had an 11.2% increase. While the trends aren’t uniform, they generally demonstrate an axiom that’s at least as old as television: As new media come along, older media have to shift what they deliver.

In terms of overall ad categories, most of the news is positive. In addition to big increases in the categories of drugs and remedies during full year 2007, other substantial gainers included food and food products, up 17% to more than $2.1 billion; retail, up 10.3% to more than $1.9 billion; and toiletries and cosmetics, up 11.9% to $2.6 billion.

But there are trouble spots in automotive, technology and home furnishings and supplies, off in ad revenue by 2.1%, 9% and 8.2%, respectively.

For home furnishings and supplies, the category may be suffering from a downturn caused by the beleaguered real estate market, which is a cyclical situation. For automotive and technology, however, it’s obvious that the Internet is one reason dollars are being sapped away and that may be a longer-term problem. At the annual meeting of the American Magazine Conference in October 2007, Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli told the crowd not to look for increases in ad spending from his company.²³ Christine MacKenzie, executive director of multi-marketing and agency relations at Chrysler, said. “For us, magazines still play a role. Magazines are great, particularly during launching a product.” She added, however, that their effectiveness at delivering lots of information is something the Internet can do, too, often better.

The quest to gain readers and advertisers is leading more and more publishers in unusual directions. For example, CondéNet, the online unit of Condé Nast, was one of the launch advertisers on Facebook Ads, where it has created presences for its cooking site Epicurious and its teen girl-targeted site Flip.com; it also signed an ad revenue-sharing deal late in 2007 with YouTube, and in 2006 bought Reddit.com, a social networking site that allows users to vote on and share their favorite online content.

To Sarah Chubb, president of CondéNet, it’s all about leveraging the Web’s easy distribution to build both audience and advertisers. “A big goal with all of these distribution deals is to have advertisers come along with us,” she says.

For instance, CondéNet has worked both online and offline with the Diamond Trading Company, the company that brought the world the slogan “A Diamond Is Forever.” The deal included print advertising in shopping magazine Lucky, online advertising at Condé Nast fashion site style.com, sponsorship of the style.com video area, and offline distribution of the diamond company’s advertising through an initiative called Emerging Cinemas, in which CondéNet video is screened at art house film theaters across the country as a 10-minute feature before the show. Long-form commercials, of more than two minutes, from the diamond company were interspersed within the CondéNet video.

Though Condé Nast has had a cutting-edge approach to incorporating advertisers into its properties, wherever they are, it’s becoming increasingly clear that, as with other media categories, magazines will live in a variety of media, with brands being the thread that pulls the different content platforms together.

Taking the Measure of Measurement

While Nielsen Media Research is still the standard for measuring television ratings, the quality and quantity provided by digital measurement is giving it a run for its money, as well as pushing measurement of every other ad-supported medium to improve.

Digital technology’s ability to tell advertisers exactly who is accessing a specific promotion at any given time is a far cry from the “sample” Nielsen households that have held together the television industry.

“There is an awful lot of pressure on mainstream media to keep up with the Internet,” says Brad Adgate, senior vice president for research at Horizon Media. Magazines, newspapers, cable television and radio are all trying to make their measurement digital, or, at the very least, compare themselves favorably to digital advertising vehicles.

Sarah Fay, an online media executive who took the reins of the online and offline operations of Aegis Group’s Carat USA in 2007, is painfully aware of the discrepancy. “Coming in fresh to the broadcast market, the big question you ask is: Are the samples big enough to be valid?”

To people who have spent their careers in broadcast media, that may seem an odd question. Nielsen’s sample of approximately 10,000 households (incorporating 30,000 viewers) of the 100 million households in the U.S. has satisfied the advertising community well enough to justify tens of billions of dollars being spent in TV each year. “We are still taking $65 billion (in TV ad spending) off of panel-based measurement,” says Sean Cunningham president and CEO of the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau.

But as digital audiences grow, there’s more concern not only about all of the households who aren’t in Nielsen’s fold, but whether measurement data in every medium can stand up to newer technologies. “There’s no question that technology is pushing us to a lot of things,” says Nielsen spokeswoman Anne Elliott. “But we’re developing technology that will help us on the way.”

What follows is a snapshot of how measurement is changing to try to meet the digital challenge.

Television:

Nielsen’s C3

At Nielsen, the biggest measurement news right now is what the media industry has come to call C3. (See sidebar.)

The new system rates commercials and all viewing of a TV program – whether real-time, on a video game such Xbox, or on a digital video recorder — within three days after it airs.

C3 also became the negotiating currency for much of the 2007 upfront, meaning that audience guarantees to advertisers were based on it, instead of the old currency, which measured live program ratings.

Although not everyone wanted to limit viewing to three days, a shorter time frame made sense for some time-sensitive categories, like movies and retail. According to Elliott, “A significant amount of playback does occur within those three days.”

Measuring time-shifted viewing is one C3 innovation. The second is that, for the first time, Nielsen is rating the commercials within each program. For advertisers, this finally gets at the question of whether commercials, as opposed to programming, are being watched. Still, C3 provides relatively rudimentary results, because it only gives an average rating of all commercials within a program. It won’t tell, say, whether a Budweiser ad featuring talking lizards did better than a commercial for the car-care product Armor All.™

As Nielsen has converted to C3, the system has offered up what seems to be a common result when a new measurement is introduced: lower ratings.

According to data compiled from September to early December 2007 by David Poltrack, chief research officer of CBS, the four major broadcast networks saw prime-time audience drop by 9% over all, 11% in the 25-to-54 age group, and 10% in the 18-to-49 age group. The ratings for commercials dropped only slightly, by about 5%, when people viewed them as part of live programming; about 60% skipped past commercials when watching pre-recorded programming.

That’s not news that advertisers and television executives particularly want to hear. But C3, which most view as a transitional system, is still a signpost of what’s to come.²⁴

The Set-Top Box

What the television and advertising markets are really gearing up for is the ability to mine data about viewer behavior directly from the set-top box — or the cable box, as most consumers know it.

There are limitations. Even if the television is off, the set-top box will still record whatever channel the cable box is turned to as viewing data. But the potential is clear: every time a television viewer changes channels using the set-top box, that data are transmitted back to the cable operator. Until recently, that information has never been used to target advertising. “We’re only a few years away from a transformation of set-top boxes,” says Dave Morgan, executive vice president for global advertising strategy for Time Warner’s AOL.

The goal now is to use that data to provide more accurate ratings and also place more targeted advertising – all in ways that protect consumers’ privacy. “We’re looking at different ways that we can look at the set-top box information,” says Nielsen’s Elliott.

And it’s beginning to happen. Although there are a number of initiatives, one that created headlines last year was a deal among Nielsen, Google and EchoStar’s DISH Network to provide second-by-second ratings information, which helps marketers, agencies and media companies discover not only whether a commercial is being watched, but also at what point viewers tune out.²⁵ For advertisers, this is crucial to rethinking their advertising. “In other words, where within that 30-second ad are we losing people?” says Todd Juenger, general manager and vice president for audience research and measurement at TiVo.

While Google and EchoStar had already been working together on Google TV Ads, Nielsen brought new information to the table: demographic data, based on samples, to pinpoint the age, gender and income of the people tracked.

Another headline-maker was a November 2007 agreement between NBC and TiVo.²⁶

One result of that deal is taking advantage of TiVo’s Internet-like interactivity. NBC advertisers can buy clickable tags when their ads appear on the network via TiVo; the results of those clicks will then be reported back to advertisers.

The second component is that NBC said it would subscribe to TiVo’s Stop/Watch service, a panel-based measurement initiative, which, like the Google/Nielsen/EchoStar deal, gives second-by-second measurement. “TiVo is sitting on some terrific data,” says Juenger.

Google TV Ads is an experiment with an automated, auction-based process for buying television advertising, in conjunction with EchoStar, Wave Cable and Nielsen. Like Google Print Ads, the service allows advertisers too small to warrant a call from sales reps to buy television advertising online. What’s truly interesting is the data the advertiser gets back: Google TV reports whether people viewed an ad and when they tuned out.

It would be reasonable to question why all major advertisers aren’t experimenting with set top devices. Some contend that it’s because there are still advertising executives who view too much knowledge as a bad thing. It’s no doubt scary for some to finally face the truth of how ads are performing. “Who wants to be incredibly accountable when you don’t have to be?” asks Omnicom Group’s Jonathan Nelson.

Why is Google involved in television? Google imagines a world where advertising is completely accountable. If it can build accountability into models for all its clients across all platforms, everyone wins — Google, by gaining even more revenue; advertisers and agencies, with assurances their ad dollars are being invested wisely, and publishers, by proving their properties are worthy advertising vehicles.

At the UBS Global Media Conference in December 2007, Tim Armstrong, resident of advertising and commerce for Google North America, explained how more accurate measurement helps advertisers target and media companies sell more advertising. At a former job, he said: “We had a Saturday morning fishing and hunting TV program, which in the late ’90s you couldn’t sell, and in essence now it’s sold out … the question is — was that inventory not valuable in 1998, and now it’s valuable in 2007? The answer is there probably was not enough data and information at that time period to really show advertisers why that inventory was really valuable.” Theoretically, at least in the sales arena, every program has a value to advertisers; you just need the data to prove it.

Google’s model does not answer the question: can advertising be 100% accountable?

A spokeswoman for Google, Deanna Yick, says, “We think it can be.” But the ideal has its skeptics, who point out that the idea may work better for ads calling for a consumer response, such as dialing a toll-free number, than those aimed at building brand awareness and image.

And, as radio is finding in its own attempt at more digitally based measurement with its Arbitron Portable People Meter, digital has its imperfections. (See Radio Chapter.)

“I don’t think we’ll ever get perfect accountability,” says Charlie Rutman, CEO of North America Operations at MPG, a unit of Havas.

Print: Online Surveying

And then there’s print. How does a medium that has no near-term prospect of being delivered digitally cope with the digital challenge?

The answer is in several ways, which include comparing how the medium performs in combination with, or in competition with, digital platforms, and also by inserting digital technology into the product.

Ellen Oppenheim, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of the Magazine Publishers of America, says online surveying — using the online medium to find out more about readership — has been hugely popular among publishers. The trade organization has also done a series of studies, including how magazines help drive online success for advertisers.

Perhaps the most interesting experiment on the boards in magazine research is one by research firm MRI (Mediamark Research and Intelligence) to measure readership using RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, which can then transmit data about whether someone is reading a magazine back to headquarters.²⁷ “Accountability is the watchword,” says Kathi Love, the CEO of MRI. “Everybody wants proof that their ad was seen.”

The test, expected to start in early 2008, will put RFID tags in magazines in some doctors’ waiting rooms, which will be embedded into a plastic cover. Data will be transmitted back to MRI through a Blackberry-size unit on the wall. It will not tell what stories a reader spends time on; it will record whether a magazine is opened and the amount of time it stays open. More detailed data will come later, says Love.

The newspaper business announced a new measurement service called Audi ence-FAX in November. A joint venture of the Newspaper Association of America, Scarborough Research and the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the service is merging online and offline audience data for newspaper properties to give advertisers more complete data on each newspaper property’s impact, regardless of which medium people are using to consume it. “ Getting that kind of data into their hands is going to be critical if we are to move past simply counting papers into counting people who consume what we produce,” according to Audience-FAX.

More refined targeting brings with it a major concern. Will consumer privacy be breached? There’s no simple way to resolve that issue. The industry would prefer to self-regulate in large part by targeting ads at consumers who agree to receive them or through, say, Internet cookies, which track consumer behavior without revealing identities.²⁸ But for now, the privacy debate remains largely unresolved.

Advances in measurement will march on. Clearly the days of advertisers spending billions of dollars based on broad strokes of data about audience are drawing to a close.

From Advertising Agency to Media Agency

Over the past decade, the explosion of new digital platforms has provided advertising agencies with a staggering array of options to help sell their clients’ messages.

Planning and buying media, once a behind-the-scenes specialty within the advertising business, has taken center stage to help advertisers sort through the smorgasbord of media choices.

What is planning and buying, and what exactly does the key figure involved, the so-called media specialist, do?

Planning is the process of deciding where an advertiser’s message will have the most impact: Are prospective purchasers for a product watching prime-time network television, listening to the radio, reading a niche magazine or surfing the Web?

Once an advertiser and agency have decided where the campaign should appear, the buying phase starts. Buying is the process of purchasing advertising, including such units as 30-second broadcast television commercials, single-page print ads or Web banners. This is not a simple trip to a media supermarket, but involves intense negotiations, sometimes with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.

And the weight of all those dollars has significantly shifted how advertising agencies operate.

Ad agencies once had several departments under one roof: creative, where ads are designed and produced; media, which plans the media strategy and buys the media where ads will appear, and account services, which coordinates these activities on behalf of the client. Most agencies also had a research department to gather insights into what made consumers tick.

When media selections were limited to a few television stations, consumer magazines, radio stations and newspapers, the media specialty within the advertising business was the poor stepchild. But that all changed in the 1990s, as media, and the business of planning and buying it, started to become exponentially more complex. Once working quietly behind the scenes, media specialists are now edging out the creative people as the darlings of the ad world.

Today, media specialists have to decide not only which older media channels are appropriate for their clients’ messages, but also whether the consumers they are trying to target are best reached through social networking Web sites or search engines; video and podcasts seen and heard on your laptop or PDA, or the still-proliferating number of cable networks.

The rise of the media specialist also has led to a fundamental structural change within the ad business. For the most part, media is now handled not within the ad agency that creates the ads but through a separate unit, known as the media agency, whose complete focuses is on finding the right outlet for clients.

For the foreseeable future, the ad business looks as if it will be two businesses: the media agency and the creative agency.”

As MediaPost columnist Jack Feuer explained: “In the old mass media world, everybody fished on the same three giant oceans [the broadcast networks]. Nobody knew where the fish were or if they were biting. So the difference between the fat fishermen and the starving fishermen was who had the brightest lure — the best creative.”

Here’s one example of how drastically that has changed.

In 2004, Dove, the women’s skincare brand made by Unilever, embarked on its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” a continuing effort that from its inception has used a complex combination of media to promote its twin messages. The first: Beauty comes in many shapes and sizes. The second: Let’s start a discussion on how women define beauty.

To get out those messages, the Dove brand leapt into the multi-media pool using the following outlets:

• Interactive billboards such as one in Times Square, allowing viewers to use text messaging to vote on whether the woman portrayed there was “wrinkled or wonderful.”
• An online series, “Dove Realty Diaries,” which features blogs and videos that follow four girls as they deal with self-esteem issues that arise during the teen years.
• A Web site, campaignforrealbeauty.com, that acts as a forum for visitors to discuss their concepts of beauty.
• Viral videos, “Dove Evolution,” appearing online only, portraying how the beauty industry creates unrealistic images of beauty.
• A 2006 Super Bowl commercial focusing on self-esteem issues.
• National magazine advertising.

The budget numbers for the campaign have not been divulged by the media agency, Mindshare, and the creative agency, Ogilvy & Mather.²⁹ But they will share some of the responses, which illustrate how deep and wide new audiences for a product can be.

During four years, nearly 4.5 million people have visited the campaignforrealbeauty Web site. Since it had its debut in early 2007, the viral video “Dove Evolution” has been viewed by more than 12 million people on YouTube alone and caused an 8,000% jump in traffic on the campaign’s main Web site. And more than one million people have viewed the latest video, “OnSlaught,” on YouTube since it appeared in late 2007.

While Unilever is a particularly inventive company when it comes to media strategy, campaigns such as this one are becoming more commonplace, requiring more intricate planning and buying — and the service of dedicated media agencies – than those that rely on older media outlets.

The rise of media agencies also reflects the considerable clout they wield when negotiating to buy space and time with media companies ranging from NBC to Time Warner to Yahoo.

In 2006, according to data from Advertising Age, 15 media agencies controlled about $85 billion of the $150 billion spent in domestic advertising. (Much of the rest is in local advertising.) As with the ad agencies they split from, the media agencies are nearly all owned by one of four communications holding companies. And each of these, in turn, owns dozens of companies in every marketing communications field, from public relations to sales. (See AdAge chart.)

Interpublic Group, for instance, owns media agencies Initiative and Universal McCann, as well as the public relations agency Weber Shandwick, the ad agencies McCann Erickson Worldwide and Deutsch (and others), and even the Hollywood publicity outfit PMK/HBH.

The big four holding companies are:

• Interpublic Group, New York. 2006 revenue: $6.2 billion. Major clients: General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever.³⁰
• Omnicom Group, New York. 2006 revenue: $11.4 billion. Major clients: Chrysler, McDonald’s, PepsiCo.³¹
• Publicis Groupe, Paris. 2006 Revenue: $6 billion. Major clients: General Motors, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble.³²
• WPP Group, London. 2006 revenue: $11 billion. Major clients: Ford, IBM, Unilever.³³

Ad agencies filled with account and media people still exist, but a more accurate name for them today is creative agency.

And yet as the advertising and media industries continue to evolve, there are signs the business will come full circle, with creative and media once again housed together to create truly integrated campaigns. In December 2007, one major media agency, Starcom Mediavest Group, announced it was developing its own in-house creative department to help with certain parts of the creative process, such as designing clients’ programs on the Web.³⁴

Footnotes

1. Greg Smith, chief operating officer of Neo@Ogilvy, a digital media offshoot of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide.

2. TNS Media Intelligence

3. Publishers Information Bureau Revenue & Ad pages by Category 2007: http://www.magazine.org/Advertising_and_PIB/PIB_Revenue_and_Pages/Revenue___Pages_by_Ad_Category__quarterly___YTD_/25716.cfm

4. Advertising Age 100 Hundred Leading Advertisers: http://adage.com/datacenter/article?article_id=118652

5. Attributed to John Wanamaker : http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/John_Wanamaker/

6. 2008 Ad Age Advertising Jobs report: http://adage.com/images/random/datacenter/2007/annualjobs2007.pdf

7. TNS Media Intelligence

8. “Why We Don’t Know Enough About Broadband in the US,” Pew Internet & American Life Project: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/Backgrounder.MeasuringBroadband.pdf

9. Diego Vasquez. “Big Changes for Local Web Advertising,” Media Life Magazine: http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman2/publish/Research_25/Big_changes_for_local_web_advertising.asp

10. Interactive Advertising Bureau Internet Advertising Revenue Report first half of 2007: http://www.iab.net/media/file/IAB_PwC_2007Q2.pdf

11. “So Many Ads So Few Clicks,” BusinessWeek, November 12, 2007: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_46/b4058053.htm

12. Google advertising tool AdWords: http://adwords.google.com/select/Login.

13. “Will Give-Backs Become Contagious?” by Mariss Guthrie, Broadcasting and Cable, December 17, 2007: http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6513149.html?q=Nielsen.

14. “Super Bowl Slots Nearly Sold Out,” Media Week, December 15, 2006: http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003522472

15. “40 Million Spent to Tout Candidates on Iowa TV,” CNN.com, January 1, 2008: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/01/iowa.ad.spending/.

16. TNS Media Intelligence: http://www.tns-mi.com/news/12112007.htm

17. Nielsen Online Ad Relevance. .

18. “The New York Times Company Reports 2007 Third-Quarter Results,” New York Times Company Press Release. October 23, 2007: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=105317&p=irol-pressArticle&ID=1066071&highlight=

19. Magazine Publishers of America. Magazine Digital Initiatives 2007: http://www.magazine.org/digital/25681.cfm

20. Publishers Information Bureau. Revenue and Pages by Magazine Titles Yearly table.

21. “AdWeek to Expand Digital Offering.” AdWeek, November 20, 2007: http://www.adweek.com/aw/national/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003676050.

22. Publishers Information Bureau. Revenue & Pages by Magazine Titles (Quarterly): http://www.magazine.org/Advertising_and_PIB/PIB_Revenue_and_Pages/Revenue___Pages_by_Magazine_Titles__quarterly_/24509.cfm.

23. Nat Ives. “Chrysler CEO says Ad Spending Unlikely to Increase,” Advertising Age, October 29, 2007: http://adage.com/amc07/article?article_id=121607&search_phrase=Chrysler+magazines

24. Anthony Crupi. “Buyers Debate C3 Ratings,” MediaWeek, November 16, 2007: http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003673852

25. Brian Stelter. “In Foray into TV, Google is to Track Ad Audiences,” New York Times, October 24, 2007: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/business/media/24adco.html

26. “NBC Partners with TiVo on Advertising and Research Solutions,” TiVo press release, November 27, 2007: http://tivo.com/abouttivo/pressroom/pressreleases/2007/release_112707.html

27. “MediaMark, DJG Marketing and WRSS to Test Passive Measurement of Magazine Readership in Public Places.” Mediamark Research and Intelligence Press Release, December 3, 2007.

28. Randall Rothenberg. “Facebook’s Flop,” Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2007:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119760316554728877.html

29. Paid media for Unilever’s Dove campaign includes the interactive billboard, print ads and the 2006 Super Bowl spot. The major expense on the viral videos was production. The Web site costs include production and site maintenance.

30. The Interpublic Group of Companies, 2008 Annual Report: http://library.corporate-ir.net/library/87/878/87867/items/247880/2006ar.pdf

31. “Omnicom Reports 2006 Fourth Quarter and Year End Results,” Omnicom Press release, Feb. 13, 2007: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=102269&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=962272&highlight=

32. David Giantasio. “Publicis’ Net Income up 15%,” AdWeek, February 28, 2007.

33. David Giantasio. “WPP’s Revenue, Profit up in ’06,” AdWeek, February 23, 2007.

34. Joe Mandese. “SMG eyes ‘Agency of the Future,’ Expands Creative Services Role, Media Daily News,” December 19, 2007.