{"id":219025,"date":"2009-12-02T09:50:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-02T13:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2745923954793947308.post-8922226699213133476"},"modified":"2009-12-02T10:01:15","modified_gmt":"2009-12-02T14:01:15","slug":"ftc-testimony-explains-3-trends-for-newspapers-in-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/219025","title":{"rendered":"FTC Testimony Explains 3 Trends for Newspapers in 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rick Edmonds
Poynter.org
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The remarks below were prepared for testimony offered Dec. 1, 2009 at the FTC workshop “How Will Journalism Survive The Internet Age?” and have been adapted for this format.<\/em><\/p>\n

My assignment is to talk about the state of the news business, newspapers in particular, right now and in the near future. I guess that makes me the Ghost of Christmas present. And there are some unfortunate parallels between the finances of the industry and those of Bob Cratchit’s family. The health of several once robust metropolitan newspapers is now as fragile as Tiny Tim’s. <\/p>\n

I am not among those who think that newspapers are dying. But these have been excruciatingly hard times for the news business, and more of the same is in prospect for at least the next six to nine months. . . . <\/p>\n

. . . By necessity, newspaper organizations have cut deeply just to stay in business, even more deeply if they are to maintain profitability. Newspapers have been busily outsourcing all sorts of things from office functions to printing. Many metros have cut circulation to outlying areas and spend much less than they used to on selling new subscriptions. As a result, paid daily circulation was off more than 10 percent year-to-year in the most recent reporting period. <\/p>\n

Also, at a time when aggressive investment in new ventures is clearly indicated, newspaper organizations have scarce resources for start-ups and limited access to capital. <\/p>\n

But the visible edge of the cutting is in the newspapers themselves — many fewer reporters and editors, downsizing of the physical dimensions of the paper, sharply curtailed space devoted to the news report. <\/p>\n

Several months ago I sought to quantify these losses, using available data on lost revenue and some survey information on news budgets as a percentage of revenue. <\/p>\n

The result: By a conservative calculation, newspapers are generating $1.6 billion less in annual spending on news, headed into 2010, than they were three years ago. <\/strong><\/em>Granted, some of that spending may have been inefficient, even unnecessary. But one alarming implication of that number is that we really don’t know what investigations, insight and basic civic coverage simply didn’t happen and won’t. A second is that the explosion of exciting new ventures, still finding their way to sustainability, does not match the scale of the work lost. . . READ FULL STORY<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rick EdmondsPoynter.orgThe remarks below were prepared for testimony offered Dec. 1, 2009 at the FTC workshop “How Will Journalism Survive The Internet Age?” and have been adapted for this format. My assignment is to talk about the state of the news business, newspapers in particular, right now and in the near future. I guess […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4246,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4246"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}