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Young [Non]Readers and the News

'State of Media' Report Offers Valuable Insights for Working Press

 Defining the Media Field of Play

The Project for Excellence in Journalism in March issued the first of what is planned to be an annual "State of the News Media 2004" report. The report addresses the full range of media carrying news on and about the environment but in no way is aimed at environmental journalism. Nonetheless, the report clearly lays out "the playing field" on which environmental journalists are and will be toiling. Highlights from the report can be read at: http://www.stateofthemedia.org.

Newspapers | Network TV | Cable TV | Local TV | Radio
Ethnic Media | Alternative Press | Magazines | Online Media

State of the Media: Newspapers
Bill Dawson

The newspaper chapter of "The State of the News Media 2004" contains both warning signs and hints of potential opportunities for those who care about the state of environmental reporting in particular.

The report's historical overview of newspaper industry trends will probably be generally familiar to most journalists. Still, it provides a useful, detailed and sobering context for a better understanding of the waxing and waning fortunes of the environment beat as a newsroom fixture and the other ways that environmental coverage occurs.

Some key findings:

Despite declining readership, however, the newspaper industry as a whole is "economically robust" and "enormously profitable," the report asserts. Its authors stress that a crucial question confronts industry leaders:

Should newspapers invest in growing circulation -- perhaps by boosting and diversifying content, as some companies have done successfully? Or should they accept the judgment of some analysts that newspapers are a "mature" industry, no longer capable of significant growth and, therefore, focus on maximizing profits by other means, such as cutting costs?

It's clearly a question with serious implications for the future of environmental coverage, which has still not achieved "beat" status at many newspapers and has occasionally sustained cutbacks at some locations where it enjoyed that standing.

In this connection, what the report's authors perceive as a general pattern of past practice by newspaper executives is not encouraging. Since 1990, they report, broad cuts in editorial staffing typically occurred during tough economic times, followed by only "modest" staff expansions when the economy headed upward again.

Partly as a result, newsroom staffing declined by 2,200 fulltime positions since 1990. These cuts often occurred through buyouts that claim experienced journalists, the authors write, and accompanying budget cuts typically take the largest toll in areas that include investigative and in-depth reporting.

"It all adds up to mission creep with a reduced work force," they note, "and possibly less time for artful storytelling and high-level reporting and analysis." Those are all qualities that most environmental reporters would undoubtedly say are especially valuable for covering their challenging field well.

Despite such worrisome signals, the report also identifies a number of features on the newspaper landscape that could be hopeful for environmental journalists, or at least command their continuing attention.

Based on a content analysis of Page One stories at 16 newspapers last year, the report authors note "a small but steady trend toward a broader definition of news" when comparing the 2003 findings to similar surveys in 1977, 1987, and 1997.

While the number of "government" stories generally declined on front pages during this period, other story categories that could include environmental and related topics such as "domestic affairs," "lifestyle" and "science" have increased.

Meanwhile, instead of being driven by individual "protagonists," such as political leaders and celebrities, front page stories in 2003 were generally more event-based, tending "to focus on several people talking about events and ideas" instead of "institutions or people."

The report also notes "current experiments" in a number of cities, in which mainstream dailies have begun producing free papers aimed at potential readers in the 18- to 34-year-old demographic. Whether it occurs in youth-oriented papers, in traditional all-ages dailies themselves, or in the Spanish-language spinoff papers that some dailies are launching, more newsroom investment obviously could mean boosts in environmental coverage and reporting on other topics historically seen by some editors as lower priorities.

The report authors cautiously cite academic findings suggesting that papers with larger staffs may do better economically as a result. "In the long run," they write, newspapers may pay heed, deciding that in order to thrive, they must "cover aspects of the community, offer a depth of information, and provide a level of synthesis other media do not." If that happens, environmental journalism may well benefit.

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Young [Non]Readers and the News

Newspaper executives received another stern warning in April about their industry's increasingly shaky relationship with young readers.

In a survey of 10,800 readers at 52 dailies, the Readership Institute at Northwestern University found that readership is declining in the group aged 18 to 24.

Those younger newspaper readers spend less time than older individuals reading the newspaper, according to a report to a joint conference of the Newspaper Association of America and American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Key survey results were reported by Editor and Publisher. More details are available at the Readership Institute's website.

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Network TV
Bud Ward

First the good news: About 83 percent of Americans get most of their news from television, about double the percentage that turns primarily to newspapers.

Now the bad news: Environmental stories comprise about one percent of stories on the network nightly news broadcasts -- about the same as education, transportation, and religion. "If you watched a commercial nightly newscast every weeknight for a month -- some 10 hours of programming -- you would have seen ... about four minutes on the environment." That's more air time on those programs than for culture and the arts or family and parenting ... but less than for the other news categories examined.

What's more, says the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) State of the News Media 2004 report, the three commercial networks' coverage of science has declined during the past two years, in part because of the increased coverage given foreign policy. Journalists doing environmental reporting on network TV find the media facing five "major trends," the report says:

  • shrinking audiences;
  • declining news budgets;
  • competition from 24-hour cable news;
  • the rapid growth followed by the decline of prime time news magazine shows; and
  • increased influence of lighter-fare morning programs within news divisions.

The Dan Rather/Tom Brokaw/Peter Jennings nightly network newscasts are "still the place where viewers can get the most comprehensive sense of the day's events," the report says. But "morning news programs have become clearly more important to network news divisions." Those shows focus more on crime, less on governmental affairs or foreign events, and substantially more on celebrities and lifestyle news.

Writing of the morning network news programs, the report says, "It is a world where the economy is covered as household finance tips; where science is covered as innovations in personal health or consumer electronics; and where environmental stories such as global warming are covered as the latest weather disaster."

Not only has the environmental news hole narrowed on the networks, but the news hole generally is much smaller: 18 minutes and 48 seconds now compared with 22 minutes in earlier 30-minute programs. Even that reduced air time for news content is more than for the morning news programs, which average just slightly more than 15 minutes in 30 once commercials, promotional announcements and teases, and local news are accounted for.

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Cable TV

The "television news medium of choice" for many Americans is cable, and in particular, CNN.

"Yet all is not so rosy," say the authors of the State of the News Media 2004 report. The growth of core audiences may have peaked, and "the age of innovation and investment in new kinds of programs or people that characterized cable news is no more."

Cable viewers often find "newsgathering in the raw: live interviewing illustrated by unedited videotape, extemporaneous reporting with little time to write or consult sources... Hour after hour, across all parts of the day, cable television news features constant repetition, a narrow news agenda, an obsession with headlines, scanty sourcing and little autonomy for correspondents in the field."

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, working with Andrew Tyndall, reviewed 240 hours of programming and found that only 11 percent of that time and 8 percent of stories consisted of written and edited packages. Sixty-two percent of the cable time consisted of "live" pieces, primarily anchors conducting interviews, and close to 10 percent of the time consisted of Q and A with in-house analysts, experts, and staff.

Along with the "limited breadth of the cable news agenda," the report points to "the limited amount of updating .... Each days' news agenda was narrowly defined, determined in the morning and largely just replicated thereafter." Nearly three-quarters of the stories are "the same matter turned to repeatedly." A viewer watching CNN, MSNBC, or Fox for an entire 16 hours in the course of a recent day might expect to see about one minute on environment, but more than an hour on crime news, an hour on accidents and disasters, 53 minutes on lifestyle coverage, 41 minutes on celebrities and entertainment, an hour and one-half on politics, and two hours and 17 minutes on the Iraq war.

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Local TV

"Mixed signals of health and challenge" characterize the local TV sector, and "the next few years may determine whether the industry ultimately heads up or down."

With viewership of local news on the wane, more people in local TV appear pessimistic rather than optimistic about its future, the report says, pointing to higher news-gathering costs in the face of sagging news budgets, heavier workloads for smaller reporting staffs, and a format many find to be "repetitive, formulaic, sensationalized, or insipid."

There is some good news too: the business generally is healthier for local news than for network news, and networks still want to own more local stations. Also, advertisers and political campaigns still look to local TV to sell products and candidates.

Local TV content is "dominated by the ethos of 'live, local and late-breaking,'" the report says, particularly when it comes to covering crime. About three-quarters of local TV stories are local, and 70 percent of stories are less than a minute long. Crime stories outnumber all others by at least two to one, and 40 percent of stories "are about fairly typical everyday incidents." Six out of 10 local TV stories involving controversy "gave only or mostly one point of view," the report says, pointing to "an alarming tendency toward onesidedness and a steady disappearance of enterprise."

"The notion that it has to bleed to lead in local television news is an exaggeration, but it is grounded in some reality," they conclude. A growing trend in local TV: "Centralcasting," in which local stations seek to cut costs by contracting to an outside concern for newscasts to air on more than one station.

Again, not all the news is bad when it comes to local TV: The PEJ report says people tend to trust local TV more than any other type of news, even though most people seem to feel local TV shies away from complex issues.

"In the end, the issue for local television is similar to that for newspapers," the report says. "It is such a robust business that declining viewership has not hurt revenues. Yet even more than newspapers, local television news invests little in improving the product," and that product is "getting thinner" as budgets are stretched further and as competition from the Internet increases.

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Radio
Dale Willman

First, a personal aside: Let me admit something right up front— I love radio. I've worked in the medium almost exclusively since 1974, and I was hooked on the power of radio from the start. My first job was with a station in a small Ohio town, where listeners tuned in not primarily for the music. That they could get from a better station in nearby Cleveland.

Rather, they listened for what they could only get from us -- news about their community. Unlike the Cleveland stations, we told our listeners what their local elected officials were doing. We described what their police department was up to. But the one thing that has always stuck with me was the "Daily Record Report" after the three o'clock news every day. I always remember it, because that's when we read the local paper including the obituaries.

As odd as that might sound, it was an important service for the elderly who could not leave their homes. We provided a link for them to the outside world.

It was this sense of community that local radio provided so well—an audio version of the town square. And it is that sense of community that is so obviously lacking from radio today.

Granted, most towns can do without a daily dose of death announcements. But that means local news is about all that's left to separate local radio stations from their satellite cousins. And the state of local radio news is in trouble.

Now, this is not the conclusion of this report. In fact, Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which produced the report, says they chose not to draw too many conclusions. He says that for the first report, "It was important for us to establish ourselves as a credible source of info." And besides, he says, drawing conclusions was not always necessary, "some of the data speaks for itself."

And that it does:

Given these facts, it's simply impossible to credibly argue that local radio news is holding its own today, let alone thriving. Instead, it's clear that local news is continuing a steady, and at times rapid, decline.

Of course, that also means less environmental coverage is making its way onto the radio airwaves. And given that environmental news already makes up so little of the news hole for any medium, including radio, the decline of total time given to radio news means already limited environmental coverage will become even more restricted.

While radio remains an understudied medium (compared, say, to its broadcast brethren in television) this report has completed an exhaustive examination of the data. But where it fails, if anywhere, is in its unwillingness to state the obvious. Rosenstiel, however, says that may never happen; "I don't know how far we'll ever go in coming up with conclusions."

While this could prove to be a real shortcoming over time, the data collection alone represented in this report is still well worth reading.

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Ethnic Media

Some of the largest growth to occur in all categories examined in the PEJ report has taken place in the ethnic and alternative media.

Coming up with a comprehensive look at ethnic media is difficult. According to the report's authors, data are limited, and language barriers complicate data collection. There are not one or two ethnic media outlets, but dozens speaking different languages or dialects. Another problem for data collection: many of the ethnic media outlets are operated locally, or as small regional operations, making data collection difficult.

But the available data show ethnic media outlets are growing rapidly.

As the report's authors point out, the nation's ethnic population has skyrocketed in the past two decades, and the number of people not speaking English at home has grown by 48 percent to 47 million. From 1980–2000, the percentage of people in the U.S. identifying themselves as non-white grew from around 17 percent to more than 24 percent. During that same time, the Hispanic population doubled.

That explosive growth in the Hispanic population is reflected in the growth of Spanish-speaking media. According to the report, circulation of Spanish-language daily newspapers has more than tripled in the past 15 years, and ad revenues have grown more than sevenfold during that same time. Similar growth has occurred in Spanish radio and TV. Such growth has attracted larger companies, making Hispanic outlets the only ethnic media to show a high level of ownership consolidation.

Hispanic media have shown the greatest growth in the ethnic category, but other ethnic media are also doing well. The report notes growth in African-American and Asian media outlets, primarily newspapers. But it also points out that unlike Hispanic media, which can address its audience in just one language, the Asian press must deal with a wide number of languages and dialects. This language barrier, the authors indicate, could make it difficult for a national Asian news outlet to become viable.

The same difficulties found in trying to quantify ethnic media, including multiple languages, may provide barriers to increased environmental coverage. Another factor is the character of the news content offered. In many of the ethnic papers, for instance, much of the news is focused on events in the home country, leaving less room for local environmental news.

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Alternative Press

Alternative papers also represent one of the fastest-growing sectors in the media world. But many are not really "alternative," at least not in the way the term was defined in the 1960s.

Then, alternative papers provided strong political voices often critical of government and challenging the status quo, something rarely found then or now in the mainstream press.

Those days are long gone, however, as the PEJ report makes clear. Today's alternative publications are more likely filled with ads from the very establishment operations they once derided as capitalist tools. And the content now tends more toward movie reviews and "best of" articles, rather than diatribes on Marxist ideology.

There are still a few publications that maintain the 60s mantra. However, according to this report, those publications are now labeled the "dissident" press.

The report's authors express some surprise at the demographic make-up of those who read today's alternative media -- the median age of readers is now in the 30s, and for some publications the 40s. The authors must not be regular readers of New York's Village Voice or the Chicago Reader. If they were, they would see the focus now is not edgier fare favored by the younger crowd. Rather, the editorial content is more like a comfortable shoe, designed to wear well and not pinch. In other words, you'll rarely find articles that challenge readers beyond whether they should eat Chinese or Ethiopian this weekend.

And that does not bode well for environmental coverage. Environmental stories typically require a readership more engaged than those simply looking for a movie and a date. Yet the typical editorial fare in the alternatives is rarely challenging or in-depth.

There will be a periodic article taking shots at some unfortunate city government official. And in Washington, D.C., where politics is both a contact and a spectator sport, the City Paper has a popular column that covers the local political scene. But this is more the exception than the rule. More typically, the fare is focused on "news you can use," such as events listings, movie and restaurant reviews and huge numbers of personal ads.

What is less prominent is news that requires a more in-depth treatment and that challenges the reader. And that means there is little hope that alternative media, as they now stand, will substantially increase coverage of major environmental stories.

The whole point of alternative media today seems to be to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. And when selling ads becomes the primary focus of a media outlet, stories perceived as potentially damaging to those same advertisers, such as environmental stories, often get left behind. What is left is material designed for the most part to be inoffensive to advertisers and appealing to those with disposable incomes.

Given this editorial focus, the older demographic should not be a surprise. That's because this age group has a higher median income than the population in general -- $50,000 to $70,000, depending on the publication. And this means readers also have a disposable income coveted by advertisers.

Both circulation and revenues for alternative publications skyrocketed during the 1990s according to the PEJ report authors. Revenue climbed from around $170 million to $500 million, while circulation doubled to more than seven million by 2002. In other words, this isn't your daddy's alternative media.

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Magazines
Joe Davis

There is a lot of hope for the future role of magazines in the U.S. news media mix, PEJ reports. Perhaps surprisingly.

First the good news. "The overall number of magazines is growing," PEJ reports. "Overall, the magazine industry is healthy." After trending down from 1995 to 2000, readership of news and entertainment magazines has been rising again. Ad pages, ad dollars, and profits for the industry as a whole "look relatively stable," according to the extensive data collected in the PEJ report.

But a lot of the bad news is about magazines that publish news. That is especially true of the "big three" national news magazines: Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. Publishers are not launching new newsmagazines. The readership figures for traditional newsmagazines have been flat, even as U.S. population grows.

And the audience for newsmagazines is aging steadily (not desirable from the viewpoint of advertisers). Among all the genres and niches in the magazine industry, PEJ says, "Ad dollars and pages are increasingly going to places other than news magazines."

As the big three strain to compete for a bigger, younger audience, they have spent more pages and covers on entertainment, lifestyle, celebrity, health, and science, "at the expense of what is considered more traditional news of government, public policy and the economy."

That last trend may contain a kernel of good news in disguise for environmental reporters. A great many environmental stories are (or can be recast as) health, science, and lifestyle stories. The economic story PEJ tells about the magazine industry sounds in many ways like the story of the media industry generally -- decisions driven by profits and an unrelenting trend toward concentration of ownership. In general, this has not been good for serious journalism.

"The largest and most powerful magazine owners," the PEJ authors write, "...are heavily invested in pop culture and entertainment magazines, which have also seen large growth in the last decade. There is less interest at the corporate level in traditional news."

Nowhere does the report paint a drearier picture for reporters than in the section headed "Shrinking Staffs," a phenomenon seen in other media and not just in magazines. Admittedly, computer pagination and computer research have allowed magazines to be more productive with fewer people. But "staffs of the two biggest news magazines have declined significantly in the past 20 years," the report states, as have the numbers of bureaus.

The brightest ray of hope for magazine news comes not in the mainstream newsmags, but from another quarter. PEJ reports peculiar upticks in the fortunes of two special varieties -- one, the "elite" strain represented by New Yorker and The Economist, and two, the other the "opinion news" strain represented by The Nation and National Review.

The "elite" magazines benefit from higher ad rates they can charge for their smaller numbers of upper-income and more highly educated reader and also from the appetite these readers have for more substantial and sophisticated news. The opinion mags, at least the liberal ones, seem to be surfing the wave that always buoys "opposition" media.

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Online Media

The PEJ report concludes that the Internet has definitely arrived as "a major source of news in America." But the big challenge, still largely unmet, lies in harnessing its growth and potential to an economic model or models that will pay for it to reach its potential.

"The Web is the only part of the mainstream news business that generally is seeing audiences grow, especially among the young," the PEJ report authors write, but "Some of the biggest news Web sites are not yet breaking even."

Will the success of Web news kill older media like newspapers and TV? "Less clear," say the report authors. Those media can't blame all their problems on the Web. What's going on is a lot more complex -- a "convergence" that is blurring the lines between different media.

Writers can take heart from PEJ's finding (which surprised even PEJ) that the Web as a medium has so far remained dominated by text.

"What is most intriguing is the evidence that television rather than print is suffering most," PEJ concludes. "This is surprising because, at this point, the Web is still largely a text-based medium.

One might have thought that print media would thus be hurt by the greater convenience that the Web offers, in much the same way that cable seems to have eroded the appeal of network television. This is not the case."

Economics aside, "The promise of Internet news is its availability, immediacy, interactivity and unlimited space," PEJ notes. The 150 million Americans who go online can get most Internet news for free, and they can get the story they want right away. Internet news is updated almost instantaneously -- as fast as, or faster than, any other medium except truly live TV or radio. Web technologies allow audiences to customize and react to the content they are getting so quickly and extensively that they essentially shape the content while it is being produced. And hyperlinks allow reporters and publishers to make long texts part of their reports without interrupting narrative flow or boring uninterested readers.

"Which of these characteristics are really being taken advantage of?" the PEJ authors ask, and they offer statistics to show that even many of the big Web news sites make only limited use of video, audio, photos, graphics, archives, chat, and audience feedback.

Some more good news for writers and photographers: "Internet journalism is still largely material from old media rather than something original."

The PEJ report deals largely with the struggle of the Web news big dogs (AOL, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, New York Times, and Yahoo) to make a buck from the new media. The report does not examine the issue of how writers -- pardon us, "content providers" -- are to be paid fairly or otherwise compensated when their stories are "re-purposed" for the Web.

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May 2004