State of Local

The Project For Excellence In Journalism has issued its annual “State Of The Media” report, and there are a number of good takeaway points that are applicable to any local news organization. But as is always the case with this type of report, take all the points as interesting nuggets of information, rather than the complete story of the state of the media.

The two points getting the most attention involve audiences and advertising.

The good news for the news business is that audiences are continuing to shift the attentions online, and the traditional media outlets are grabbing larger percentages of the market than they did in the offline world. But the downside of the story is that while the online news audience is thriving, the advertising side of the equation hasn’t kept pace. Content and advertising are increasingly becoming uncoupled, and that only increases the bottom line problems for many so-called “legacy” news organizations.

Here are a few of the highlights from the report (which really should be read in its entirety):

Increasingly, news is moving from a traditional story-based presentation to a world of options. Audiences are moving toward information on demand, to media platforms and outlets that can tell them what they want to know when they want to know it.

There is no single or finished news product anymore. As news consumption becomes continual, more new effort is put into producing incremental updates, as brief as 40-character e-mails sent from reporters directly to consumers without editing. (The afternoon newspaper is also being reborn online.) Service also broadens the definition of what journalists must supply. Story telling and agenda setting - still important - are now insufficient. Journalism also must help citizens find what they are looking for, react to it, sort it, shape news coverage, and - probably most important and least developed - give them tools to make sense of and use the information for themselves.

There is also a lot of discussion of two continuing trends online. Realizing that each page should be seen as its own home page, and understanding that news consumers increasingly want to see additional context and resources from whomever provides the best information. Whether or not they’re a competitor.

Now they must move toward also being stops along the way, gateways to other places, and a means to drill deeper, all ideas that connect to service rather than product. “The walled garden is over,” the editor of one of the most popular news sites in the country told us. A site restricted to its own content takes on the character of a cul de sac street with yellow “No Outlet” sign, reducing its value to the user. “Search has become the predominant … paradigm,” an influential market research report circulating throughout the industry reads. That means every page of a Web site - even one containing a single story - is its own front page. And each piece of content competes on its own with all other information on that topic linked to by blogs, “digged” by user news sites, sent in e-mails, or appearing in searches. As much as half of every Web page, designers advise, should be devoted to helping people find what they want on the rest of the site or the Web. That change is already occurring. A year ago, our study of news Web sites found that only three of 24 major Web sites from traditional news organizations offered links to outside content. Eleven of those sites now offer them. Some of this may simply be automated, which may be a service of limited value.

One topic I found fascinating was an examination of the top online news destinations and the percentage of original content used in the most popular headlines. Most of the major news web sites heavily relied on Associated Press copy-in some case as much as 90 percent of the headlines were AP generated. But ironically, while Google News doesn’t create any original content, it primarily linked to original content:

Google News, on the other hand, a site that produces no original content itself sends its users to other sites for their news content. And when a user follows a link from one of the lead stories on the Google News site, 17% of the coverage was wire content that appeared on some other site while 82% of the coverage was original reporting by the cited news organization, most often newspaper outlets.

Some of that lack of links to AP stories is a function of the fact that Google News is now effectively filtering out most of the multiple AP stories out of its indexes. But it’s also a recognition of the fact that when given the choice, most people prefer original content over a wire story.

The challenge for local news outlets is the same as the one for the largest international news organizations. How do you efficiently create as much non-wire copy as possible within the financial constraints brought on by an online advertising market that is still in its infancy?

As I mentioned, there are a number of great talking points in the study, and they are some of what we’ll be talking about in the days and weeks to come.

But I want to hear your thoughts. What are some of your greatest challenges? What are some of the greatest opportunities for local news organizations?