Emerging Trends

The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism has released the State of the News Media 2009 report. In it six "new emerging" trends were identified:

1. The growing public debate over how to finance the news industry may well be focusing on the wrong remedies while other ideas go largely unexplored.
2. Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions.
3. On the Web, news organizations are focusing somewhat less on bringing audiences in and more on pushing content out.
4. The concept of partnership, motivated in part by desperation, is becoming a major focus of news investment and it may offer prospects for the financial future of news.
5. Even if cable news does not keep the audience gains of 2008, its rise is accelerating another change—the elevation of the minute-by-minute judgment in political journalism.
6. In its campaign coverage, the press was more reactive and passive and less of an enterprising investigator of the candidates than it once was.

Two through five make perfect sense to me, and I am not enough of a political junky to argue six, but I do have a problem with one. Exploring new ideas? Sounds great! Let's see what the Pew Project came up with:

1. Adopt the cable model, in which a fee to news producers is built into monthly Internet access fees consumers already pay. News industry executives have not seriously tested this enough to know if it could work, but these fees provide half the revenue in cable.

Surely we'd hear the cries: "The ESPN model? But what if I don't watch ESPN!?" Then take tell me what a "news producer" is. Would theHuffington Post be considered? How about the Drudge Report? There will have to be some serious line drawing in some rapidly shifting sand.
And what about the day when Google provides us all with free Internet? (Please check out that link, even if you don't care about free Internet)

2. Build major online retail malls within news sites. This could both create a local search network for small businesses and link them directly with consumers to complete transactions, not just offer advertising—with the news operation getting a point-of-purchase fee.

So this is...Craigslist meets Amazon? Newspapers are trying to get back that lost revenue that came from connecting people to what they want through classifieds. Not a bad idea, but let's hope no big corporations are let in.

3. Develop subscription-based niche products for elite professional audiences. These are more than subject-specific micro-sites. They are deep, detailed, up-to-the-minute online resources aimed at professional interests, and they are a proven and highly profitable growth area in journalism.

How...elitist? Actually I like this idea because niche journalism definitely has the potential to sell. A plus: it's produced for those who find it useful, so it can be more technical and geared toward that audience.

More on the issue (an AFP piece in the Tehran Times) here.