Monday, March 15, 2004
The State of American Journalism
The Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released a new report called The State of the News Media 2004. A description in today's New York Times summarizes the report: "Journalism in 2004 is in the midst of an epochal transformation that is complicated by cost-cutting and a public mistrust of the media, a study released Sunday concluded."
Here are two paragraphs from the section on online journalism: "In the meantime, a handful of giant media companies have come to dominate Web news, at least for the moment. Time Warner, the largest of them, controls two of the top four news sites. Nearly 69 percent of the most popular news Web sites are owned by one of the 20 biggest media companies. There are also a myriad of local Internet news sites, whose goals are not to compete for the nationwide audience but rather to appeal to the local community. Their popularity is harder to track."
Web logs, or blogs, such as instapundit.com and kausfiles.com, are an exciting new prospect for the Web. And some of these bloggers are influential. For now, though, bloggers appear to command only a fraction of the online audience. During the first week of the Iraq war, for instance, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that only 4 percent of Internet users had visited a blog."
Here are two paragraphs from the section on online journalism: "In the meantime, a handful of giant media companies have come to dominate Web news, at least for the moment. Time Warner, the largest of them, controls two of the top four news sites. Nearly 69 percent of the most popular news Web sites are owned by one of the 20 biggest media companies. There are also a myriad of local Internet news sites, whose goals are not to compete for the nationwide audience but rather to appeal to the local community. Their popularity is harder to track."
Web logs, or blogs, such as instapundit.com and kausfiles.com, are an exciting new prospect for the Web. And some of these bloggers are influential. For now, though, bloggers appear to command only a fraction of the online audience. During the first week of the Iraq war, for instance, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that only 4 percent of Internet users had visited a blog."
