The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its eighth annual of State of the News Media 2011, a fascinating review of the news media over the past year, showing that news has reached a tipping point (if it hasn’t already tipped) with more news read on-line than in print.
In the last year alone, on-line news reading grew by a little over 17% with every other news source losing audience: cable TV lost nearly 14% and there’s bar chart showing the decline here. Getting news and information on mobile devices was a big winner with 47% of all American adults reading some local news on their mobile device. There’s also an interesting part on how many people would pay for news and how much they would pay. The full article on mobile consumption is here.
Newspapers are the biggest losers with a weekday circulation loss of 5% and an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 newsroom jobs lost in the last year. There’s also concern that the move to on-line reading and in particular, reading on mobile devices, has introduced new players such as Google and Apple to the news space and they want to both set the rules and take their share of the revenue.
And if you want to know who owns the news media, then there’s a whole page of “Top 5s”.
This is absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants to know what’s happening in news media but you’d need to set aside an hour or so to read it cover to cover.