Formerly Mainstream Media: We’re Falling, We Can’t Get Up, and We Don’t Have a Clue

David Bauder of the Associated Press files about as clueless a report as there can be:

With television news losing audience, newspapers struggling to stay afloat and growth even slowing on Internet sites, it seems like a desolate time for the news industry.

Yet there are signs of hope, according to the Project for Excellence (PEJ) in Journalism, which issued its annual report on the state of journalism on Sunday.

People haven’t lost interest in news, said Tom Rosenstiel, the project’s director. But all facets of the industry are hurting simply because there are so many more ways to get information - on broadcast and cable television, big-city newspapers and local handouts, Web sites, blogs, cell phones and PDAs.

Indeed David, people haven’t lost interest, but more and more of them are going elsewhere for news because they don’t trust their newspapers and traditional TV sources any more — and with good reason. Consistent, unrelenting, and transparent bias will do that (yes, the newspaper blogs have grown, but not by anywhere near the contraction of the print editions). How much “hope” is there that after all these years, the Formerly Mainstream Media will change its ways (because that is what it will take for a turnaround)?

And wait a minute: ALL facets? Let’s go through the report ourselves:

• Newspapers — Declining long-term
• Evening and Morning Network News — Declining long-term
• Cable News — Declined in 2006 after many years of growth, but MSNBC improved from basement-like levels
• Online — Flat (but see below; somehow PEJ missed big growth)
• Local News — Declined in 2006
• Big 3 Weekly Newsmagazines — only Time went up a tiny bit, but because of a big price increase and major structural changes, the direction will be downward in 2007. Newsweek and US News held steady, and appear to have halted a longer-term trend of decline.
• Radio (info is for 2005) — a small decline overall, but a big pickup in the 55-64 and 65+ demographics (i.e., the demos that vote in greatest numbers) for news and talk. Bad news for the Big 3 Nets — the switch to reliance by these demos probably explains the continued decline in the evening news.

Anything missing?

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Well first, there’s newspaper blog traffic, which tripled in past year (surprised? I wonder who fed a lot of that?):

Internet traffic to blogs on the top 10 newspaper Web sites more than tripled in the past year, according to a survey released yesterday by market research firm Nielsen/NetRatings.

The number of unique visitors to the most popular newspaper blogs climbed to 3.8 million last month, compared with 1.2 million in December 2005. Readers of newspaper blogs also took up a larger slice of total visitors to those sites, up to 13 percent of total traffic from 4 percent a year ago.

Overall unique visitors to newspaper sites climbed 9 percent to 29.9 million.

The news was available to PEJ on Jan. 17. How did they miss it?

Now here’s something else they missed — blog growth in general. I won’t go into details, but it’s growing in numbers, in traffic, both in the Formerly Mainstream Media (as noted already) and elsewhere.

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UPDATE: This is about as good an Exhibit A as there can be as to why newspapers and other Formerly Mainstream Media are losing eyes and ears (”Jihadist Meltdown”; HT NixGuy). How can someone from the New York Sun scoop everybody on a story like this and have such a deep and detailed knowledge of the players, while the rest of the media either knows about these things and won’t tell us, or hasn’t put forth the effort to know and learn these things? Decades ago when there was competition between multiple papers and there were more wire services going against each other, reporters would be called on the carpet for having circles run around them like this. Now the Formerly Mainstream Media doesn’t seem to care about missing a story, especially if it’s one that’s favorable to the US.

Update to Update, Mar. 15: Wizblog raises the valid point that it’s hard to explain all that is happening without bringing Iran into the picture, unless we’re to assume that Al Qaeda is an Iranian proxy, and that this is all that needs to be known. I’ll have to agree that such a contention would seem dubious to me, and leaves the report a bit incomplete — but still infinitely improved over the tired “hopeless civil war” mantra that passes for Formerly Mainstream Media “analysis.”