Friday, March 20, 2009

State of the Media 2009

I've just started reading this long, bleak report. Here's a bit of the overview:

Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online. By 2008, the industry had finally begun to get serious. Now the global recession has made that harder.

This is the sixth edition of our
annual report on the State of the News Media in the United States.

It is also the bleakest.

Don't even get me started on how the people who run journalism companies are to blame for this mess. They are. Forget doing awful things to AIG guys who got bonuses, do 'em to the schmucks who run newspaper companies instead. They put us here, sucking every little dollar out of a system and running up, somehow, huge debt at the same time.

This is not a fun report to read. And yet it's vital.

Only the Internet and Cable grew as news sources. The Net grew because, well, it's the Net. Cable grew thanks to the U.S. presidential election and those gains will disappear soon. It's ugly ugly ugly.

More later, as I digest the report.


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