Pew: About a quarter of Americans say journalists contribute little to society | Poynter
From the comments: “I can’t hate “journalists” enough. I have less regard for them than lawyers and warlords.”
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The smartest guys in media give up on print | Reflections of a Newsosaur
In a historic capitulation, three of the largest companies ever built by putting ink to paper are severing their publishing assets to concentrate, instead, on the broadcast and entertainment portfolios that they hope will grow faster and generate more profits than the legacy businesses they are hastening to exit.
Their reasons:
- “Shrinking audiences: With digital technologies empowering individuals to acquire content when and where they want it, fewer consumers than ever see the value of subscribing to a newspaper or magazine that, owing to the unavoidable latency of print, often is out of date by the time it arrives.
- Decaying revenues: With advertisers following audiences to the web, smartphones, iPads and smart TVs, the combined ad sales of the nation’s newspapers have plunged by more than half since reaching a record $49.5 billion in 2005. Last year, the industry’s primary revenue stream amounted to a mere $22.3 billion.
- Contracting profits: Notwithstanding aggressive efforts to control expenses, shrinking sales have led to sharp declines in the enviable profits once enjoyed by publishers.”
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Newsroom Diversity: A Casualty of Journalism’s Financial Crisis | The Atlantic
Despite claims by news organizations that they value and promote diversity, the numbers in this year’s study show 90 percent of newsroom supervisors from participating news organizations were white.
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Does the NLRB Confirmation Fight Confuse You? MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Breaks It Down | AFL-CIO Now
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TimesMachine | New York Times
And if you haven’t yet seen the New York Times TimesMachine, where you can “browse 70 years of New York Times archives,” take a look. It’s slick.
Image source: Richard Ling via photopin cc
