A mounting body of evidence finds that the spread of mobile technology is adding to news consumption, strengthening the appeal of traditional news brands and even boosting reading of long-form journalism. But the evidence also shows that technology companies are strengthening their grip on who profits, according to the 2012 State of the News Media report by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The annual State of the News Media report is a comprehensive analysis of the health of journalism in America, which includes detailed analysis of eight different media sectors as well as an overview that identifies key trends and key findings of the essential statistics about news in the last year.

This year’s study also includes special reports on the impact of mobile technology and social media on news. Those reports, which feature new survey data, finds that rather than replacing media consumption on digital devices, people who go mobile are getting news on all their devices. They also appear to be getting it more often, and reading for longer periods of time. For example, about a third, 34%, of desktop/laptop news consumers now also get news on a smartphone. About a quarter, 27%, of smartphone news consumers also get news on a tablet. These digital news omnivores are also a large percentage of the smart phone/tablet population. And most of those individuals (78%) still get news on the desktop or laptop as well.

A PEJ survey of more than 3,000 adults also finds that the reputation or brand of a news organization, a very traditional idea, is the most important factor in determining where consumers go for news, and that is even truer on mobile devices than on laptops or desktops. Indeed, despite the explosion in social media use through the likes of Facebook and Twitter, recommendations from friends are not a major factor yet in steering news consumption.

Read the full report on the health of American journalism, which also includes findings on:

• How mobile devices are affecting news consumption
• The growing influence of technology giants on the future of news
• How new devices may be helping magazines
• The role of social media in news
• Which media sectors experienced revenue growth last year
• How a visually oriented year helped TV news in 2011
• How Native American communities are turning to cellphones for news

Chapters of the report:

• Overview
• The year in the news
• Newspapers
• Network television
• Local television
• Cable television
• Mobile devices and news consumption
• Digital platforms
• What Facebook and Twitter mean for news
• Audio landscape
• Magazines
• Alternative weeklies
• Community News

Even the top news websites in the country have had little success getting advertisers from traditional platforms to move online, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The digital advertising they do get appears to be standard ads that are available across many websites. And with only a handful of exceptions, the ads on news sites tend not to be targeted based on the interests of users, the strategy that many experts consider key to the future of digital revenue.

The study of 22 news operations found that only three showed significantly levels of targeting and two others had shown some movement in this direction. This stood in contrast to the highly targeted advertising is already a key component of the business model of operations such as Google and Facebook.

Read the full report for these detailed findings:

• Who is placing ads?
• Financial industry is the biggest buyer of ads
• Use of targeting
• Use of discount sites like Groupon and coupons
• Digital ads format
• Analysis of advertising in the digital era by University of Pennsylvania’s Joseph Turow

Who are these new players in journalism? Are these sites delivering, as they generally purport to be, independent and disinterested news reporting? Or are some of them more political and ideological in their reporting? How can audiences assess this for themselves? In short, what role are these operations playing in the changing ecosystem of news?

A new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism offers a detailed look at a portion of this new cohort of news providers-sites that cover state and national news. The study examines some four dozen sites across the country, all of them launched in 2005 or later, that offer coverage beyond the local level to state and national news. That group includes national news sites such as Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica, which receives money from more than a dozen foundations and has a staff of more than 30.¹ It also includes lesser-known news sites such as Missouri News Horizon, whose funding is less clear and covers Missouri state government with a staff of three journalists. The study analyzes the funding, transparency and organizational structure of these sites, and also the nature of their news coverage.²

(There is a larger universe of community-level non-profit news operations perhaps even more diverse in nature. That group is beyond the scope of this analysis, but does bear further study.)

The 46 national and state-level news sites examined — a group that included seven new commercial sites with similar missions — offered a wide range of styles and approaches, but roughly half, the study found, produced news coverage that was clearly ideological in nature.

In general, the more ideological sites tended to be funded mostly or entirely by one parent organization — though that parent group may have various contributors. They tended to be less transparent about who they are and where their funding comes from. And they tended to produce less content — in some cases generating one or two stories per week produced by a single staffer.

Sites that offered a mixed or balanced political perspective, on the other hand, tended to have multiple funders, more revenue streams, more transparency and more content with a deeper bench of reporters. The six most transparent sites studied, for instance, were among the most balanced in the news they produced.

In terms of reach, the most popular site in the study, The Daily Caller, is a commercial enterprise with a clear ideological orientation. Of the non-profit sites, it is harder to generalize. One of the most popular sites in the study was the Washington Independent, a liberal site, but it has since ceased publication.³ In many other cases, sites with more balanced coverage, such as ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, are among the most trafficked in the sample.

These are among the findings of the study, which examined 46 news websites and an additional 68 institutions and individuals that provide the primary financial support for those sites. Researchers analyzed a total of 1,203 stories sampled from the month of September 2010 and conducted an audit of the sites and their chief supporters between the months of May 2010 and September 2010.

Read the full study and view special online features of the report at journalism.org

1. Among ProPublica’s funders is The Pew Charitable Trusts, which provided the group with a two-year grant of $1 million in June 2010. The Pew Charitable Trusts is also the primary funder of the Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

2. Sites formed around a single issue, like the Hechinger Report, or those comprised primarily of opinion or aggregation, such as Arkansas News, were excluded from this study. So were sites that were fundamentally local in nature, covering one community, such as Voice of San Diego, the St. Louis Beacon, or the Bay Citizen. Also excluded were sites that produce on average less than one original story per week. See About the Study for more on the parameters of the sample.

3. In a November 2010 note to readers, editor Aaron Wiener explained that as foundation support began to dry up in the midst of economic recession, The Washington Independent’s expenses were unsustainable, and its parent, the American Independent News Network, ended publication.

By several measures, the state of the American news media improved in 2010.

After two dreadful years, most sectors of the industry saw revenue begin to recover. With some notable exceptions, cutbacks in newsrooms eased. And while still more talk than action, some experiments with new revenue models began to show signs of blossoming.

Among the major sectors, only newspapers suffered continued revenue declines last year — an unmistakable sign that the structural economic problems facing newspapers are more severe than those of other media. When the final tallies are in, we estimate 1,000 to 1,500 more newsroom jobs will have been lost — meaning newspaper newsrooms are 30% smaller than in 2000.

Beneath all this, however, a more fundamental challenge to journalism became clearer in the last year. The biggest issue ahead may not be lack of audience or even lack of new revenue experiments. It may be that in the digital realm the news industry is no longer in control of its own future.

News organizations — old and new — still produce most of the content audiences consume. But each technological advance has added a new layer of complexity — and a new set of players — in connecting that content to consumers and advertisers.

In the digital space, the organizations that produce the news increasingly rely on independent networks to sell their ads. They depend on aggregators (such as Google) and social networks (such as Facebook) to bring them a substantial portion of their audience. And now, as news consumption becomes more mobile, news companies must follow the rules of device makers (such as Apple) and software developers (Google again) to deliver their content. Each new platform often requires a new software program. And the new players take a share of the revenue and in many cases also control the audience data.

Those data may be the most important commodity of all. In a media world where consumers decide what news they want to get and how they want to get it, the future will belong to those who understand the public’s changing behavior and can target content and advertising to snugly fit the interests of each user. That knowledge — and the expertise in gathering it — increasingly resides with technology companies outside journalism.

In the 20th century, the news media thrived by being the intermediary others needed to reach customers. In the 21st, increasingly there is a new intermediary: Software programmers, content aggregators and device makers control access to the public. The news industry, late to adapt and culturally more tied to content creation than engineering, finds itself more a follower than a leader in shaping its business.

Meanwhile, the pace of change continues to accelerate. Mobile has already become an important factor in news. A new survey released with this year’s report, produced with the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in association with the Knight Foundation, finds that nearly half of all Americans (47%) now get some form of local news on a mobile device. What they turn to most there is news that serves immediate needs — weather, information about restaurants and other local businesses, and traffic. And the move to mobile is only likely to grow. By January 2011, 7% of Americans reported owning some kind of electronic tablet. That was nearly double the number just four months earlier.

The migration to the web also continued to gather speed. In 2010, every news platform saw audiences either stall or decline — except for the internet. Cable news, one of the growth sectors of the last decade, is now shrinking, too. For the first time in at least a dozen years, the median audience declined at all three cable news channels.

For the first time, too, more people said they got news from the web than newspapers. The internet now trails only television among American adults as a destination for news, and the trend line shows the gap closing. Financially the tipping point also has come. When the final tally is in, online ad revenue in 2010 is projected to surpass print newspaper ad revenue for the first time. The problem for news is that by far the largest share of that online ad revenue goes to non-news sources, particularly to aggregators.

In the past, much of the experimentation in new journalism occurred locally, often financed by charitable grants, usually at small scale. Larger national online-only news organizations focused more on aggregation than original reporting. In 2010, however, some of the biggest new media institutions began to develop original newsgathering in a significant way. Yahoo! added several dozen reporters across news, sports and finance. AOL had 900 journalists, 500 of them at its local Patch news operation. By the end of 2011, Bloomberg expects to have 150 journalists and analysts for its new Washington operation, Bloomberg Government. News Corp. has hired from 100 to 150, depending on the press reports, for its new tablet newspaper, The Daily, though not all may be journalists. Together these hires come close to matching the jobs that we estimate were lost in newspapers in 2010, the first time we have seen this kind of substitution.

A report in this year’s study also finds that new community media sites are beginning to put as much energy into securing new revenue streams — and refining audiences to do so — as creating content. Many also say they are doing more to curate user content.

Traditional newsrooms, meanwhile, are different places than they were before the recession. They are smaller, their aspirations have narrowed and their journalists are stretched thinner. But their leaders also say they are more adaptive, younger and more engaged in multimedia presentation, aggregation, blogging and user content. In some ways, new media and old, slowly and sometimes grudgingly, are coming to resemble each other.

The result is a news ecology full of experimentation and excitement, but also one that is uneven, has uncertain financial underpinning and some clear holes in coverage. Even in Seattle, one of the most vibrant places for new media, “some vitally important stories are less likely to be covered,” said Diane Douglas who runs a local civic group and considers the decentralization of media voices a healthy change. “It’s very frightening to think of those gaps and all the more insidious because you don’t know what you don’t know.” Some also worry that with lower pay, more demands for speed, less training, and more volunteer work, there is a general devaluing and even what scholar Robert Picard has called a “de-skilling” of the profession.

Among the features in this, the eighth edition of the State of the News Media produced by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, is a report on how American newspapers fare relative to those in other countries, two reports on the status of community media, a survey on mobile and paid content in local news, and a report on African American media. The chapters this year have also been reorganized and streamlined: each is made up now of a Summary Essay and a longer, separate Data Section where all the statistical information is more easily searchable and interactive.

Read the full report at journalism.org.

The tight journalism job market is taking its toll on recent college graduates, according to a new report released today by the University of Georgia. The survey of more than 2,700 journalism and mass communication students who graduated in 2009 found the lowest level of full-time employment in the 24-year history of the study.

The results, included in the University of Georgia’s “Annual Survey of Journalism and Mass Communication Graduates” reveal that just 55.5% of 2009 journalism and communication graduates with a bachelor degree were able to find full-time work within a year of leaving school. That is down 4.9 percentage points from the year before and stands in stark contrast with the 70.2% of graduates who found work as recently as 2007. The most recent masters degree recipients fared little better, with their employment rate dropping to 61.9% from 65.4% in 2008.

Although 2008 was a difficult year for new graduates seeking employment, the 2009 jobs picture was markedly grimmer. “While 2008 was bad, last year was even worse,” said Lee Becker, the report’s co-author and the director of the Cox Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research at the University of Georgia.

Becker did offer one silver lining, noting that students found it easier to get jobs in the period from November 2009 through the spring of 2010 than they did in the first few months after graduation. “In 2009, there was a clear growth line after October 31, which didn’t happen the year before,” said Becker.

This daunting job market was further compounded by stagnating salaries and eroding benefits, according to the survey. The median annual wage for full-time employed 2009 bachelor degree recipients again stood at $30,000, the same number it has been since 2006, although inflation edged up in the past year. At the same time, benefits continued to be cut across the board, with only 52.9% of the 2009 employed grads receiving major medical coverage at work compared with 59.2% the previous year. Dental coverage fell from 56.7% to 50.3%, and life insurance benefits dropped from 49.1% to 41.7%.

Another troubling aspect of the market downturn identified in the survey was its disproportionate impact on ethnic and racial minorities. When the survey excluded those students who opted to return to school rather than enter the job market, fewer than half of the 2009 minority graduates with undergrad degrees (48.6%) found full-time jobs compared with 63.9% of non-minority graduates. That gap of 15.3% almost tripled from the previous year, when it stood at 5.9% and represents the biggest such difference in the more than two decades that the University of Georgia has been monitoring this.

“Unfortunately, minority graduates are still not playing on a level field, and when the market gets bad, it gets worse for those on the margins,” Becker said.

Yet for all the troubling news, the study’s authors did identify a few encouraging signs, such as an increase in the number of 2009 graduates working with the internet, a central component of modern journalism. Fully 58.2% of the recent bachelor graduates with communication jobs reported being involved with Web writing and editing, a substantial increase from 50.6%, the year before.

“Given that digital activities are certainly a key part of communication work,” the report concluded, “the suggestion is that the quality of the jobs the 2009 graduates took, on average, was at least slightly higher than had been true for the 2008 graduates.”

When it came to the students’ assessments of their college educations, the results were mixed. A majority of graduates (58.3%) said they were satisfied with the way school had prepared them for communication jobs. But 41.7% said they either hadn’t been properly prepared or weren’t sure.

In addition, 42.5% said they felt that they hadn’t acquired certain key skills necessary for real-world success — mainly in new digital technologies and job seeking strategies.

While Becker attributes some of that dissatisfaction to a general frustration with the poor jobs market, he admits that academia could be doing more to prepare graduates for jobs in the real economy. “We know that J-schools are struggling to create a curriculum to match market needs,” he said.

On the broader question of whether they had made the right degree choice, nearly two-thirds of the 2009 graduates (64.4%) said they did not regret their communication career choice despite the challenges. Conversely, 31.8% said they regretted their decision. As recently as 2005, 70.9% of the grads say they had made the right career choice as opposed to only 24.6% who had second thoughts.

Warned one respondent who seemed concerned about his career choice: “Stay in school forever. It all goes downhill from there.”

But some of the students voiced considerably more optimism. “Communication is a very versatile field with skills applicable to many job opportunities,” said one 2009 graduate with a degree in public relations. “Graduates should see this as a blessing and as something that does not limit them.”

Download the full report (PDF)

You can also find links to journalism jobs, journalism schools and other journalism resources — as well as a note of advice to students about a career in journalism — at journalism.org.

At the moment our surveys find only a tiny proportion of internet users — 7% — express any willingness to pay for news. That’s not because internet users are uninterested in news: fully 71% of all those online say they get news from the internet. Within that group, however, just 35% say they have a favorite news website and, among those with a favorite site, only 5% say they pay for news content now. Moreover, just 19% say they would be willing to pay if that favorite site started charging for access to its content.

In other words, when we asked people who have a favorite website if they would pay for access to that site if it erected a pay wall, 82% said they would not return to the site and would go elsewhere for their news. And those are the people who like that website enough to call it a favorite. This reluctance poses huge challenges to news sites that want to erect a pay wall and add subscription fees for access to their online offerings.

Lee Rainie, Director, Internet & American Life Project

Many news executives, however, sense change for the better in their newsrooms despite cutbacks and declining revenue. Editors at newspaper-related companies praise the cultural shifts in their organizations, the younger, tech-savvy staff, and a growing sense of experimentation. Many broadcast executives see so-called one-person crews — in which the same individual reports, produces and shoots video — as improving their journalism by getting more people on the street.

But the leaders of America’s newsrooms are nonetheless worried about the future. Fewer than half of all those surveyed are confident their operations will survive another 10 years — absent significant new sources of revenue. Nearly a third believe their operations are at risk in just five years or less. And many blame the problems not on the inevitable effect of technology but on their industry’s missed opportunities.

“Our mantra this year is experiment and fail quickly,” one newspaper news executive volunteered. “Don’t be afraid of change and don’t stick with something too long if it doesn’t work.”

“Outside funding options are a bad idea overall,” another broadcast news executive offered. “They are being used to ‘save’ old models of journalism that are no longer economically viable and will die out over time no matter what.”

The survey found some significant differences between the attitudes of leaders of newspaper-based newsrooms and those of broadcast. Among them was their view of journalism’s future. Broadcast news executives were strikingly more pessimistic, with those who see journalism headed in the wrong direction outnumbering those who think it is headed in the right direction by almost two-to-one. Leaders of newspaper newsrooms, by contrast, are split, with a slight tilt toward optimism.

These are some of the findings of a non-random online sample of 353 journalism executives from the ASNE or RTDNA membership lists, recruited via e-mail invitation from December 2009 through January 2010. In all, 353 news executives responded, representing 36% of those surveyed from ASNE and 24% from RTDNA.

Among the findings:

• Many of the new revenue options being debated today receive only limited or divided support from news executives. When it comes to the often-discussed option of pay walls for online content, for instance, only 10% say they are working on them, though that could change. Another 32% are considering them while 11% have written off the idea. More than a third (35%) have not considered them at all. Still, as they look ahead, only 15% of news executives believe pay walls will be a significant source of revenue in three years.
• There is significant resistance, however, to other discussed revenue streams, particularly from the government or from groups that engage in advocacy. Fully 75% of news executives have serious reservations about receiving government subsidies, and 78% have significant reluctance to accept financing from interest groups. Roughly half have significant worries about funds from government tax credits and more than a third have significant doubts about private donations.
• Most of the effort online is focused instead on more conventional revenue sources. Display and banner online advertising, for all that it has failed to grow, is still the No. 1 area of effort and the one that news executives pin their greatest hopes on. But second is revenue from products outside of news.
• Broadcast news executives are noticeably more pessimistic about journalism’s future than editors at newspaper-based operations. Broadcasters think their profession is headed in the wrong direction by a margin of nearly two-to-one (64% vs. 35%). By contrast, editors working at newspapers were split (49% wrong direction vs. 51% right direction). A year ago, journalists who were members of the Online News Association surveyed by PEJ fell in between these two: 54% wrong direction, 45% right direction.
• And most news executives think the internet is changing the fundamental values of journalism. Six out of ten feel this way — though executives from broadcast operations (62%) do so more than executives from newspapers (53%). Their biggest concern is loosening standards of accuracy and verification, much of it tied to the immediacy of the Web.
• Mobile applications are becoming increasingly important. Three-quarters say mobile applications are essential or very important while just 35% say that of YouTube postings or other video websites.

Continue reading the full report at journalism.org.