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.

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.

Newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23% in the last two years. Some papers are in bankruptcy, and others have lost three-quarters of their value. By our calculations, nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone, and 2009 may be the worst year yet.

In local television, news staffs, already too small to adequately cover their communities, are being cut at unprecedented rates; revenues fell by 7% in an election year — something unheard of — and ratings are now falling or flat across the schedule. In network news, even the rare programs increasing their ratings are seeing revenues fall.

The ethnic press is also troubled and in many ways is the most vulnerable because so many operations are small.

Only cable news really flourished in 2008, thanks to an Ahab-like focus on the 2008 election, although some of the ratings gains were erased after the election.

Percentage Change in Ad Spending by Medium — 2007 to 2008

Perhaps least noticed yet most important, the audience migration to the internet is now accelerating. The number of Americans who regularly go online for news, jumped 19% in the last two years, according to one survey; in 2008 alone traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27%.

It is now all but settled that advertising revenue — the model that financed journalism for the last century — will be inadequate to do so in this one. Growing by a third annually just two years ago, online ad revenue to news websites now appears to be flattening; in newspapers it is declining.

Percentage Change in Audience, 2007 to 2008, Across Media

What does it all add up to?

Even before the recession, the fundamental question facing journalism was whether the news industry could win a race against the clock for survival: Could it find new ways to underwrite the gathering of news online, while using the declining revenue of the old platforms to finance the transition?

In the last year, two important things happened that have effectively shortened the time left on that clock.

First, the hastening audience migration to the Web means the news industry has to reinvent itself sooner than it thought — even if most of those people are going to traditional news destinations. At least in the short run, a bigger online audience has worsened things for legacy news sites, not helped them.

Audience Growth: Top News Sites vs. Select Political Sites

Then came the collapsing economy. The numbers are only guesses, but executives estimate that the recession at least doubled the revenue losses in the news industry in 2008, perhaps more in network television. Even more important, it swamped most of the efforts at finding new sources of revenue. In trying to reinvent the business, 2008 may have been a lost year, and 2009 threatens to be the same.

Imagine someone about to begin physical therapy following a stroke, suddenly contracting a debilitating secondary illness. 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.

Much of what we have noted in the past holds true. The old media have held onto their audience even as consumers migrate online. In 2008, audience gains at sites offering legacy news were far larger than those for new media. The old norms of traditional journalism continue to have value. And when you look at the numbers closely, consumers are not just retreating to ideological places for news.

The problem facing American journalism is not fundamentally an audience problem or a credibility problem. It is a revenue problem — the decoupling, as we have described it before, of advertising from news.

That makes the situation better than it might have been. But audiences now consume news in new ways. They hunt and gather what they want when they want it, use search to comb among destinations and share what they find through a growing network of social media.

And the news industry does not know — and has done less than it could to learn — how to convert this more active online audience into revenue. In newspapers, roughly half of all classified advertising revenue has vanished, a good deal of that to operations that newspapers could have developed for themselves. Insiders now expect that classified revenue could be zero in five years — or sooner. When newspaper executives met this winter to talk about how to create a way for consumers to design their own ads, the discussion focused on doing so for print editions, not online. “They still don’t get it,” one irritated executive told us on background.

Print vs. Online Ad Expenditures, Newspapers

There are growing doubts within the business, indeed, about whether the generation in charge has the vision and the boldness to reinvent the industry. It is unclear, say some, who the innovative leaders are, and a good many well-known figures have left the business. Reinvention does not usually come from managers prudently charting course. It tends to come from risk takers trying the unreasonable, seeing what others cannot, imagining what is not there and creating it. We did not see much of it when times were better. Times are harder now.

In the last year, alternative news sites, have continued to grow, including those produced by journalists who have left legacy newsrooms, but their scale remains small. The new media in aggregate are far from compensating for the losses in coverage in traditional newsrooms, and despite enthusiasm and good work, few if any are profitable or even self-sustaining.

Those are just some of the questions and conclusions in this edition of our annual report on the state of American journalism. This year’s report, as always, offers a general overview of the state of journalism as well as detailed examinations of the state of eight separate sectors (newspapers, online, network television, cable television, local television, audio, magazines, and ethnic media). The report also includes our in-depth content analysis, based on a study of nearly 80,000 news stories and television and radio segments in A Year in the News, which this year includes an Interactive Topline where people can explore the data for themselves.

This year we also offer some special reports.

• A study of citizen-based media, including a university study of 363 citizen websites in 46 markets.
• The first-ever survey of the members of the Online News Association, to be released March 30.
• An essay by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, Lessons of the Election.
• A backgrounder on the growing models of entrepreneurial journalism, new Web news organizations run by professional journalists outside the mainstream press.
• A review of changes in the last year in public attitudes in regards to the news media.

For the full report on the health and status of American journalism — including links to all sections and interactive tools — please see stateofthemedia.org.

You can also get a further round-up of all the findings and links in the executive summary and in a report on the major trends shaping journalism in 2009.

It isn’t exactly so.

The corps of journalists covering Washington D.C. at the dawn of the Obama administration is not so much smaller as it is dramatically transformed. And that transformation will markedly alter what Americans will know and not know about the new government, as well as who will know it and who will not.

A careful accounting of the numbers, plus detailed interviews with journalists, lawmakers, press association executives and government officials, reveals that what we once thought of as the mainstream news media serving a general public have indeed shrunk — perhaps far more than many would imagine. A roll call of the numbers may shock.

But as the mainstream media have shrunk, a new sector of niche media has grown in its place, offering more specialized and detailed information than the general media to smaller, elite audiences, often built around narrowly targeted financial, lobbying and political interests. Some of these niche outlets are financed by an economic model of high-priced subscriptions, others by image advertising from big companies like defense contractors, oil companies and mobile phone alliances trying to influence policy makers.

In addition, the contingent of foreign reporters in Washington has grown to nearly 10 times the size it was a generation ago. And the picture they are sending abroad of the country is a far different one than the world received when the information came mainly via American based wire services and cable news.

Consider a few examples:

ClimateWire, an on-line newsletter launched less than a year ago to cover the climate policy debate for a small, high-end audience, deploys more than twice the reporting power around Capitol Hill as does the Hearst News Service, which provides Washington news for the chain’s 16 daily newspapers.

The Washington bureau of Mother Jones, a San Francisco-based, left-leaning non-profit magazine, which had no reporters permanently assigned to the nation’s capital a decade ago, today has seven, about the same size as the now-reduced Time magazine bureau.

The Washington bureau of the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera, which opened a modest bureau when George W. Bush took office eight years ago, now has 105 staff members in its various services accredited to cover Congress, a staff similar in size to that of CBS News — both radio and television — at 129.

Or consider that the organization with the largest number of journalists accredited to the press galleries Congress is CQ, a news operation that produces an array of on-line and print publications with names like CQ Budget Tracker and CQ Senate Watch. Its 149 reporters eclipse the number of Hill-accredited journalists at the Associated Press (134), and congressional staffers dealing with accreditation say CQ has since surpassed even the hometown Washington Post in numbers. A decade ago, CQ had 40.

Collectively, the implications of these changes are considerable. For those who participate in the American democracy, the “balance of information” has been tilted away from voters along Main Streets thousands of miles away to issue-based groups that jostle for influence daily in the corridors of power.

In 2008, newspapers from only 23 states had reporters based in Washington covering the federal government, according to the listings of Hudson’s Washington News Media Contacts Directory. That is down by a third from 35 states listed in the directory’s 1985 edition — and that was before a host of further cutbacks late in 2008.

As New York Times Washington Bureau Chief Dean Baquet put it, “It concentrates knowledge in the hands of those who want to influence votes. It means [for example] the lobbyist knows more about Senator [Richard] Shelby than the people of Alabama. That’s not good for democracy.”

These are the conclusions of a three-month study conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and journalist Tyler Marshall on the scale, scope and nature of the Washington press corps at the beginning of the new administration. Marshall conducted the research and reporting. The report was written by the Project and Marshall jointly.

Among the findings:

• A significant decline in the reporting power of mainstream media. The poster child of this trend is the daily newspaper, historically the backbone of American journalism, whose robust Washington presence and aggressive reporting has uncovered scandals that toppled a president, sent members of Congress to jail and does the daily job of covering congressional delegations and federal agencies. Since the 1980s, the number of newspapers accredited to cover Congress has fallen by two-thirds. The number claiming a presence in Washington generally, according to capitol directories, has fallen by more than half.

• The decline in mainstream press has been nearly matched by a sharp growth among more narrowly focused special interest or niche media. The number of specialty newspapers, magazines and newsletters has risen by half since the mid-1980s. Newsletters alone are up nearly two-thirds.
• A marked jump in foreign media now represented in Washington. When the U.S. State Department first opened a Foreign Press Center for representatives of non-U.S. media in 1968, there were about 160 foreign correspondents reporting from Washington. In October, 2008, there were nearly 10 times as many. With some notable exceptions, this growth has been more a broadening than a deepening of coverage to international audiences. Foreign journalists tend to fare poorly in the fight for access to key federal government decision-makers and consequently, they break few important stories. Still, their presence in such large numbers has changed the way the world gets its news from Washington, and the implications of their presence for America’s image in the world are considerable.

The shift from media aimed at a general public toward one serving more specialized and elite interests also comes as important parts of the federal government — most notably arms of the executive branch — have become more circumspect, more secretive, and more combative in their dealings with the media. As a result, the traditional — and natural — adversarial relationship between the media and the federal government has hardened perceptibly at a time when the mainstream Washington-based media have weakened. Symbolic of the state of this relationship, George W. Bush is the first president since Theodore Roosevelt not to address the National Press Club during his years in office.

Read the full report at journalism.org

1. As of January 2009, Time had eight in its Washington bureau, down from more than 30 in the mid-1980s.

2. This means accredited to cover the 110^th Congress, whose term concluded at the end of 2008.

It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.

The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.

Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years.

This description is a composite. It is based on face-to-face interviews conducted at newspapers across the country and the results of a detailed survey of senior newsroom executives. In total, more than 250 newspapers participated. It is, we believe, the most systematic effort yet to examine the changing nature of the resources in American newspaper newsrooms at a critical time. It is an attempt to document and quantify cutbacks and innovations that have generally been known only anecdotally.

The study, by journalist Tyler Marshall and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, captures an industry in the grips of two powerful, but contradictory, forces. On one hand, financial pressures sap its strength and threaten its very survival. On the other, the rise of the web boosts its competitiveness, opens up innovative new forms of journalism, builds new bridges to readers and offers enormous potential for the future. Many editors believe the industry’s future is effectively a race between these two forces. Their challenge is to find a way to monetize the rapid growth of web readership before newsroom staff cuts so weaken newspapers that their competitive advantage disappears. In recent weeks–after this survey was completed–a new round of newsroom cutbacks, made against a backdrop of steadily deteriorating advertising revenues and rising production costs, intensifies the difficulty of the challenge.

This report is an attempt to document where newspapers are in that race. As editors cut back on coverage and staff, while at the same time building up their capacity online and in multi-media, what is being gained and what is being lost? What coverage is disappearing and what beats are considered sacrosanct? What new expertise has come into the newsroom, and what knowledge has been lost? In short, where is the industry headed?

Key Findings:

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• The majority of newspapers are now suffering cutbacks in staffing, and even more in the amount of news, or newshole, they offer the public. The forces buffeting the industry continue to affect larger metro newspapers to a far greater extent than smaller ones. In some cases, these differences are so stark it seems that larger and smaller newspapers are living two distinctly different experiences. Fully 85% of the dailies surveyed with circulations over 100,000 have cut newsroom staff in the last three years, while only 52% of smaller papers reported cuts. Recent announcements of a further round of newsroom staff reductions at large papers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post, indicates these differences may be widening further. Our survey found that more than half of the editors at larger papers and a third at smaller ones expect more cutbacks in the next year. But a weaker-than-expected economic performance during the first half of 2008 and grimmer forecasts for the rest of the year suggest some of those cutbacks have already been implemented and darken these projections even further.
• Papers both large and small have reduced the space, resources and commitment devoted to a range of topics. At the top of that list, nearly two thirds of papers surveyed have cut back on foreign news, over half have trimmed national news and more than a third have reduced business coverage. In effect, America’s newspapers are narrowing their reach and their ambitions and becoming niche reads.
• The culture of the daily newspaper newsroom is also changing. New job demands are drawing a generation of young, versatile, tech-savvy, high-energy staff as financial pressures drive out higher-salaried veteran reporters and editors. Newsroom executives say the infusion of new blood has brought with it a new competitive energy, but they also cite the departure of veteran journalists, along with the talent, wisdom and institutional memory they hold as their single greatest loss. Clearly stretched to describe what is unfolding in their newsrooms, editors use words like, “exciting,” “extraordinary,” “nerve-wracking” and “tumultuous.”

• Newspaper websites are increasingly a source of hope but also of fear. Editors feel torn between the advantages the web offers and the energy it consumes to produce material often of limited or even questionable value. A plurality of editors (48%), for instance, say they are conflicted by the trade-offs between the speed, depth and interactivity of the web and what those benefits are costing in terms of accuracy and journalistic standards. Yet a similar plurality (43%) thinks “web technology offers the potential for greater-than-ever journalism and will be the savior of what we once thought of as newspaper newsrooms.”

Amid these concerns–and despite the enormous cutbacks and profound worries–editors still sense that their product is improving, not worsening. Fully 56% think their news product is better than it was three years earlier.

“I believe the journalism itself is discernibly better than it was a year ago,” said the editor of a large metropolitan daily, whose paper last year lost 70 newsroom employees. “There’s an improvement in enterprise, in investigations and in the coverage of several core beats.”

How such upbeat assessments stand up in the face of new staff cuts and more pessimistic economic projections is unclear. Several editors lamented the attendant loss of time to organize a thoughtful attack on a story, to think through precisely why a story is being done or how to make the story more meaningful. “There is a huge pressure to rush to publish,” one editor added in a comment on the survey.

Overall, newsroom executives say they feel broadly unprepared for the changes sweeping over them and seem uncertain where the changes would lead. Only 5% of those responding to the survey said they were very confident of their ability to predict what their newsrooms would look like five years from now.

“I feel I’m being catapulted into another world, a world I don’t really understand,” said Virginian-Pilot Editor Denis Finley. “It’s scary because things are happening at the speed of light. The sheer speed (of change) has outstripped our ability to understand it all.”

The study is based on interviews at newspapers in 15 different cities from four distinct regions of the country and a survey of senior news executives from 259 newspapers. That sample of newspaper executives includes more than half of all newspapers over 100,000 in circulation, and roughly one-third of those with circulations between 50,000-100,000. In total, more than one in every five of the nation’s 1,217 daily newspapers participated, making it one of the broadest surveys of its kind in recent years. The survey was executed online with the help of Princeton Survey Research Associates during the first quarter of 2008.

Scan the headlines of 2005 and one question seems inevitable: Will we recall this as the year when journalism in print began to die?

The ominous announcements gathered steam as the year went on. The New York Times would cut nearly 60 people from its newsroom, the Los Angeles Times 85; Knight Ridder’s San Jose Mercury News cut 16%, the Philadelphia Inquirer 15% — and that after cutting another 15% only five years earlier. By November, investors frustrated by poor financial performance forced one of the most cost-conscious newspaper chains of all, Knight Ridder, to be put up for sale.

Adding to the worry, industry fundamentals, not the general economy, were the problem — declining circulation, pressure on revenues, stock prices for the year down 20%.

It wasn’t only newspapers, either. Magazines like Newsweek, U.S. News and Business Week were suffering, too. The largest company, Time Inc., advertising and circulation falling, cut 205 people and promised to transform itself from “magazine publishing” to a “multiplatform media company.” The former dean at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Tom Goldstein would conclude, “Unless they urgently respond to the changing environment, newspapers risk early extinction.”

Is it true? From here on will the delivery of news in ink on paper begin a rapid and accelerating decline? Newspapers are the country’s biggest newsgathering organizations in most towns and the Internet’s primary suppliers. What would their decline portend?

For two years, this report has tracked the major trends in the American news media (link to 2005 and 2004). What is occurring, we have concluded, is not the end of journalism that some have predicted. But we do see a seismic transformation in what and how people learn about the world around them. Power is moving away from journalists as gatekeepers over what the public knows. Citizens are assuming a more active role as assemblers, editors and even creators of their own news. Audiences are moving from old media such as television or newsprint to new media online. Journalists need to redefine their role and identify which of their core values they want to fight to preserve —something they have only begun to consider.

In 2005, change intensified. The shift by audiences to other delivery mediums accelerated print’s problems. Things that seemed futuristic two years ago, such as watching network news on a PDA, began to arrive. The role of new aggregators like Google grew. And new scandals in the old media seemed to confirm worries that some news people are more concerned with their careers than the public interest.

We believe some fears are overheated. For now, the evidence does not support the notion that newspapers have begun a sudden death spiral. The circulation declines and job cuts will probably tally at only about 3% for the year. The industry still posted profit margins of 20%. Measuring print and online together, the readership of many newspapers is higher than ever.

[And while the public continues to be troubled about the news media in some areas, including heightened concerns about bias, criticism of the military, and whether the news media really protect democracy, Americans have a more favorable view of the press generally and considers the news media more professional and moral than they did before September 11, 2001, or in aftermath of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.]

On the other hand, the most sanguine reaction to all these changes — that they simply reflect an older medium’s giving way to a newer one, and that citizens will have more choices than ever — strikes us as glib, even naïve. Even if newspapers are not dying, they and other old media are constricting, and so, it appears, is the amount of resources dedicated to original newsgathering.

Most local radio stations, our content study this year finds, offer virtually nothing in the way of reporters in the field. On local TV news, fewer and fewer stories feature correspondents, and the range of topics that get full treatment is narrowing even more to crime and accidents, plus weather, traffic and sports. On the Web, the Internet-only sites that have tried to produce original content (among them Slate and Salon) have struggled financially, while those thriving financially rely almost entirely on the work of others. Among blogs, there is little of what journalists would call reporting (our study this year finds reporting in just 5% of postings). Even in bigger newsrooms, journalists report that specialization is eroding as more reporters are recast into generalists.

In some cities, the numbers alone tell the story. There are roughly half as many reporters covering metropolitan Philadelphia, for instance, as in 1980. The number of newspaper reporters there has fallen from 500 to 220. The pattern at the suburban papers around the city has been similar, though not as extreme. The local TV stations, with the exception of Fox, have cut back on traditional news coverage. The five AM radio stations that used to cover news have been reduced to two. As recently as 1990, the Philadelphia Inquirer had 46 reporters covering the city. Today it has 24.

In the future, we may well rely more on citizens to be sentinels for one another. No doubt that will expand the public forum and enrich the range of voices. Already people are experimenting with new ways to empower fellow citizens to gather and understand the news — whether it is soldiers blogging from Baghdad, a radio program on the war produced by students at Swarthmore College carrying eyewitness interviews with Iraqi citizens, or a similar effort by young radio reporters in Minnesota to cover local towns.

Yet the changes will probably also make it easier for power to move in the dark. And the open technology that allows citizens to speak will also help special interests, posing as something else, to influence or even sometimes overwhelm what the rest of us know. The worry is not the wondrous addition of citizen media, but the decline of full-time, professional monitoring of powerful institutions.

Those are just some of the questions and conclusions in this, the third of our annual reports on the state of American journalism. The study, which we believe is unique in depth and scope, breaks the news industry into nine sectors (newspapers, magazines, network television, cable television, local television, the Internet, radio, ethnic media, and alternative media) and builds off many of the findings from a year ago.

This year, the study also includes a distinct content report, A Day in the Life of the News, in which we examine one day’s events as they course through the media culture in print, television, radio, online, and blogs, magazines, both nationally and locally in three American cities.

Read the full report, including a more extensive version of this overview