Media's focus narrowing, report warns

MEDIA'S FOCUS NARROWING, REPORT WARNS
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: James Rainey]
News organizations confronted with declining revenue and increased competition are entering an era of more limited ambition in which they will drop a broad worldview for more narrowly focused reporting. The Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that the struggle to create sustainable media brands is driving "hyper-local" coverage in newspapers; encouraging citizen journalism on the Internet; and giving rise to opinion-driven television personalities like CNN's Lou Dobbs and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. "The consequences of this narrowing of focus involve more risk than we sense the business has considered," said the report from the project, an arm of the Washington-based Pew Research Center. "Concepts like hyper-localism, pursued in the most literal sense, can be marketing speak for simply doing less." The review describes print, radio and television news operations as weathering "epochal" changes — with audiences splintering so radically that is has become difficult to accurately measure new viewing and reading habits. Daily newspaper circulation declined 3% in 2006, for instance, but the increase in online readership is more difficult to quantify. The three television networks collectively lost an additional 1 million viewers -- about the average in each of the last 25 years -- but YouTube and other online services created a new delivery vehicle for the networks' content.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-journalism12mar1...
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* PEJ’s State of the News Media 2007
http://www.journalism.org/node/4487

* Web revolution leaving newsgathering in a lurch
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/life/20070312/d_mediamix12.art.htm

* Annual PEJ Report Charts Losses -- and New Ideas
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_con...

WEAK LEAD-IN PROGRAMMING TAKES TOLL ON THE NEWS RATINGS
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Jacques Steinberg]
While most of the attention in the heated network news competition focuses on the anchors -- Katie Couric at CBS, Charles Gibson at ABC and Brian Williams at NBC -- their performance is still greatly complicated by “lead-ins,” the programs that precede the national newscasts, and by how much the network newscasts squander or build on the audiences delivered to them by local stations. In almost every market, the immediate lead-in is a half-hour of local news. Even in an age where viewers can, with the mere touch of a remote control, choose from among hundreds of channels, most continue to get their network news from the same station that provides their local news. That means that at least one major variable in the performance of the programs of Mr. Williams and Ms. Couric -- both of which changed executive producers during the last week -- is largely out of the hands of those producers and respective anchors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/business/media/12network.html
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