Media's focus narrowing, warns Project for Excellence in Journalism

[DeepModem Mom]

LAT: Media's focus narrowing, report warns
Splintering audiences in the online age are driving risky trends like 'hyper-local ism,' the Project for Excellence in Journalism says.
By James Rainey, Times Staff Writer
March 11, 2007

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, according to an annual review of the news business being released today by a watchdog group.

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....

Traditional newsrooms remain the primary source for information, and the report suggests that news organizations need to be more aggressive about mining revenue for their work. The old-line media may have to form consortiums to force Internet "aggregators," which compile content from other sources, to pay licensing fees for news and information, the report says....

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-journalism12mar12,0,5474359.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[lyonn]

1. The media should try going back to the old way of doing things.

Investigations and not just reporting what their bosses want told. Independance from the big corporate bosses would be a great start. It is the internet and all the people that enjoy being snoops and getting scoops that is making life uncomfortable for the tv personalties in the news.

This is a fun story. It is about time they start wondering what they are doing wrong and losing dollars. Enough of the hours of giving opinions as to how to bury someone, and just plain gossip type news.