Journalism in jitters

News business is turning into its own nemesis. After 80 years the Graham family sold The Washington Post in the first week of this month. Two days before that the Boston Globe, founded in 1872, got a new owner. Newsweek became history umpteen months ago. Time Magazine reduced its staff size by 5% early this year and then discontinued its cartoon section from last June to further cut costs. The news industry all over the world is in jitters.  Not just that the giants in the business are incredibly shrinking. News is also shrinking with them.
What's happening in America won't simultaneously happen in other countries. It'll follow the evolutionary path, contraction being gradual to some extent as expansion, until advanced becomes backward and necessary becomes redundant. The news business is heading for the twilight in mature markets, but it's still nascent in other parts of the world. In Bangladesh, for example, newspapers and magazines are being launched by the month (less frequent for television channels). Media power is the new hobbyhorse of our moneyed men.
It's probably the halfway house where giants are meeting midgets: The news value of news is getting compromised.  The Pew Research Center in its "The State of the News Media 2013" report estimated that the news industry in the United States suffered 30% newspaper newsroom cutbacks since 2000, professional employees hitting below 40,000 for the first time since 1978. The television channels aren't spared either, which is heavily reflected in their contents. Sports, weather and traffic now account for nearly 40% of the contents produced on the newscasts studied, while story lengths continue to get squeezed. Between 2007 and 2012, CNN, the cable channel that made its name for deep reporting, reduced story packages nearly into half.
Once proud of their ability to sink teeth into news, the American media is losing its bite. The reasons are obviously obvious. Given the manpower shortage, newspapers and televisions are now less prepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information that is available to them. A public opinion survey conducted by the Pew revealed that the readers are taking notice of this diminished commitment. Nearly 31% of the respondents claimed they had stopped using a particular news outlet because it no longer provided them the news and information they liked to read or hear.
Thus, the news media is caught in a vicious circle. Loss of revenue means loss of manpower, which means loss of quality, again meaning loss of readership. At the completion of each cycle, the revenue is reduced further. A growing number of media houses, including Forbes magazine, are turning to cheaper options. They're using technology to produce contents so that they can undercut the cost of human reporting.
One only needs to follow the money to understand why. While the news industry continues to lose out on advertising revenue in the United States, mobile and digital advertising are raking in money by the bushel. Mobile advertising grew 80% in 2012 to $2.6 billion, while digital advertising grew 22%. According to Pew's estimate, newspaper revenues from print advertising in the United States declined from $44.9 billion in 2003 to $18.9 billion in 2012.
In their struggle to survive, 450 out of 1,380 US dailies are resorting to some kind of paid content subscription or pay wall plan. Many have opted for the metered model, which means it allows a certain number of free visits before requiring users to pay. The digital ad revenue of the newspapers is growing at a humble rate of 3% a year, while digital subscriptions are not enough to compensate for the loss of revenue in advertising. The New York Times, which is rumoured to be the next newspaper likely to be sold, has reported that its circulation revenue now exceeds its advertising revenue. The traditional revenue split is supposed to be as much as 80% advertising dollars to 20% circulation dollars.
The outcome of this trend is that while the number of journalists is on the wane, the number of publicists is growing in the United States. The Pew study found that campaign reporters were acting primarily as "megaphones, rather than as investigators," merely relaying the campaign statements instead of interpreting them and giving them contexts. Many journalists are being tempted by corporate marketers to write stories pitched by them.
On a fundamental level, news business is undergoing change. Once a social commitment for the businesses, it's now a business commitment for the socialites. That's affecting the nature of news as well. Journalism is losing its nose for news, its focus shifting from investigation to investors. The future of news looks fuzzy as the bottom line squeezes the baseline. The breaking news is that the spirit of journalism is breaking, if not broken already.

The writer is Editor, First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
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