Panel of experts address deepening crisis facing old media

The news media is on life-support and beginning to flat-line.

Tremendous ad revenue losses, spurred by a public who increasingly refuse to pay for content, has resulted in consumers being less likely to view traditional media as an authoritative source on all matters.

Not so fast, indicate the speakers at Transforming Journalism: The State of the News Media 2010, held at The George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs (SMPA).

The March 29 event, sponsored by The Newseum and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, explored the current state of the media coinciding with the release of the “State of the News Media” report.

The opening panel discussion, moderated by former George Mason University professor and current SMPA Director Dr. Frank Sesno, offered insight into journalism’s future by stating that the news media can weather the storm but “hand wringing” will not help.

Among the charges held against the mainstream media is an increased trend towards partisanship.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, noted that “the news is more of an argument and less of an authoritative finished product.” Rosenstiel continued, “Just in the last couple years we’ve seen a rise in distrust [in the media] again . . .  much of it actually from liberals who think that the press has become more biased than they were.”

The merging of entertainment with hard news isn’t going away any time soon, either.

“You have to regard yourself as putting on a show, ” said Tina Brown, former editor of The New Yorker and founder of The Daily Beast. The major enemy that we all have is time famine. Make them pay attention. If they didn’t read anything, you failed.”

“Never before in human history has so much information been available to so many people, so quickly,” said Dr. Sesno. The information overload leaves consumers of media with many options of finding out information, yet there is no consensus on what the day-to-day news events really mean.

Jim Brady, president of Digital Strategies for Allbritton Communications and a panelist at the GW event, sees mobile phone content as the next big undeveloped territory. Yet it seems the news media are preparing for these changes by focusing on increasing their own reach through mobile media, news aggregators, blogs and Twitter feeds, rather than leading the way by innovating new ways of distribution.

“If you are looking at like traffic alerts and weather alerts [while you’re] approaching 495 and the phone [tells] you that you’re about to approach a huge traffic jam, maybe you ought to make a left,” said Brady. “I mean, if I got saved twice a year by those alerts, I’d pay a pretty good chunk of change for it.”

The information provided by social, or “new” media, created by loosely connected citizen journalists, offers a taste of what the new media model may look like.  Yet there is an interesting counterpoint to this shift.

“When do we stop calling it new? I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for 10 years,” said Ana Marie Cox, GQ Magazine’s Washington, D.C. correspondent. The mainstream media dominates the debate about itself by framing its competitors as a passing trend, yet it usurps those ways of distribution to further its own ends. Without the media to determine what is on the agenda, perhaps the public is better suited towards deciding what should be on the day’s agenda.

“You can’t assign a citizen journalist to do something; they have to want to cover it,” said Cox.

The pay-per-story model, announced by The New York Times this year, could change the way we consume news, yet there is likely to be a resistance towards paying for content online by consumers who have been reading it free online for years.

Falling revenue streams face not only corporate news outlets, but the public ones as well. The news media is “wounded in that area, but not killed,” said Vivian Schiller, president of NPR news during the event’s keynote speech.

“The losses suffered in traditional news gathering in the last year were so severe . . . they overwhelm the innovations in the world of news and journalism,” said Schiller.

Yet Schiller ended her keynote with an optimistic message to the students attending about how the future of the news media will occur: “You will be the ones to create what those of us [who] have brains that are just too old will ever figure out.”

George Mocharko,  Stylus Staff Editor

• Jim Brady, President, Digital Strategies, Allbritton Communications Company, Tina Brown, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, The Daily Beast; Susan Page, Washington Bureau Chief, "USA Today"; Antoine Sanfuentes, Senior Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief, NBC News, • Vivian Schiller, President and CEO, National Public Radio (Keynote); Charlie Sennott, Executive Editor, "GlobalPost"  Photo Coutesy by The School of Public & Media Affairs, The George Washington University

• Jim Brady, President, Digital Strategies, Allbritton Communications Company, Tina Brown, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, The Daily Beast; Susan Page, Washington Bureau Chief, "USA Today"; Antoine Sanfuentes, Senior Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief, NBC News, • Vivian Schiller, President and CEO, National Public Radio (Keynote); Charlie Sennott, Executive Editor, "GlobalPost" Photo Courtesy by The School of Public & Media Affairs, The George Washington University

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