Online News Ad Growth Slowing, Sites Finances Need Review: Report

The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) has released its State of the News Media annual report for 2007, which found that as audiences for news media shrank, the organizations were limiting their ambitions by looking for certain areas to build their coverage around, or going very local. Perhaps unsurprisingly the only segment that grew was the Hispanic one. In terms of online content, the report found that while online ad revenue was still growing, that growth is slowing. Newspaper sites are the most successful of the media’s online efforts, claiming 41 percent of the online media ad revenue. This is followed by internet companies (25 percent) and online Yellow Pages sites (16 percent). (graph)

There are a couple of suggestions in the report, such as that “news organizations can broaden what they consider journalistic function to include activities such as online search and citizen media, and perhaps even liken their journalism to anchor stores at a mall, a major reason for coming but not the only one”. It also claims that news sites must find a way to get customers to pay for digital content, although not directly. Apparently the increasingly logical scenario is that “news providers would charge internet providers and aggregators licensing fees for content”. The news organizations may have to create consortiums to make this happen, and the fees would get added to the bills for internet access.

There are also questions about the financial model of media. “Private markets now appear to value media properties more highly than Wall Street does. More executives are openly expressing doubt, too, whether public ownership

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