News is shifting from being a product — today’s newspaper, Web site or newscast — to becoming a service — how can you help me, even empower me? There is no single or finished news product anymore. As news consumption becomes continual, more new effort is put into producing incremental updates, as brief as 40-character e-mails sent from reporters directly to consumers without editing.
This is an extract of one of the top line trends from the State of the News Media 2008 by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It is a sobering analysis of not only the state of journalism but also the products which rely on journalists for content.
The newspaper trend is gloomy:
Circulation continues to fall at about 2.5% year-to-year for dailies and 3.3% for Sunday editions.
Magazines don’t fare much better in the analysis. What interested me was the optimism around efforts being made by some publishers and others to navigate the challenges. Successful media brands will survive the distribution challenge (print versus online) and they will do this by riding the change wave. This is what newsagents need to do.
Newsagents ought to read the report and make notes on changes which can be implemented in their businesses right away. Many newsagents won’t take this initiative – I think they are waiting for suppliers to lead them.