The 2013 State of the News Media report has good news and bad.
The bad news is that the media is still hurting. Newsroom staff is down 30% from 2000 – in fact there are fewer than 40,000 full-time professional employees in media newsrooms for the first time since 1978. Nearly one-third of consumers surveyed by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism said they have abandoned a news outlet because it no longer gave them what they had counted on, either with fewer or less complete stories.
This add up to a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands.
The good news is that this, combined with new technology resources, has opened the door for brands and organizations to publish their own content and reach directly to the public. Or to form partnerships with the media to report on subjects they can no longer cover.
With newsroom cutbacks, some news organizations supplement their reporting through work funded through other sources, like ProPublica and the Kaiser Family Foundation’s service for reporting health news. When he was at ABC, Westin said the network accepted a grant from the Gates Foundation for reporting on subjects like the water supply in Africa it otherwise would not have been able to afford.
Kaiser Health News is one example of this. Another is the Stanford University project on the water supply in the San Joaquin Delta
Most brands can produce content about their industry and house it in a social newsroom and distribute it on a wire service that encourages the use of visuals.
