A few months ago, The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual study of the media business. As you might guess, it’s bleak. The questions aren’t just about how the media will recover after a (let’s hope) short-term recession, but rather they center on the long view, which is equally dire. “The market research and investment banking firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson projects that by 2013, after the economic recovery, three elements of old media — newspapers, radio and magazines — will take in 41% less in ad revenues than they did in 2006.

“For newspapers, which still provide the largest share of reportorial journalism in the United States, the metaphor that comes to mind is sand in an hourglass. The shrinking money left in print, which still provides 90% of the industry’s funds, is the amount of time left to invent new revenue models online. The industry must find a new model before that money runs out.

“The losses are already enormous. To quantify the impact, with colleague Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute we estimate that the newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000, or roughly 30%. That leaves an estimated $4.4 billion remaining. Even if the economy improves we predict more cuts in 2010.”

The news is equally dire for magazines, although not to the extent of that facing newspapers. “In magazines, the number of ad pages sold across all titles studied fell by 26% in 2009, more than double the decline of a year earlier (12%). Almost every magazine suffered. Only 8% of the nearly 250 titles monitored saw an increase in ad pages. Among news magazines, the larger ones were hard hit. Time and Newsweek, for instance, saw ad pages fall 17% and 26% respectively. Niche news magazines examined tended to do better, though even here, the only one to gain ad pages was the Week, up 9.5 percent.” For some other key findings, click here.

For a very good discussion about the state of the today’s news business, check out the July 16 episode of On the Media, available on iTunes as a podcast. 

This is an older article I recently stumbled upon, but it is a topic of interest: the philosophy of journalism. The article asks why it is difficult to find a philosophy of journalism at college campuses across the country. “Why, at a time of breakneck technological and social revolution in news and newsrooms, do deans and presidents permit ossified philosophy departments to abdicate their responsibility to cover the world by not thinking about the media?” writes Carlin Romano. “How can it be that journalism and philosophy, the two humanistic intellectual activities that most boldly (and some think obnoxiously) vaunt their primary devotion to truth, are barely on speaking terms?”

Even though he doesn’t say it outright, Romano, a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, believes journalism programs lack intellectual depth and fail to address the bigger questions when teaching their students. He writes, “Broadly speaking, we need philosophers who understand how epistemology and the establishment of truth claims function in the real world outside seminars and journals—the role of recognized authorities, of decision, of conscious intersubjective setting of standards. And we need journalists who scrutinize and question not just government officials, PR releases, and leaked documents, but their own preconceptions about every aspect of their business. We need journalists who think about how many examples are required to assert a generalization, what the role of the press ought to be in the state, how the boundaries of words are fixed or indeterminate in Wittgensteinian ways, and how their daily practice does or does not resemble art or science.”

Romero writes that all journalism students must at least be required to take a history of journalism course. I was, and I believe my alma mater, the University of Nebraska, succeeds in this area. Many of these discussions were required in courses such as media history and media law. It’s what makes the program a standout above many journalism programs throughout the country.

This article provides much food for further thought. “There’s a great history to be written of philosophers’ engagement with journalism, from Hegel’s citation of the daily newspaper as his morning prayer, to Ortega y Gasset’s lessons from newspaper life, to Russell’s widespread freelancing and the later Wittgenstein’s instantiation of conceptual journalism as a philosophical method.”

It’s the million-dollar question. Will Apple, the iPad and the iTunes business model save journalism and magazines? It’s uncertain. Whether or not you believe Apple knows something about selling “content” to the public, the debate will need to be discussed by virtually every publishing company in the country. Will they go the iTunes route or is there another path to compete in the digital age?

There’s an interesting debate going on at Gigaom after Steve Jobs’ recent appearance at the D8 conference last week. The Apple CEO said, “I think people are willing to pay for content. I believe it for music and video, and I believe it for the media.” The question is how to get readers to pay for the material they’ve become accustomed to reading for free online.

From the article: “The vision of an iTunes that served up paid-for newspaper and magazine content to millions of adoring readers has captivated the traditional media for some time. One of the most eloquent pleas for such a model came from New York Times media writer David Carr last year, in a column entitled “Will Someone Please Invent iTunes For News?” Carr described Apple’s success in selling music, and then said he hoped that someone like Jobs would come along and convince “the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it’s time to pay up.”

It’s sad news to learn today that Newsweek magazine is up for sale. Growing up in a print culture, I admired the qualities of this wonderfully produced news magazine. It’s the bellwether-- the end of the large market weekly news magazine, the decline of print journalism and the shift to something new as news and commentary moves toward purely online forms of distribution, as this story in the New York Times points out:

“The move comes as companies have been sloughing off and revamping other mass magazines. TV Guide was sold for $1 to a private equity firm; Businessweek was sold for $5 million in cash to Bloomberg L.P.; and Reader’s Digest was given an editorial overhaul as it slashed circulation.

“The circulations of Time and Newsweek now stand about where they were in 1966, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

“Those magazines had much more stature in those days,” said Edward Kosner, who began at Newsweek in 1963 and was its editor in the late 1970s. “It was really important what was on the cover of Newsweek and what was on the cover of Time because it was what passed for the national press. They helped set the agenda; they helped make reputations.”

“The era of mass is over, in some respect,” said Charles Whitaker, research chairman in magazine journalism at the Northwestern University school of journalism. “The newsweeklies, for so long, have tried to be all things to all people, and that’s just not going to cut it in this highly niche, politically polarized, media-stratified environment that we live in today.”

Earlier this month, a group of publishers banded together to launch a new campaign titled Magazines: The Power of Print. Expected to roll out in May issues of various magazines, the advertising campaign is designed to remind readers and advertisers that print is alive and well. Participating publishers include Hearst, Time Inc., Condé Nast, Meredith Corp. and Wenner Media. From the Folio post from author Jason Fell:

Hearst Corp. executive vice president and publishing director Michael Clinton: “It is a misperception that print is a shrinking medium. It is a growing medium—audiences are growing, subscriptions are growing, etc. The magazine business, collectively, has said that we have this incredibly dynamic medium that consumers love and spend money on, and we need to tell that story in a bigger way. The magazine world doesn’t have a consumer problem, it has an advertising perception problem, among some advertisers.”

According to Fell’s post, the Publishers Information Bureau reports that advertising pages were down 25.6 percent in 2009, “marking the 10th reported quarterly decline out of 11 since PIB began reporting on a quarterly basis in mid-2007. Shockingly, a mere 18 titles posted ad page gains in 2009.”

Josh Quittnor has a very good article posted on CNN about the iPad and the future of reading:

“The more I thought about it, the more I decided there was good news for the evolution of the publishing industry here—and better news. The good news is that 12-year-olds, just like their parents and their parents before them going all the way back to the publication of the first magazine in 1731 (the year Charles Darwin’s grandfather was born), still enjoy the medium. But they want it delivered in an exponentially more useful way.

“Raised to expect instant, sortable, searchable, savable, portable access to all the information in the world, these digital natives—tomorrow’s magazine subscribers, God and Steve Jobs willing—could well become the generation that saves the publishing industry.”

In the article, Quittnor addresses five key questions about the future of reading and the advent of tablet computers, including whether people will be willing to pay for online content, advertising and whether reading is dead. (No, it’s not. “Isn’t the idea of a magazine irrelevant in the atomized, buy-the-single-not-the-album world? If that were so, we’d expect to see fewer people reading magazines. But according to the Magazine Publishers Association, 174.5 million people paid to subscribe to magazines in 1970; that number has steadily and consistently risen over the years, to 324.8 million as of 2008.") I recommend you check it out.

"Often recounted, like the tales of Agincourt, with advantages, they present the reporter as a roguish knight-errant, a dashing adventurer with a streak of rat-like cunning. The stuff of countless Fleet Street memoirs, they are also the essence of the Watergate story and of newsroom dramas such as “The Front Page”. Today, however, such derring-do is rare, not just because telephones and live television make it unnecessary to rely on steamships and trains, but because the whole idea of news as a commodity owned and purveyed by journalists is slipping into history.”

So writes Brian Cathcart in More Intelligent Life, Winter 2009 issue. “If news, as a commodity purveyed by reporters, is coming to an end, when and how did it start?”

I enjoyed this essay and I thought I would pass it along here on my blog. It’s written by one of my favorite reviewers, Michael Dirda, a reviewer for the Washington Post and other sites. Here he writes about the nature of his reading habits (voracious to say the least) and the changing nature of today’s literary culture. I especially liked this paragraph, where he writes about a moment he felt he was at the crossroads, seeing his profession evolve while he had to make a decision about his future.

“Of course, I didn’t count on the now ongoing crises in print journalism. Nor that Book World itself would cease to be a separate section in 2009 (my pieces now appear in the Style pages on Thursdays). Neither did I pay enough attention to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s comment about being a professional writer: “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” Still, a long career in newspapers, combined with a workingclass background, does teach resilience. Any journalist I’ve ever known figures that he can cover just about anything. It’s part of the cocky charm of the field.”

For many year’s Medill’s School of Journalism at Northwestern University has conducted a wonderful investigative journalism program for undergraduates. As part of the program, undergrads researched criminal cases where convictions may have sent innocent people to death row. Now the program is (wrongly) under fire. From the New York Times:

“Since 1992, Prof. David Protess at the Medill school at Northwestern University has worked with undergraduate journalism students to investigate cases in which prosecutors appear to have taken aim at the wrong people. That might be about to happen again, only this time the students themselves would be the targets.” The students’ work has always been considered journalism, and has received its due protection under the law. Yet, now with journalism weakened both economically and politically, the professions enemies are emboldened to take it on.

From the Times: “And because of that investigative work — and perhaps work on other cases, which has led to the exoneration of 11 people, 5 of whom had been sentenced to death — the project and its students find themselves in the gun sights of Cook County prosecutors ... The prosecutors are seeking access to investigative materials, e-mail messages, course outlines, syllabuses, training materials and, yes, even grades, to explore the “bias, motive and interest” behind the students’ work.”

I encourage you to read the entire story. This is what I most fear as journalism undergoes its transition from print to digital, from professional to crowd-sourcing.

"The hard truth about the future of journalism is that nobody knows for sure what will happen; the current system is so brittle, and the alternatives are so speculative, that there’s no hope for a simple and orderly transition from State A to State B.” So says Clay Shirky in an interesting analysis of the future of journalism published at CATO Unbound. The economic model for journalism is changing to be sure, yet nobody is sure where it will lead. But Shirky makes some good points in his essay that can help as we begin to plan for the future.

“We can expect changes in journalism to be linked to changes in subsidy. There are many shifts coming, but three big ones are an increase in direct participation; an increase in the leverage of the professionals working alongside the amateurs; and a second great age of patronage,” writes Shirky. He examines each point in a bit more detail, so I encourage you to read the entire essay.

Neither the simple preservation of the old system of journalism, nor a full replacement of the current journalistic model will happen, writes Shirky. Instead the future is open for something entirely new and different. “The change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained. In the meantime, the changes in self-assembling publics and new models of subsidy will drive journalistic experimentation in ways that surprise us all.”