Traditional US media are fighting an uphill battle against Internet news websites and citizen journalists, despite question marks over the credibility of the Web and copyright problems.
“Almost all newspaper owners realize that they are constantly losing ground in the battle for eyeballs,” Warren Buffett, a millionaire shareholder of the major US national daily The Washington Post, said of the competition for readers.
“In fact many intelligent newspaper executives who regularly chronicled and analyzed important worldwide events were either blind or indifferent to what what was going on under their nose.”
A recent study by the Pew research centre showed 43 percent of people in the United States turn to the Internet for news, against 17 percent who prefer national newspapers.
The Internet also saw surging advertising revenues, which grew by more than 17 percent in 2006, according to this month’s figures from TNS Media Intelligence. Papers and television were still ahead, but the figures showed online media closing the gap with radio over ad earnings.
For the US regional press, advertising revenue was down 3.3 percent in 2006, while for newspapers with national distribution it grew only feebly by the same percentage.
Television advertising revenues also grew by a weak five percent, which included a significant rise in the amount spent on political broadcasts ahead of the 2008 presidential election.
“The consumer is in control now rather than the journalist,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a US-based research group.
“We are all becoming our own editors, whether we are Googling a subject or deciding what to download or podcast on our phones, on our MP3 player,” he added.
On the news front, traditional outlets face a stiff challenge from the booming community of online commentators and blogs, and video-sharing sites such as YouTube where users can post home-made or even copyrighted clips.
But such new online media powers also run new risks. US entertainment giant Viacom launched a billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube and its mother company Google for reproducing copyright material on the site.
In another high-profile case, YouTube hosted a video that had been edited to portray the US Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton as an authoritarian “Big Brother” figure.
Incorporating material from a television commercial, the anonymous video added a political message supporting Barack Obama, a rival candidate for the Democratic nomination, sparking speculation over the identity of the author.
Both candidates’ camps denied any involvement with the video, which Obama said was produced by a renegade former employee of a company hired by his campaign to help design his website. But once again it raises questions over the credibility of material posts on the Net.
“Power is shifting from the journalist as a gate keeper for the public to the individual citizen to be responsible for their own news gathering and consumption,” Rosenstiel said.
The metamorphosis of traditional media is also having an impact on lifestyles. The once hallowed television with its fixed-time programs is being slowly ousted from the living room as consumers plump for downloading videos on demand, which they can watch when they choose.
“It’s a crossline between Internet and TV experience. In a couple of years, we’ll be seeing television from being a dedicated box to being part of a home network, connected, eliminating all the wires,” said Tim Hanlon, vice president of Denuo researchers.
