Via the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism: The State of the News Media 2009. It makes grim reading for journalists in all media (and not just Americans), but those of us who specialize in writing for websites really need to understand what's happening. An excerpt from the introduction:
Perhaps least noticed yet most important, the audience migration to the Internet is now accelerating.
The number of Americans who regularly go online for news, by one survey, jumped 19% in the last two years; in 2008 alone traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27%.
Yet it is now all but settled that advertising revenue—the model that financed journalism for the last century—will be inadequate to do so in this one.
Growing by a third annually just two years ago, online ad revenue to news websites now appears to be flattening; in newspapers it is declining.
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