Journalism's Need for New Models

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has issued its annual State of the News Media report. This year’s identifies seven major trends. (The report calls them new trends even though they are not new, but that’s a quibble.) The trends are:

• News organizations need to do more to think through the implications of this new era of shrinking ambitions.
• The evidence is mounting that the news industry must become more aggressive about developing a new economic model.
• The key question is whether the investment community sees the news business as a declining industry or an emerging one in transition.
• There are growing questions about whether the dominant ownership model of the last generation, the public corporation, is suited to the transition newsrooms must now make.
• The Argument Culture is giving way to something new, the Answer Culture.
• Blogging is on the brink of a new phase that will probably include scandal, profitability for some, and a splintering into elites and non-elites over standards and ethics.
• While journalists are becoming more serious about the Web, no clear models of how to do journalism online really exist yet, and some qualities are still only marginally explored.

The report is lengthy and detailed, a must-read for anyone who cares about the present and future of journalism. More later…