Produced by
The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication
in partnership with The Seattle Times
Written by
Ben Shors,
Clinical Associate Professor, Director of the Murrow News Service
Douglas Blanks Hindman,
Associate Professor/Chair of the Journalism and Media Production Sequence
The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication
Washington State University
Overview
The past decade has wreaked havoc on traditional
newsrooms in the Pacific Northwest, as newspaper and
television leaders have raced to adapt to new digital
technologies. Today, the arms race for news media
consumers has moved to mobile platforms, where billions
in digital dollars — as well as access to key demographic
groups, including younger, digitally native users — are at
stake. Today, more than half of readers seek out news on
mobile devices and they skew younger than traditional
media audiences, a number expected to reach 75 percent
by 2018.
Digital advertising — driven by an explosion in mobile
markets — is now greater than newspaper, radio and
outdoor advertising. For example, mobile advertising
alone topped $20 billion in revenue in 2015, a 66 percent
increase from the previous year. To date, those digital
dollars have been concentrated to a handful of companies,
and none of them produce original content.
Media companies in the Pacific Northwest find themselves
at the center of the battle between those that produce
content and those that provide platforms. Few places in the
country are more representative of this than Washington
state, home to tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft, as
well as a diverse cluster of news media outlets, including
private, public and nonprofit newsrooms. The transition
from traditional media companies to digital-first has been
painful: Newspapers closing or cutting staff, television
and radio tightening budgets to build leaner news teams,
nonprofit newsrooms struggling to find and maintain
funding. The regional changes mirror problems across the
United States, as the number of working journalists across
the country has dropped in half since 1990.
That decline in the number of journalists working in the
Pacific Northwest threatens to undermine civic engagement,
government accountability and the public’s knowledge of
local communities, according to a panel of regional and
national experts convened by Washington State University
and The Seattle Times in April 2016. The newsgathering
networks — and the news-consuming habits of the public
— become more difficult to rebuild as the years pass and
newsrooms continue to struggle, according to Ken Doctor,
a national media analyst and the panel’s keynote speaker.
“I think what we see happening is that we’re losing in
some places the muscle memory of local news,” Doctor
said during The Murrow Interview. “A whole generation is
growing up not even understanding what that’s all about.”
Digital dollars funneled to a few companies
Younger generations are consuming news, Doctor noted,
but they are increasingly turning to non-traditional
platforms. In 2015, more than 60 percent of millennials
reported getting their political news on Facebook, and
older news consumers are turning to the social media giant,
as well, according to the Pew Research Center.
issued last month. Three-quarters of that revenue went to
just 10 companies, led by Google and Facebook. For news
media companies, relatively little of that digital money has
trickled down to newspapers and broadcast outlets. At
most newspapers, 85 percent of revenue comes from print,
Doctor said. Among television stations, about 90 percent of
revenue comes from legacy sources.
As news consumers migrate to mobile, Facebook has
emerged as the dominant application; the company’s firstquarter earnings show that advertising revenue jumped to
$5.2 billion, up from $3.3 billion in the fourth quarter of
2015. Mobile ads accounted for 82 percent of the revenue,
the company reported.
“This is 20 years after the Internet is beginning,” Doctor said,
“so we’re closer to the beginning of this transition, which
also accounts for the difficult straits of the news business.”
Understanding the complex nature of social sharing will
be critical to newspapers, radio and television newsrooms
hoping to keep pace with their digital-first brethren. Onlineonly sites, like BuzzFeed and Quartz, receive more than half
Mobile helped drive continued growth in digital ad
of their traffic via social media, while most daily newspapers
revenue: In 2015, Internet advertising revenue grew
receive only 8 percent to 12 percent of all traffic from social
to nearly $60 billion, a 20 percent increase from 2014,
according to the Internet Advertising Bureau revenue report sharing.
The Edward R. Murrow Future of Journalism — 1
Newspapers and television industries are behind in the
transition to digital advertising, Doctor said. Newspapers,
which received about 20 percent of advertising revenue
in the pre-Internet days, now receive 7 percent of the
$50-billion market in digital advertising. Television stations
used to receive 60 percent of advertising revenues. Now,
their digital revenue claims only 5 percent of the digital
total.
“That is why we have seen the cratering of the local
newspaper industry,” Doctor said.
This year, the number of journalists working in the United
States will be 28,000, which is about half the number that
were employed in 1990, Doctor said. Pressure is growing
on companies like Google and Facebook to share that
revenue with content providers, he added.
Lessons from digital start-ups
During the past decade, the lesson for legacy media outlets
in the Pacific Northwest has been brutal: Change quickly or
suffer the economic consequences. The lesson for digital
start-ups, said Evan Hansen, who was then the head of
content labs at San Francisco-based Medium.com, is equally
instructive: Learn to fail quickly and cheaply.
“The technologists are groping along in the dark, the same
as you guys,” Hansen told the group. “The number of ideas
we have considered and abandoned in the past three years
is mind-boggling.”
Hansen saw, firsthand, the power of digital technology to
overturn traditional media. His first experience was working
as a journalist for a trade publication serving the legal
community. Each year, Hansen and the other journalists
painstakingly assembled a widely read issue that listed firstyear salaries of law firm associates across the country. One
year, a person who wrote an insiders’ blog about law firms
asked new associates to post their salaries on the blog.
Readership of the blog skyrocketed as more associates
posted their salaries. More readers led to more contributors.
Within one week, Hansen said, the blogger had destroyed
the trade publication’s annual report by providing a more
comprehensive, timely and widely read version of the same
information.
blog’s community of readers included national security
insiders and hacking community outsiders. One of the
outsiders submitted a tip about a military officer in Iraq who
had provided WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of classified
documents. ThreatLevel investigated and broke the story
about Chelsea Manning’s (born as Bradley Manning) arrest
for espionage.
Each of these experiences showed Hansen that “journalists
need to evolve to harness, and not compete, with the forces
of networks of social media.”
The way to do this is to think differently about audiences,
sources and story development, Hansen said. Audiences
in this evolved form of journalism are communities of
informed and engaged insiders cultivated by the site.
Audience members become sources or co-creators of
content, as they provide story tips, fact checks and details
that fill in the gaps in evolving stories. Journalists must be
willing to publish what they have at any given moment,
even if couched in “people are speculating” language.
Journalists must continue to publish updates as fresh
information becomes available. It is an “iterative process
of writing, revising, updating” Hansen said. Research
and writing becomes an open process that engages the
audience.
Digital publishing requires its own set of principles, designs,
Hansen’s second experience that led him to believe that
news-gathering had changed was on his first day at CNET — workflows, rules and ideas. The principle of harnessing
the power of the audience is key. Design, as with Medium.
a site that has a large following of tech insiders. One of the
readers sent Hansen an outline of a new product rollout that com, is about readability and beauty, providing a consistent
“magazine” look to all stories — with whitespace, pull
was about to launch. Thanks to the tip, CNET published
quotes and images. Workflows are about the interactive and
the market-moving scoop and earned even greater loyalty
iterative process of story and idea development.
among its growing ranks of reader/contributors.
Hansen’s final experience about the power of online
communities was on Wired.com’s ThreatLevel blog. The
On Medium.com, a provocative essay will inspire other
contributors to further elucidate the underlying ideas. Rules
The Edward R. Murrow Future of Journalism — 2
in digital, and at Medium.com, include the lack of frontend restrictions on content submission and the reliance
on reader complaints to identify questionable content.
Rules also take the form of algorithms that stimulate reader
engagement through content presentation based on
individuals’ stated interests and reading behavior.
Nonprofits tap into alternative revenue streams
When Texas journalist Evan Smith noticed a decline in
political coverage in Texas, he decided a new model
was needed. In 2009, the former editor of Texas Monthly
teamed up with venture capitalist John Thornton to launch
a nonprofit, nonpartisan digital newsroom. As editor-inchief and CEO of the Texas Tribune, Smith taps into private
donations, fundraising, corporate sponsorship, and dozens
of conferences and festivals each year.
He said that support allows the Texas Tribune to publish
award-winning investigative reports in cooperation with
The New York Times and ProPublica. Texas state legislators
now talk about the Tribune’s effect on legislative hearings.
According to Smith, when a reporter is present, the
lawmakers know they will be held accountable.
The goal is to fund journalism that watchdogs Texas
politics and engages and informs the state’s citizens. Texas
traditionally has among the lowest voter-turnout rates in the
country.
“In our case, the problem we’re trying to solve is woefully
low civic engagement,” Smith said.
At a national level — and at 900 “member stations” across
the country — National Public Radio (NPR) is attempting
to engage its traditional audience, while building content
for young demographics. The nonprofit, which relies, in
part, on financial contributions from listeners, has seen its
audience age and tracked a decline in listening. In the era of
on-demand sources, like podcasts and streaming, Jarl Mohn,
NPR’s president and chief executive officer, knows he must
explore all avenues.
“We think we have to be on all the platforms,” Mohn said.
“We have to be where our listeners are.”
But NPR’s reach into digital platforms may risk bypassing
its member stations, as The Washington Post noted last
year. Stations like Seattle’s KUOW have been able to grow
support from listeners, according to its 2015 financial report,
as well as Northwest Public Radio (NWPR), a service of The
Edward R. Murrow College at Washington State University.
Kerry Swanson, station manager of NWPR, said NPR’s digital
expansion can bring more listeners to public radio.
NPR’s audience on digital devices has grown, and the move
to mobile platforms provides an opening for radio to extend
its reach, Mohn said. NPR is looking to capitalize on those
changes, drawing on more than 1,500 radio journalists
across the country.
“We want to be the largest and the best news-gathering and
storytelling newsroom in the United States,” Mohn said.
The challenge for legacy media in the Pacific Northwest
The news outlets competing for consumers bring a plethora
of approaches and backgrounds: technology companies
aggregate news content; nonprofits seek foundation and
consumer support; and traditional media migrate content
from one platform to the next.
“The mobile consumer wants a different type of video
content than what we’re putting on television,” Briggs said,
adding, “The dollars are definitely there.”
Today, the The Seattle Times has more than 5 million unique
viewers to its website each month — the most of any local
news outlet in the state. Now, mobile offers even greater
Those changes force media companies to continually
reach, and new technology means learning new delivery
calibrate how they prepare content for viewers, said Mark
strategies. Kathy Best, who was then the editor of The Seattle
Briggs, Seattle’s KING 5 TV digital director. As a result,
Times, said her newspaper creates video content that is a
media content has been increasingly customized to the
departure from what has traditionally been produced by
platform. Understanding the consumers’ needs on each
platform will determine the financial success of news outlets. regional television newsrooms.
The Edward R. Murrow Future of Journalism — 3
“It was a very different storytelling form,” Best said. “It’s one
of the few advantages that newspapers have — we don’t
have to unlearn old video habits.”
Frank Blethen, publisher and chief executive officer of The
Seattle Times, said that — aside from the technological
challenges — news outlets must stay true to their mission
within American society. Blethen said journalism’s
independence from the forces of government and political
parties must remain. Press independence comes from legal
protections from governmental interference in content
but, also, through localism, Blethen said. Democracy
depends on a press system that is locally owned, locally
edited and locally accountable. Blethen added that media
consolidation has disconnected local news organizations
from local accountability, while producing a press system
lacking in both numbers and diversity — each of which is
crucial to self-government.
Blethen argued that the restoration of locally relevant
and locally dependent news organizations will require
governmental support and protection just as newspapers
in the newly formed United States were supported
and protected. Historically, governmental support for
newspapers included subsidized postal rates, which
encouraged the cheap distribution of information. Support
for local broadcast organizations included the free use of a
public resource: the broadcast wireless spectrum.
The First Amendment protects news organizations from
governmental control of content. Control in broadcasting
takes the form of governmental management of the
broadcast spectrum via licensing and renewal requirements.
License renewals are based on how well the individual
stations meet their public interest obligations. In practice,
however, public interest obligations are minimal, and
license renewals are nearly automatic, according to Blethen.
Blethen said the future of journalism must be based on
the criteria Walter Lippmann outlined in a 1949 speech
commemorating The Des Moines Register and Tribune’s
centennial: a diverse and plentiful system of decentralized,
independent, locally based and locally accountable news
organizations. Blethen did not specify which systems of
governmental support and control are needed to rebuild
the press in America. He made it clear, however, that the
stakes could not be higher — the security of democracy,
itself. n
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