The Decline of Local News on the Net?
August 17, 2007
A week after Google made headlines by opening up Google News to commentary, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University is weighing in with an interesting study: Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet.
The center looked at traffic to 160 news Web sites over the last year and found overall traffic leveling off. But there were some telling distinctions. Newspapers with national brands, like the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today, saw their audiences grow, on average, 10 percent over the year. Most other newspapers lost visitors.
In television, brand-name networks like CNN, MSNBC Fox and the traditional TV networks grew by 30 percent on average. Local TV and radio stations grew also, but more slowly.
And blowing everyone away were news aggregators like Yahoo News, Google News and smaller sites like Topix.net and Digg.com.
From the report:
The Web particularly threatens daily newspapers. They were among the first to post news on the Internet but their initial advantage has all but disappeared in the face of increased competition from electronic media and non-traditional providers. The Internet is also a larger threat to local news organizations than those with national reputations. Because it reduces the influence of geography on people’s choice of a news source, the Internet inherently favors “brand names”—those relatively few news organizations that readily come to mind by Americans everywhere when they seek news on the Internet.
Nancy Palmer, executive director of the Shorenstein Center, said the decline of audiences for local papers and television stations is a potentially significant loss. “People need to be involved in their communities. If the way they are finding their news leapfrogs their community to someplace they don’t live, like New York or Los Angeles or Washington, how are they going to know what is going on in their town? Being a good citizen is all about having a solid base of knowledge. That is hard to do when all your news comes from a city you may have never even been to.”