It's just so easy to get diverted onto side trails and to wander among Elysian Fields of anything but education policy. Not that I'm not enjoying this excursion into the quagmires of policy and legislation. But, hmmmm, quagmires vs. Elysian Fields should say something.
So -- back to the in's and out's of this study of second-tier media. We've issued a cautionary caveat about the tangled web of media ownership. And we've noted what's out as far as this study is concerned: obvious first-tier national and local news organizations, local news organizations without a Web presence, other-than-English news outlets, and one online blog about local education but written by reporters for a first-tier local news organization.
So what's in?
In order to answer that question -- we're getting there, I promise -- we need to look at how the news media landscape has shifted over the last several years. Specifically, we need to look at some upstart new players.
The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism issued its annual report on American Journalism recently. The State of the News Media 2011 made note of a couple of very interesting developments in the area of online news sources which, to no one's surprise, continue to claim a larger percentage of news followers.
The changes are two-fold. First, the players are changing. It's not just traditional news organizations putting up Web sites and sharing news from print to Web and back again. Second, the delivery substructure is changing so drastically that the relationship between news organization and news consumer is convoluted and tenuous.
In fact, the Pew report said, "It may be than in the digital realm the news industry is no longer in control of its own future."
Why?
Mainly because the behind-the-scenes online conduit components are not owned by the newspapers themselves. Print newspapers print their own papers, or hire a printer to do so, and hire delivery people to drop them on people's doorsteps or to fill vending machines. News broadcasters generally broadcast over frequencies owned by their company.
But online distribution is more complicated. As the Pew report points out, device makers, software developers, news aggregators, and social networks each have their own platform requirements and rules. And, while the end user, i.e. the news consumer, doesn't usually pay for news except when he/she buys a new computer (not seen in the same light as buying a news subscription), each of these links in the distribution news chain cost news organizations money.
Of more concern, the news consumer may access the news by clicking on a link on a social networking site -- but the link may have originated with a friend of a friend of a friend in Outer Mongolia. Indirect links make it almost impossible for news organizations to track audience data, which they use to target content and advertising to specific audiences and which is the commodity they sell to advertisers.
The results? The Pew report says, "Financially, the tipping point also has come. When the final tally is in, online ad revenue in 2010 is projected to surpass print newspaper ad revenue for the first time. The problem for news is that by far the largest share of that online ad revenue goes to non-news sources, particularly to aggregators."
Here's the kicker. Those news aggregators -- Yahoo, AOL, Bloomberg, and others -- are developing their own news organizations. Some of them can be considered second-tier news organizations -- for the time being, at least. Another ten years and, who knows?
(See, I told you I hadn't forgotten where we were headed!)
So -- here's what I'm including in this particular review:
Second-tier national media sources:
Second-tier state and local (Tampa Bay area, i.e., Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties) media sources:
- Clearwater Gazette
- Creative Loafing Tampa
- Florida Catholic
- Florida Courier
- Florida Sentinel Bulletin
- Jewish Press
- Khaas Baat
- The News
- Tampa Bay Business Journal
- Tampa Bay Newspapers
- The Weekly Challenger
- Bay News 9
- WEDU
- WPDS-TV
Whew!
Who are all these people?
Stay tuned!
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