old media loss no gain for new media

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FACTS, FIGURES

Newsroom budgets are being slashed - and old media loss does not mean new media gain.

Since 2000, newspapers have cut 30 per cent, or $1.6bn, from newsroom budgets, leaving only $4.4bn (€3.2bn), according to a joint study by the Pew Research Centre and the Poynter Institute.

The reason this is a loss for new as well as old media comes from the same centre. Notes the Financial Times, in the same article:

new media " ... concentrating on analysis and debate ... are increasingly dependent on a shrinking base of reported journalism. Pew's analysis of more than 1m blogs and social media sites discovered that 80 per cent of links were to traditional US media sites."

Emphasis added. That effectively means the new media boom is four-fifths sourced from centuries of journalism tradition, calling into question the whole notion of "new" media. Similar claims were made for radio and television.

LINK

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/aecc08c6-2fd2-11df-9153-00144feabdc0.html

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