Project for Excellence in Journalism: State of the News Media 2004

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, (Journalism.org), just released a massive study (500 pages) that concludes that the state of journalism is woeful, in terms of product, ethics and business health. One silver lining to the story, however, is the Internet. In its Eight Major Trends overview section, the report notes that in regard to shrinking audiences for other news media:

The only sectors seeing general audience growth today are online, ethnic and alternative media.

The 30-page Online section of the report goes on to note that in September, 2003, 150 million Americans, more than half of the population, went online, the majority of whom used the medium as a news resource. With regard to many online publishers' slow progress towards breaking even, the report notes, "Journalism has traditionally been a slow-growth industry (CNN, for instance, took ten years to turn a profit)." The intro of the online section also notes:

The Internet is the medium having the most success attracting young people to news, something that the older media were having trouble with before the Internet even existed.