Pew Study: Classified Revenue Losing Ground Fast to Online Advertising

Newspaper classified revenue has dropped about 50 percent since 2000 while the number of online adults who have used online classifieds has more than doubled in the past four years, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project survey found.

The April survey reports that 49 percent of Internet users say they have used online classified sites, compared with 22 percent of online adults who had done so in 2005.

Annual revenue for newspapers from classified advertising in 2000 was more than $19.608 billion, but in 2008 it was $9.975 billion, the study found. That represents a 49 percent drop, as represented by the Pew chart above.

The survey also said that on any given day about a tenth of Internet users visit online classified sites, up from 4 percent in 2005.

This data should make all publishers concerned. It may be that Google isn't the only culprit in the demise of print newspapers after all. Classified advertising has long been the lifeblood of print newspapers. The ideas of restricting newspaper website to subscribers could be a short-term fix. But if it classified revenue continues to dwindle, and there's nothing to suggest the bleeding will stop any time soon, it will be tough for newspapers to survive in any form.

Pew Center: 1 in 5 Journalists in 2001 Is Now Out of the Business

Pew Research Center released its 2009 State of the Media Report last week. It's pretty ugly:

Newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23% in the last two years. Some papers are in bankruptcy, and others have lost three-quarters of their value. By our calculations, nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone, and 2009 may be the worst year yet. [A personal note, I'm one of the five. --- Jeff P.]

In local television, news staffs, already too small to adequately cover their communities, are being cut at unprecedented rates; revenues fell by 7% in an election year -- something unheard of -- and ratings are now falling or flat across the schedule. In network news, even the rare programs increasing their ratings are seeing revenues fall.

The ethnic press is also troubled and in many ways is the most vulnerable because so many operations are small.

Only cable news really flourished in 2008, thanks to an Ahab-like focus on the 2008 election, although some of the ratings gains were erased after the election.

Perhaps least noticed yet most important, the audience migration to the internet is now accelerating. The number of Americans who regularly go online for news, jumped 19% in the last two years, according to one survey; in 2008 alone traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27%.

Balanced Media? Pew Center Funded Study Say No Way This Election Year

The perception in the real world is that the mainstream media has been overly kind to Sen. Barack Obama and unduly harsh on Sen. John McCain this election year. Now there is a study by the The Project for Excellence in Journalism, funded by the Pew Research Center, that seems to back that up.

The study reports:

Press treatment of Obama has been somewhat more positive than negative, but not markedly so.

But coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable—and has become more so over time. In the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate, unfavorable stories about McCain outweighed favorable ones by a factor of more than three to one—the most unfavorable of all four candidates—according to the study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

For Obama during this period, just over a third of the stories were clearly positive in tone (36%), while a similar number (35%) were neutral or mixed. A smaller number (29%) were negative.

For McCain, by comparison, nearly six in ten of the stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%), while fewer than two in ten (14%) were positive.

John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei wrote in Politico today about their personal observations:

Politico political editor Charles Mahtesian was e-mailing the other day with a Republican lobbyist who signed off with a plea that sounded more like a taunt: “Keep it balanced.”

A reader e-mailed us with the same sentiment in different language. “Are you f***ing joking! Your bias has stooped to an all-time low. Wait, it will probably get worse as election day nears.” Those asterisks, by the way, are hers, not ours.

And get a load of this one, from someone in Rochester, N.Y., who did not like our analysis of the final presidential debate. “You guys are awfully tough on McCain. There may be some legitimacy to the claim of press bias. Mom.”

We were all set to dismiss Harris’ mother as a crank. Same for VandeHei’s: a conservative dismayed by what she sees as kid-glove treatment of Barack Obama. Then along came a study — funded by the prestigious Pew Research Center, no less — suggesting at first blush, at least, that they may be on to something.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s researchers found that John McCain, over the six weeks since the Republican convention, got four times as many negative stories as positive ones. The study found six out of 10 McCain stories were negative.

What’s more, Obama had more than twice as many positive stories (36 percent) as McCain — and just half the percentage of negative (29 percent).

You call that balanced?

Later in the story, the writers justify Politico's reporting by saying that Obama is doing better, so he should be getting better coverage.

There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site — when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring — has made us cringe.

As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.

Politico was not included in the Pew study. But our researcher Alex Burns pulled out his highlighter pen and did his own study of Politico's October stories last week: 110 stories advanced a narrative that was more favorable to Obama than McCain. Sixty-nine did the opposite.

But isn't that a chicken-and-the-egg argument? Did Obama rise in the polls in October because of all the positive press or did he get all the positive press because of his rise in the polls?