Note to Readers

I added a blogroll to my website this week (see the left hand column) and am considering adding advertising. As many readers of GoozNews know, I spent many years in the news business. For me, it wasn't just a career choice. I am and continue to be a fervent believer in the role that independent news gathering plays in our society. It is crucial to any well-functioning democracy, and I cannot help but think that the decline of the quality of the mainstream press in recent years is in part responsible for the sorry state of our political and economic affairs.

The media's poor performance on issues ranging from Monica-gate to the War in Iraq can't be blamed entirely on its declining economic fortunes. But it sure didn't help. As newsroom budgets shrank, the longer-term, investigative projects that reporters like me used to specialize in were the first to go. Entire walks of life went uncovered, or became just one of three or four beats on beleaguered reporters' plates. Reporters without time or resources to follow a story become easy marks for spinmeisters and propagandists, and far too many fell into the trap of simply regurgitating without evaluation what they were told.

Will the press snap back with a change in administration? The inescapable fact is that the economic model that historically provided employment for the vast majority of reporters is this country is collapsing. Readers are migrating to free websites on the Internet (see this post from last week) in ever greater numbers, yet the jobs are not following them there.

Here's some job statistics I looked up this morning that you may find interesting:

A decade ago, newspapers employed 420,000 people. Today, that's down to 344,000, which includes a loss of 15,000 jobs in the past year alone.

Broadcasting employed 314,000 people in 1997 and employs 337,000 today. But the number of jobs in television and radio is still below its 2001 peak of 345,000.

And the Internet? In 1997 there were just 22,000 jobs in that sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now there are 45,000 jobs. That doubling is good news, but it still makes up for just one in three jobs lost in the newspaper industry, despite the huge profits and stock valuations of aggregators like Google and Yahoo.

As many of you know, for many years I have supplemented my regular jobs as a professor of journalism and, more recently, at the Center for Science in the Public Interest by doing freelance writing, some of which later (when contractual obligations allowed) appeared here. But that kind of work, like full-time work in the field, is getting harder to find. And what is available pays less than before as publishers pare their freelance budgets and/or take advantage of a desperate workforce.

In one sense, I am part of the problem. I don't want to break my arm patting myself on the back, but I like to think that the quality of the writing on this blog and, more importantly, its analysis offers real value to readers. Indeed, I have been pleasantly surprised to watch readership grow month after month almost without fail since I began a few years ago. This site now gets about 15,000 different individuals visiting each month, many of them multiple times. While that's nothing compared to major blogs that cover politics or culture, it is quite respectable for an independent site that focuses largely on health care.

But this is part of the problem. Newspapers, news magazines, and other general circulation periodicals were the aggregators of old. A million circulation newspaper was in reality a composite of audiences: a third of readers liked the news section, a third liked sports, there were sub-audiences for cultural coverage, business, health, and features. Now those sub-audiences have fragmented. They can create a home page or RSS feed that brings in a dozen sites that reflect their interests. Yet none of these aggregators hire journalists -- at least not yet.

Which brings me to a decision point. Unlike many of my competitors with health care-oriented blogs, I do not work for a think tank, work fulltime for a media outlet, or run a consulting business. I will always want to freelance for some publications. But allowing advertising on this site will enable me to devote more of my freelance time and energy to reporting pieces that will appear exclusively on this website. I'm leaning in that direction. What do you think?

Posted by gooznews at November 10, 2007 12:20 PM