{"id":88796,"date":"2014-03-26T00:01:47","date_gmt":"2014-03-26T05:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/2014\/03\/26\/the-growth-in-digital-reporting\/"},"modified":"2024-04-14T04:18:19","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T09:18:19","slug":"the-growth-in-digital-reporting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/journalism\/2014\/03\/26\/the-growth-in-digital-reporting\/","title":{"rendered":"The Growth in Digital Reporting"},"content":{"rendered":"

At a time when print newsrooms continue to shed jobs, thousands of journalists are now working in the growing world of native digital news\u2014at small non-profits like Charlottesville Tomorrow, big commercial sites like The Huffington Post and other content outlets, like BuzzFeed, that have moved into original news reporting. In a significant shift in the editorial ecosystem, most of these jobs have been created in the past half dozen years, and many have materialized within the last year alone, according to this new report on shifts in reporting power.<\/p>\n\n

Since the fall of 2013, there has been a dramatic and conspicuous migration of high-profile journalists to digital news ventures. In October, Yahoo hired high-profile New York Times tech columnist David Pogue, who was followed a month later by Times political writer Matt Bai. In late October, former Times assistant managing editor Jim Roberts became chief content officer at Mashable\u2019s growing news operation.<\/p>\n\n

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Also in October eBay founder Pierre Omidyar announced that his digital startup, First Look Media, would be spearheaded by the Guardian\u2019s Glenn Greenwald, famed for publishing Edward Snowden\u2019s leaked NSA documents. And BuzzFeed brought on Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Schoofs (previously at ProPublica, The Wall Street Journal and The Village Voice) to run a new investigative team. The pace picked up again in January 2014, when the Washington Post\u2019s Ezra Klein took his Project X journalism concept (now known as Vox.com) to Vox Media. And in February, former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller announced that he would become editor of The Marshall Project, a new nonprofit focusing on criminal justice issues.<\/p>\n\n

All this movement is merely the tip of the iceberg for a digital native news universe that includes not only dozens of highly publicized national and international organizations, but also hundreds of smaller digital news entities, mainly filling targeted news niches. And it is occurring at a time when print newsrooms continue to shed jobs and when local television news jobs, while holding steady, often are being stretched thinner to produce more content than in the past.<\/p>\n\n

The Pew Research Center made a first effort to put a number on the shifting journalism landscape by using interviews and multiple data bases to account for editorial staffing at 30 major digital news organizations and 438 smaller ones. Those 468 outlets\u2014the vast majority of which started in the past decade\u2014have produced almost 5,000 full-time editorial jobs.[1. That 5,000 figure reflects editorial employees with one exception. Vice Media\u2019s list of 1,100 full-time staffers includes both editorial and non-editorial employees.]\u00a0 While that does not represent a complete census of a digital news world, it is a robust a sample as may be possible from a variety of credible sources.<\/p>\n\n

Still, purely in terms of bodies, the growth in new digital full-time journalism jobs seems to have compensated for only a modest percentage of the lost legacy jobs in newspaper newsrooms alone in the past decade. From 2003 to 2012, the American Society of News Editors documented a loss of 16,200 full-time newspaper newsroom jobs while Ad Age recorded a decline of 38,000 magazine jobs, which includes all jobs for the entire consumer magazine sector. Such job cuts continued in 2013 and early 2014\u2014at such big organizations as the Tribune Co. and Time Inc.<\/p>\n\n

The accelerating shift of talent to digital news jobs has significant implications for the U.S. news consumer. Many digital outlets are working to fill reporting gaps created by the strain on resources at traditional outlets\u2014from niche topic areas like education to international coverage to local community news to investigative journalism. One of the larger cohorts\u2014the digital investigative outlets\u2014ranges from the Pulitzer Prize winning ProPublica to the 73 digital news operations in the five-year-old nonprofit Investigative News Network.<\/p>\n\n

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Other digital news producers, especially those that have emerged most recently at the national level, are aimed at\u00a0 cultivating new forms of storytelling\u2014from video<\/a>\u00a0to crowdsourcing to new documentary styles\u2014and new ways to connect with audiences, often younger ones. A number of legacy outlets are also experimenting with new storytelling and data visualization techniques.\u00a0 But much of the innovation is coming from the digital native sector, with many outlets focused on hiring people with skills and voices \u201cbeing nurtured online,\u201d as one editor put it.<\/p>\n

Some of this coverage, particularly at the local level, can be inexpensive to produce and can require only modest resources. But the question of whether digital news outlets can ultimately\u00a0 replenish the loss of legacy jobs and reporting resources hinges on creating the kind of successful business model or models that have proved elusive. Many native digital outlets are still unprofitable and there is a finite supply of billionaires willing to spend $250 million on a startup. Most analysts say this growing investment in digital news<\/a> \u00a0does not mean the industry has figured out a consistent formula for monetizing that news.<\/p>\n

Yet even with concerns about the bottom line, many see the rise of digital newsrooms as a significant moment in a transforming media landscape. Not long ago, BuzzFeed content was viewed by some as frivolous click bait. But in a recent speech to Kansas University journalism students, former Wall Street managing editor Paul Steiger mentioned BuzzFeed as \u201cthe kind of team I\u2019d want to join,\u201d if he were embarking on a journalism career. Many mainstream journalists may not have even heard of Vox Media before Klein\u2019s Project X alighted there. But when news surfaced last month about 500 across-the-board job cuts at the Time Inc. magazine empire, Slate\u2019s Dave Weigel tweeted, perhaps only half-jokingly: \u201c500 more applications for Vox.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis represents something completely new in the journalism ecosystem,\u201d says First Look Media executive editor Eric Bates, who went there in November after a decade at Rolling Stone magazine. \u201cIt\u2019s a shifting not only of editorial resources, but a shifting of editorial expertise.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Have additional data on digital news outlets? Please share it with us to help inform the research.<\/p>\n

Send Data<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The data Pew Research used to track the shifting job market in news came from several sources. The staffing data for the 30 larger native digital organizations came primarily from interviews\u2014conducted both via phone and email\u2014with representatives of 28 of the 30 organizations. The staffing information for the remaining two outlets came from media accounts. The staffing data from the universe of smaller sites was derived by merging five lists totaling more than 500 digital news organizations. That figure that was whittled down to 438 when duplicate outlets and sites that were not applicable or about which little data could be found were discarded. The staff numbers for the individual sites came from survey results, information collected by those compiling the lists and staffing levels listed on outlet websites. The job numbers from legacy media outlets came from data compiled by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Ad Age, the Radio Television Digital News Association and Hofstra University and Pew Research data.<\/p>\n

Among the findings in the study:<\/p>\n