Media Industry

Summary of Findings Anna Nicole Smith’s death and the bizarre aftermath continue to fascinate a significant segment of the American public and the mainstream media. During the second full week of coverage of the story, interest remained steady and coverage actually increased – as portions of the legal proceedings concerning her body were carried live […]

If Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report were hoping that 2006 would offset poor advertising numbers in 2005, they will be disappointed. The year-end figures are now in and they show that the number of ad pages at the three big newsmagazines barely inched up. The magazine industry generally, indeed, is suffering something of a malaise.

More than three years ago, in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, the New York Times announced it would hire its first-ever public editor or ombudsman to act as an independent monitor of the paper. Now a published report raises the issue of whether the Times is thinking about eliminating the position. Such a decision would likely reverberate throughout the newspaper industry. What are Times officials thinking?

It’s hard to know whether the universe of satellite radio companies is about to be cut in half. Is Sirius Radio boss Mel Karmazin’s talk about a merger between his company and XM Radio simply chatter or a prelude to a deal? Any union of the two intensely competitive satellite radio services would have to pass regulatory muster. Here’s a look at how the two satellite radio services stack up.

There’s a battle brewing over whether the government should regulate the use of video news releases—prepackaged segments often produced for commercial clients—that look like news reports and sometimes appear on local TV newscasts. This PEJ backgrounder examines the dispute between television industry representatives and their critics.

According to the Student Press Law Center, large numbers of college papers are being stolen from racks and newsstands at an alarming rate this semester. In most cases, the perpetrators seem intent in quashing stories about controversial or unpopular subjects. And one advocate for student journalists thinks it’s time for college administrators to crack down on the problem.

Suddenly, local ownership of newspapers is making something of a comeback. Since the breakup of Knight Ridder last year, and the threat of more cutbacks in newsrooms, private ownership groups and individuals have emerged in cities from Boston to Los Angeles wanting to buy the local paper. Who are they? A rundown.

The new numbers released this week were bad enough for a newspaper industry that lost nearly 3% of its circulation in the last year. But when you factor in subscriber discounts, the economic picture gets worse. And the industry’s efforts to compensate for decreasing circulation with increasing online readership may not stand up to scrutiny.

Nielsen Media Research, the gold standard in the TV ratings industry, has announced that it will release numbers in December that show how many people actually sit through commercials on TV. That new yardstick will affect how much advertisers will pay to air those ads and will very possibly alter the economics of the TV marketplace. And not everyone in the TV business is happy about this.

The new numbers for the newspaper industry are out, and they show another disheartening drop of nearly 3% in total average daily circulation. But the picture may be more complicated than the first impression. Not all papers are hurting, and many companies have trimmed questionable circulation. The industry also is boasting that, when online readers are included, overall readership is growing.