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Mar 27 / King Kaufman

Wall Street Journal finds some positives in annual Pew report on news business

The Pew Research Journalism Project released its State of the News Media 2014 report Wednesday, and if you’re interested in where the content business is headed, it’s worth digging in to.

Disclosure: I haven’t even scratched the surface of it myself.

Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal has, though, and he found Seven Reasons For Optimism About the News Business. Note: The story is behind a paywall. If you’re not a subscriber, you can try googling the headline, then clicking through.

Bleacher Report participated in the survey by providing some employment figures. Murray cites “a spate of hiring in the digital world” as one of those reasons for optimism: “Pew counted nearly 5,000 full-time editorial jobs in 468 digital-only news organizations in the U.S. That doesn’t offset the 16,000 jobs lost in traditional newsrooms, but it’s a start.”

Other reasons:

  • Smart money is coming in to the business, including Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post and Pierre Omidyar starting a media company
  • The rise of mobile device use is leading to increased news consumption
  • Young people are using social networks to get their news
  • Online video news is growing, which may offset some of the losses in television news
  • Digital tools are creating new ways to engage with users—such as the dialect quiz that was the most popular thing on the New York Times website in 2013
  • Paywalls are providing some new revenue

Here’s Pew’s own Overview of the report and 8 Key Takeaways about Social Media and News. Dig in.