US news industry sees big revenue loss

US news media revenues have tumbled by roughly a third since2006 amid a shift todigitalmedia,researchers said Thursday.The Pew Research Center estimated annual revenues supporting print, broadcast andonline journalism have slipped to between $63 billion and $65 billion, based on2012-2013 data.That compared with $94 billion to $95 billion in 2006, the Pew researchers said.The analysis gleaned from Pew's annual survey of the news media underscored themassive changes in the industry.The data showed "advertising dollars declining and audience payments, in the formof subscriptions, for example, comprising a bigger share," said research associate Jesse Holcomb.Between 2006 and 2012, about 17,000 full-time newspaper newsroom jobs were lost,based on figures from the American Society of News Editors.The industry has had to become less reliant on advertising as those revenuesdecline."In 2006, print and digital advertising accounted for fully 82 percent of all knownrevenue tied to professional newsgathering," Holcomb said."Today, advertising still accounts for a majority of news revenue, but amounts to 69percent of the revenue pie, more than half of which comes from the newspaperindustry whose ad revenue declined 55 percent from 2006 to 2012."Holcomb said newspaper circulation revenue showed an uptick in 2012 of aroundfive percent after five years of decline, in part due to "paywalls" or digitalsubscriptions.Some news organizations are using new models for revenue, getting funding fromfoundation grants, events and digital marketing services, as well as directinvestments from venture capital."Few industry analysts expect the advertising revenue that's been lost in recent yearsto come flooding back to news organizations," Holcomb said."While audience revenue is becoming more critical to the business, it cannot fullycompensate for the loss of ad dollars. "That is why most conversations about news sustainability come back to 'all of theabove' -- cultivating a variety of revenue streams, including non-traditional ones,and experimenting with new ways of paying for journalism.