The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s 2008 State of the News Media report on American journalism contains some interesting, updated information and statistics. If you have a chance to digest the whole report, I think you’ll agree that it’s amazing how much journalism has changed over the past 14 years. Since the start of the commercial Web, the news media is definitely among the top industries impacted the most by the onset of digital and new media. If you don’t have a chance to read it all, here are some of the highlights from my perspective;

• more than 75% of American adults are now regular users of the Web;
• the top online news sites by visits continue to be Yahoo News, MSNBC, CNN and AOL News;
• news organizations appear to finally be embracing new technology, aggressively adding new features to attract audiences and remain relevant;
• citizen journalism is rapidly increasing with nearly 1,500 so-called sites by the end of last year, and professional journalists are calling on them more than ever to inform their reporting;
• citizen-driven news sites are not only sometimes countering what appears in mainstream media, but at times beating them to the story;
• Wikipedia now includes more than 2 million articles, and last year’s shooting at Virginia Tech evaluated the site to a prominent location for breaking news when continual updates by its editors led to more than 750,000 visits over the first 48 hours;
• ‘hybrid journalism’ that combines professional writers, citizens and new technology appears to be the wave of the future;
• despite the continued growth of blogs, most Americans who read them do so for entertainment or information sharing, rather than news;
• more than 90 percent of the top 100 newspapers in the country now include blogs; and,
• there is a growing backlash by advertisers angered by the lack of unified measurement standards after more than a decade of conflicting data and traffic analysis.

Mike Spataro