NewsNetNebraska

Welcome to the NewsNetNebraska information site.

NewsNetNebraska is a Web site produced by students in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

UNL journalism students are using their creative skills and talents as they learn to explore and harness the convergent powers of multi-media (print, broadcast, Internet) by contributing to NewsNetNebraska.

The convergence skills UNL students are acquiring today will help them in their future careers as journalists. Likewise, COJMC constantly seeks new ways to study, teach and learn about new convergence techniques.

Latest News:

The latest research by the Project for Excellence in Journalism identified six new energing trends that are transforming journalism.

This year: 2006

1. The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories. As the number of places delivering news proliferates, the audience for each tends to shrink and the number of journalists in each organization is reduced. At the national level, those organizations still have to cover the big events. Thus we tend to see more accounts of the same handful of stories each day. And when big stories break, they are often covered in a similar fashion by general-assignment reporters working with a limited list of sources and a tight time-frame. Such concentration of personnel around a few stories, in turn, has aided the efforts of newsmakers to control what the public knows.

2. The species of newspaper that may be most threatened is the big-city metro paper that came to dominate in the latter part of the 20th century. The top three national newspapers in the U.S. suffered no circulation losses in 2005. The losses at smaller newspapers, in turn, appeared to be modest. It was the big-city metros that suffered the biggest circulation drops and imposed the largest cutbacks in staff. Those big papers are trying to cover far-flung suburbs and national and regional news all at the same time — trying to be one-stop news outlets for large audiences. In part, they are being supplanted by niche publications serving smaller communities and targeted audiences. Yet our content studies suggest the big metros are the news organizations most likely to have the resources and aspirations to act as watchdogs over state, regional and urban institutions, to identify trends, and to define the larger community public square. It is unlikely that small suburban dailies or weeklies will take up that challenge. Moreover, while we see growth in alternative weeklies and the ethnic press, many small suburban dailies have shrunk.

3. At many old-media companies, though not all, the decades-long battle at the top between idealists and accountants is now over. The idealists have lost. The troubles of 2005, especially in print, dealt a further blow to the fight for journalism in the public interest. "If you argue about public trust today, you will be dismissed as an obstructionist and a romantic," the editor of one of the country's major papers told us privately. An executive at one of the three broadcast networks told senior staff members in a meeting last year that "the ethical anvil has been lifted," meaning the producers could dispense with traditional notions of journalistic propriety.

4. That said, traditional media do appear to be moving toward technological innovation — finally . In earlier reports, the real investment and creativity in new technology appeared to be coming mostly from non-news organizations like Google. Traditional news outfits, in practice if not in rhetoric, treated the Internet as a platform to repurpose old material. While the evidence is sketchy and the efforts are frustrated by newsroom cutbacks, in 2005 we saw signs that the pattern was beginning to change. A big reason was that much of the revenue growth in these companies is now coming from online (and from niche products such as youth newspapers). In network television, for instance, viewers of ABC News can now watch an evening newscast from that network online three and a half hours before one is broadcast on television. In print, various papers announced reorganizations of online operations. An internal memo at the Los Angeles Times was fairly typical, calling for "a different kind of online news operation, one that recognizes the changing expectations of readers." In that transition, several big questions remain unanswered. One is whether younger audiences care anything about these traditional news brands. Another is, even if these legacy media do finally try to move online seriously, can they change their culture, or will they succumb to the natural tendency to favor their traditional platforms?

5. The new challengers to the old media, the aggregators, are also playing with limited time. When it comes to news, what companies like Google and Yahoo are aggregating and selling is the work of others — the very same old media they are taking revenue away from. The more they succeed, the faster they erode the product they are selling, unless the economic model is radically changed. Already there are rumblings. One thing to watch for in 2006 is whether old-media content producers demand that Google News begin to pay them for content. Another option for the aggregators is to begin to produce their own news, and already we are seeing baby steps; in 2005, Yahoo announced it would hire some journalists, but the effort is still minimal. Can the new rivals become more than technology companies? And if they do, will they have more than rhetorical allegiance to the values of public-interest journalism?

6. The central economic question in journalism continues to be how long it will take online journalism to become a major economic engine, and if it will ever be as big as print or television.
If the online revenues at newspapers continue to grow at the current rate — an improbable 33% a year — they won't reach levels equivalent with print until 2017 (assuming print grows just 3% a year). Realistically, even with the lower delivery costs online, it will be years before the Internet rivals old media economics, if it ever does. Fledgling efforts to get consumers to pay for online content edged forward in 2005, but only marginally. All this only adds to the likelihood that the next battleground will be producers of old media challenging Internet providers and Internet aggregators to begin compensating them for content, the model that exists in cable.