Mainstream media meltdown!

Salon reporting:
Newspapers will never be the same. But what happens to democracy if the Web business model can't fund journalism?
By Robert W. McChesney

Excerpted from "Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy"

The decline of journalism over the past generation, which has accelerated in the last decade, would be a less pressing concern if the existing news media were making a successful digital transition, or if the Internet was spawning a credible replacement. The evidence suggests on balance that emerging digital news media are hav­ing a negligible effect upon the crisis in journalism. It certainly is not due to a lack of effort, as commercial news media have been obsessed with the Internet since the 1990s; they understood that it was going to be the future.
For traditional news media, it has been a very rocky digital road. A 2012 report based on proprietary data and in-depth interviews with executives at a dozen major news media companies found “the shift to replace losses in print ad revenue with new digital revenue is taking longer and proving more difficult than executives want and at the current rate most newspapers con­tinue to contract at alarming speed.” For every seven dollars of print advertis­ing lost there is only one new dollar of Internet ad revenues; the executives said it “remains an uphill and existential struggle.” The newspaper indus­try’s percentage of overall Internet advertising fell to 10 percent in 2011, an all-time low; it had been 17 percent in 2003. “There’s no doubt we’re going out of business right now,” one executive said. By all accounts, the “clock continues to tick” for old media to find a way to survive online in the inexo­rable transition to the Internet....
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/03/mainstream_media_meltdown/