Amid the daily obituaries for the newspaper business, where bankruptcies and layoffs have become a grim daily routine, there's been comparatively little notice that television news confronts many of the same problems: declining audiences, aging demographics, fierce competition from new digital media and a broken business model.
''Everything needs to be deconstructed...Everything is going to be changing.''
Broadcast television's evening news shows have lost 27 million viewers, more than half their audience, since 1980, and the numbers get smaller each year. The drop is even more pronounced among young viewers. ''There's a paradigm shift going on as to the distribution of information,'' Spero Canton, regional director of communications for Comcast cable, warns, citing surveys that show under-30 viewers turning to the Internet for news.
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