Not Exactly a News Flash: Journalism in Trouble

It's not exactly news that the journalism business is in trouble. But just how much of a hit the nation's old-school daily print publications have taken is news.

Here are highlights from the just released Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media 2010:

—Over the last three years, about 15,000 full-time reporting and editing jobs have been lost. Today, about 40,000 journalists hold these positions, which means that newsrooms have shrunk by 27 percent.

—The newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000.

—Newspapers have lost 16.9 percent circulation in three years and 25.6 percent since 2000.

—Online advertising revenues for newspaper sites declined by about 10 percent in 2009.

—Only about 35 percent of online news consumers said they had a favorite site that they go back to daily. Of this group, only 19 percent said they'd be willing to pay for news online while the rest said they'd look for other free sites to replace their favorites if those sites decided to charge for access.

—Seventy nine percent of online consumers rarely, if ever, click on an web ad.

—Among news magazines (the publications studied were Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, The Week and The Economist), circulation fell 8.2 percent—nearly four times the rate of decline for consumer magazines over all. Taken as a group, the six news magazines sold 19 percent fewer ad pages in 2009 than in 2008.

—One winner in the survey was cable news. Daytime viewership rose 16 percent while the median prime-time audience rose 7 percent. Profits rose by 9 percent to $1.16 billion on revenues that increased 5 percent to $2.76 billion.

For more results from the survey from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, click here.