WASHINGTON: The good news for traditional US news organisations? Their websites are popular. The bad news? Few news consumers click on ads and hardly any are prepared to pay for news online. These and other findings are contained in a “State of the Media” report released today by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The report examines the potential of online revenue models for traditional news outlets and also the constrasting news agendas of the mainstream press and bloggers and social media. According to the report,

newspaper ad revenue fell by 26 per cent last year US newspapers are spending $1.6 billion less annually on reporting and editing than they did a decade ago. Network television news division resources have been cut by more than half since the late 1980s and ad revenue was down eight per cent last year. Local television newsrooms have shed six per cent of their workforce in the past two years, the report said, and ad revenue was 22 per cent lower last year.

Radio ad revenue fell 22 per cent in 2009 compared with the previous year and magazine ad revenue was down 17 per cent. Overall online ad revenue also dropped in 2009 — by five per cent — and only cable television news channels did not suffer declining revenue and layoffs last year.

“Last year was significantly harder on the news industry even than

2008, and the report predicts still more cutbacks in 2010, even with an improving economy,” PEJ director Tom Rosenstiel said. The websites of traditional news organisations continue to garner the most traffic — at least for now, the report found.

Using data from Nielsen NetRatings, it said that of the 4,600 news sites Nielsen tracks, the top seven per cent get 80 percent of the traffic and

their collected number of unique visitors grow 9.25 per cent last year.

Of the top 200 news sites, “legacy media” account for 67 per cent. Thirteen percent are aggregators such as Google News while 14 per cent are online-only sites that produce original content. “Legacy media still make up the majority of the most popular destinations, although each year newly created websites are joining the list,” the report said.

It noted that online ad revenue at US newspapers has failed to keep pace with the steady erosion of print ad revenue. Seventy-nine per cent of the online news consumers surveyed said they never or only rarely clicked on an online ad. “They don’t mind them. They simply ignore them,” the report said. Seventy-one per cent of Internet users, or 53 per cent of all American adults, get news online, according to the report.

Only 35 per cent of online news consumers said they have a “favorite” news website, and of this group,

considered the most likely to pay

for content, only 19 per cent said

they would pay to visit their

favorite site. “Because so few online news consumers even have a favorite site this translates to only seven

per cent of all people who get

news online having a favorite online news source that they say they would pay for,” the report said.

Currently, the only major US newspaper successfully charging

readers for full access online is The Wall Street Journal although Journal owner Rupert Murdoch has announced plans to erect pay walls around all of his newspapers.

The New York Times has also said it will begin charging on the Web in 2011. On the news agendas of the mainstream press and bloggers, the report found that the top linked-to news story among bloggers matched the top story in the mainstream press just 13 out of 47 weeks studied.

On Twitter, the top story was the same just four of the 27 weeks

studied. Traditional media continues, however, continues to play a large

role in the blogosphere and legacy outlets like newspapers and broadcast networks accounted for 80 per cent of all linked-to stories on blogs, the report found.