July 2011
From a Present State Analysis by Pew Research Center
Atsushi Shibata
The Pew Research Center in Washington is a nonprofit, nonpartisan institute established in 2004 and is made up of seven projects. The Center positions itself as a “fact tank” rather than a think tank as it is design to conduct analyses based on objective facts without any bias towards or against specific principles or policies. One of the seven projects, the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), annually issue The State of the News Media, which is among the most reliable reports for a better understanding of the latest trend of US media.
The latest 2011 issue reviews the trend of American journalism in 2010. It points out that due to the significant progress in the digital space, organizations that gather and report news are no longer the one which defines the news industry’s future; this job is now done by aggregators and social networks such as Google and Facebook that gather contents and transmit them for specific targets as well as by device makers that provide high-functional information terminals such as Apple. It is also revealed 46% of those surveyed cited the Interned as a news source, the second highest following television, surpassing the “newspaper” (40%) for the first time. Besides, the rapid dissemination of smart phones and tablet PCs is contributing to strengthening the presence of the Internet, with nearly half of respondents acquiring local news via mobile terminal.
In this article, along with a review on the latest PEJ report, the author inserts an interview with Tom Rosenstiel, Director of PEJ, to discuss the current state of US media and the impact of the Internet.