Media Deathwatch

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The CBS television network is discussing "a deal to outsource some of its news-gathering operations to CNN," reports Tim Arango. (The network denies the report.) The discussions reflect "a strategic shift in the face of changing market forces by the network that is widely credited as having invented television news. ... While broadcast television as a medium is in decline because new platforms -- the Internet, mobile devices -- are fragmenting audiences, the problems at CBS News are more acute. While overall evening news viewership across the three networks declined 5 percent last year, CBS’s fell 13 percent." But newspapers are feeling even more heat, according to Eric Alterman. "Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years," he writes. "Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared." Alterman worries that the decline of traditional media and the rise of citizen journalism are creating "a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism." (Meanwhile, work for internet journalists has become so demanding that the New York Times says it may be killing them.)