Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet

Little did I realize reading Joseph Schumpeter as a political theory major in college that his classic "creative destruction" coinage would be applied some 35 years later to news on the Internet.  Thomas E. Patterson has prepared a report with this title from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.  It was brought to my attention by John Bracken, who has written two posts citing data from the report (on PBS.org and on NPR.org).  Patterson writes:

... This report examines trends in Internet-based news traffic for the purpose of peering into the future of news in America.  In light of the continuing migration of people to online news and the evolving nature of Web technology, our assessments are necessarily preliminary and speculative.  Precise judgments are also made difficult by the range of Internet-based news outlets.  Thousands of siges offer news and news-related content.  Nevertheless, there are emerging patterns.  Like the cable and broadcast revolutions, the Internet revolution is redistributing the news audience in ways beneficial to some news outlets and harmful to others. ...

Link:  Kennedy School of Government [pdf].  NB: The comparative graph is from usage of each site by people who have elected to have the Alexa Toolbar installed in their browsers, so isn't necessarily representative of all users.  --Dennis

Comments

[blyons]

Dennis,
I found this report v interesting. Their methodology used
a tool from a company called compete.com. I ran our own site's
numbers (snapshot of uniques from april '06 and '07) with the compete.com tool and came up with a result (an increase, actually) that was within two percentage points of the same comparison when based on our log data. So this report's methodology seemed to track reasonably well with our own metrics.

As for Alexa comparisons--their sampling is skewed towards young geeky users, and given that, is an interesting metric as a kind of forward indicator. See what happens when you compare (with Alexa) the biggest market's PTV sites versus their Pubradio sites, or for that matter against any site with active audio streaming. Audio streams significantly boost traffic and reach with Alexa's sample.
bl