Three Things for July 8, 2021
From the Public Impact Group
This is Three Things for public media leaders for July 8, 2021.
The annual State of the News Media from Pew Research Center was released just before the July 4th holiday, giving journalism data-nerds the long weekend to evaluate this deep dive into audience, economics, and newsroom investments from various sectors of the U.S. news media ecosystem.
It’s a lot to unpack.
So for this shortened Independence Day week, we’ll devote all Three Things to look at this research.
THING ONE: State of the News Media - Public Broadcasting
The Public Broadcasting portion of the State of the News Media research takes a top-line look at the combined broadcast audience for the top NPR news stations, the number of stations (defined by Pew as “Broadcasting reach”) for NPR and PRX1, and audience for the NPR news app and the NPR One app.
Viewership of the PBS NewsHour is also included in the study noting an 18% increase in viewership over the past year with a nightly audience of 1.2 million viewers. Unfortunately, the latest data from the State of the News Media study for the three network newscasts is from 2018. Still, other reports using 2020 data from Nielsen showed that the three network newscasts also saw substantial growth in 2020.
Back to radio, and the trend is, not surprisingly, less favorable. The total weekly listenership (Cume audience) of the top 20 NPR News stations was about 9 million in 2020, down 9% from 20192.
While much of the audience loss of nearly a million listeners a week in 2020 can be attributed in part to lifestyle changes that occurred from the pandemic, it doesn’t hide the fact that the weekly broadcast audience for these twenty stations dropped by more than a million listeners during the preceding two years after peaking in 2017. What’s more, this occurred during a relentless (and sometimes exhausting) national news cycle.
One of the interesting aspects of the public broadcasting section of the study was a chart that looks at the average number of completed monthly sessions by device and app for the NPR News app and the NPR One app.
A couple of observations:
The huge bump in sessions on the NPR News iPhone app in 2020 is most likely driven by last year’s news cycle.
One additional factor could be that the NPR News app made changes over the past two years to encourage more streaming from members stations that also coincided last year with more in-home listening through the app.
The lack of significant growth in sessions with the NPR News Android app is hard to explain other than the majority of the NPR News audience own iPhones as opposed to Android devices3.
What I found most interesting with this data is the relative failure of the NPR One App to increase usage. After peaking in monthly sessions in 2018, the number of monthly sessions4 decreased 11% YoY in 2019 and by 1.1% YoY in 2020. NPR has made some excellent UI changes to NPR One over the past several months. However, the lack of substantial marketing and promotion is destined to keep this valuable distribution platform hidden away from current and potential public radio listeners.
The Economics of Public Broadcasting
This section of the report is a little frustrating because most of the data is more than a year old. The only information from 2020 is revenue from NPR and PRX, noting NPR’s revenue last year was flat at $207.1 million (an incredible turnaround from earlier in its fiscal year when things were pretty bad financially) and that total revenue at PRX in 2020 was down 10% to about $37.6 million5.
The station data in the report looks at membership and underwriting revenue, although the latest year they are reporting is from 2019. The good news is that not having the data from 2020 shows a continual upward trend in revenue for public radio, gaining praise from Steven Waldman, the co-foundation and President of Report for America, in a Tweet.
It’s estimated that overall revenue for public radio dropped by 8%, at least $120 million, in 20206. But those numbers are not included in this year’s State of the Media report.
The other bright light shared in the report is the increase in total program and production expenses for the 123 largest news-oriented public radio licensees7. Again, the data is only through 2019, but it shows a 47.6% increase in content investments from 2008 to 2019. By comparison, the newspaper sector saw a 50.8% decrease in the total number of newsroom employees during the same period8.
THING TWO: State of the News Media - Audio and Podcasting
There’s some overlap with the Public Broadcasting segment in the section on Audio and Podcasting in the State of the News Media report.
There’s also a lot missing around the activity happening in podcasting from news organizations. There is some data from The Infinite Dial study from this year on podcast listening trends. Still, it's not very useful in the overall scheme of understanding how podcasting and news organizations are using the platform to expand audiences and generate new revenue.
For example, there’s no reference to The New York Times or others and the impact they are having in reaching audiences with podcasting. This is an oversight that Pew should address in future years as podcasting continues to play a greater role in the news consumption habits of Americans.
Despite that, one of the telling bits of information is that the average revenue for stations in the all-news format commercial radio stations in 2020 dropped by 24%, according to Pew Research Center analysis of MEDIA Access Pro & BIA Advisory Services data. Average station revenue for stations in the all-news format dropped from $18.1 million in 2019 to $13.9 million in 20209.
The other interesting chart in this section looks at the trendline of the total number of newsroom employees in the broadcast sector from 2004 through 2020. Total newsroom employment in radio is down 21% (about 1,000 fewer) over the 17 years. The trendline for public radio would look very different as stations and the networks have been adding more reporters and editors since the Great Recession of 2008-2009.
The section also notes that the median wage in 2020 for news analysts, reporters, and journalists in the radio broadcasting industry was $49,000, $13,000 more than the median for newspaper reporters. In addition, editors in the radio broadcasting industry had a median annual wage of about $79,000, compared to $50,000 for an editor at a newspaper10.
THING THREE: State of the News Media - Digital, Newspapers and More
Unfortunately, the section on Digital-Native news publishers is a bit of a disappointment as much of the data used is from 2018 (similar to what we found in the Public Broadcasting section). In addition, very little in this section is relevant to this specific sector of the news industry with the revenue data taken from all digital advertising revenue, not just news outlets. The idea is to show the trends in digital advertising, which we know is dominated by Google and Facebook.
I would encourage you to take a look, and if you find something of interest, please let me know.
We’ve already touched on a few items from the section on Newspapers, but a few more bits of info about what’s happening in that space.
The estimated total U.S. daily newspaper circulation (print and digital combined) in 2020 was 24.3 million for weekdays and 25.8 million for Sunday, each down 6% from the previous year.
In the fourth quarter of 2020, there was an average of 13.9 million monthly unique visitors (across all devices) for the top 50 newspapers. This is up 14% from 2019, which itself was 5% higher than 2018.
The total estimated advertising revenue for the newspaper industry in 2020 was $8.8 billion, down 29% from 2019 based on Pew’s analysis of financial statements for publicly traded newspaper companies. The total estimated circulation revenue was $11.1 billion, compared with $11.0 billion in 2019. This is the first year in the Pew Research data that circulation revenue has been higher than advertising revenue.
Digital advertising accounted for 39% of newspaper advertising revenue in 2020, based on this analysis of publicly traded newspaper companies. The portion stood at 35% in 2019 – but at 17% in 2011, the first year it was possible to perform this analysis.
Much of the data reinforces the challenging situation for most of the traditional newspaper publishing sector. The big news from this section is that circulation revenue has surpassed advertising revenue is the key indicator of the strategy that the industry is moving to in adopting a membership/subscriber model that mirrors public broadcasting in many ways.
The other sections of the State of the News Media report have some additional value to public media leaders to get a sense of the overall landscape. The decline in viewership in the Local TV News section is something to watch, particularly as audiences move away from over-the-air and cable to streaming viewing options. The section on Hispanic and Black News Media, using data from 2018, noted the decline in audiences to Hispanic- and black-oriented news outlets. The Cable TV News section reports positive audience and revenue growth in this sector (again reported using data from 2018).
The methodology for the annual State of the News Media research is, in itself, a complex exercise for the folks at the Pew Research Center. Data is pulled from numerous different sources trying to piece together a story. With much of the data pre-COVID, it provides a “before” snapshot that, in reality, is very different from the current state of the News Media. For example, 2020 brought with it a news cycle unlike anything in recent history at the same time that the economics across the industry were impacted considerably by the economic downturn caused by the pandemic.
Add to this, the increasing movement of audiences away from traditional broadcast and print to digital platforms (on-demand and streaming) and the ongoing demographic changes happening in America and the trends from the last decade will undoubtedly be very different in the years ahead. Thus, the stakes are high for public media since the opportunity to go where the audiences are moving to is the existential threat (or enormous opportunity) that our industry faces over the next few years.
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The research did not include a station count for American Public Media.
Source: NPR, based on data from Nielsen Audio National Regional Database, for persons 12+, Monday-Sunday, midnight-midnight.
Source: MRI-Simmons Doublebase 2019
This is the combined total of monthly sessions by NPR One users with Android and iPhone devices.
The source for the revenue reports came from NPR and PRX.
Source: From the Station Resource Group’s Disrupted Trajectories report launched by NPR, SRG, and Greater Public with data and outreach from CPB, University Station Alliance, NFCB, and the African American Public Radio Consortium.
The revenue and expense data source is from Public Media Futures, a project funded by the Wyncote Foundation.
Source: Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data
The BIA Advisory Services database contains revenue data during these years for only 16 of the 25 all-news stations. Therefore, only those stations are included in the averages.
Source: Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data.