5 key takeaways from State of the News Media 2015
Pew Research Center today released 
Things are looking up for network and local television. The audience for evening network news broadcasts is up 5% from 2013 to 2014, according to Nielsen Media Research data. Early evening and morning local news viewership also is up for the second year in a row, while ad revenue was up 7% in 2014 to nearly $20 billion. Revenue for 2014 even rose when compared with 2010, the ad-rich last midterm election year, by 2%. The amount of ad revenue received in 2014 is roughly equal for local TV and for newspapers. (Both are estimates from BIA/Kelsey.)
One area with new momentum: podcasting. NPR reports that downloads of their podcasts were up 41% in 2014. The percentage of Americans who have listened to a podcast in the past month has almost doubled since 2008, from 9% to 17% by January 2015, according to Edison Research. And one-third of Americans ages 12 and over have ever listened to a podcast, up from 11% in 2006.
Financially, the legacy news industry has made little progress in securing more of the digital dollar. Digital ad revenue across all media grew another 18% in 2014 from 2013, to over $50 billion, but traditional news outlets get relatively little of that pie. Instead, five technology companies took in half of all display ad revenue, with Facebook alone accounting for 24%.
