The retention of new viewers by 24/7 cable news channels might also suggest an audience more engaged in the political life of the nation during these troubled times. This blog was launched in part last fall on the belief that there was a large TV audience with a huge appetite for politics not being addressed elsewhere online from a TV perspective.

Here is the way the authors of the report described the year for cable TV news:

Cable news was the only medium that was an across the board winner in 2008. Across all dayparts, audiences rose 38% and profits rose by 33%. But the medium has held onto some but hardly all of the audience gains.

By January, they were gone. They came back some in February, but only some. The medium was up 5% over a year earlier during the month.

Still, cable has become in many ways the primary medium of political discussion on television now ahead of broadcast, thanks to an almost singular focus on politics. That is important given the time the medium now gives over to spin doctors, to opinion hosts and its need for nearly minute-by-minute assessments. We sense, at this moment at least, a kind of disconnect between this cable media judgment of Obama, which is pretty tough, and the public view.

The findings of the study were not so good at all for local TV news.

Our proprietary analysis of local TV news audiences (we tally Nielsen ratings for the four sweeps periods at five different day parts for all the markets in a way Nielsen allows but doesn’t otherwise do) shows a growing drop in local TV news audience, down an average of 4.5% for “early evening” newscasts. Just as survey data suggests, the rise in internet usage may be hurting TV most of all. Revenue for the industry fell by 7%, unheard of in an election year.

Here are summaries from the authors of some of their other key findings. One of the most interesting is the accelerated migration to the Web by news consumers. While it puts more pressure of newspapers to develop a new business model, there is also the silver lining that much of that online migration is now going to sites owned by newspapers, like this one.

Our main overall finding is that journalism now has less time left on the clock to invent a news business model so it can survive. Two major developments cause this. One is a little-recognized significant jump in online news consumption. The other was the recession, which basically overwhelmed and stalled experimenting with new business models in the last year.

The audience migration to the web accelerated fairly dramatically in 2008, which only compounded the media’s financial problems. And the top news sites gained the most. Consider that our analysis of the top 50 news sites visits jumped 27% last year. For the top 700 sites, the number was 7%. Interestingly, legacy websites are gaining more audience than new media.

The situation at newspapers is very tough, but the industry is still generating significant revenue and profits. The business averaged double digit profits last year, about 11%, and took in, by our estimates, $38 billion in ad revenue. But revenue has dropped 23% in the last two years alone.

Staffing in newspapers has dropped nearly 20% since 2001, and by year’s end one out of every five newspaper jobs that existed in 2001 will probably be gone. Classified revenue, one analyst tells us, could be zero in five years, and now editors tell us it may be sooner than that.

On top of this, the recession has largely swamped efforts at trying to reinvent the business model for now. The recession, editors and publishers estimate, probably doubled the size of the revenue declines in newspapers in the last year. But not all of that will come back when the recession is over. In calendar 2009, we expect several more newspapers to fail, and several more to stop 7-day home delivery

There has been a significant increase in new ventures both citizen web sites and those produced by journalists who have left legacy news operations. These are charted in a special report and content analysis of new media in 46 markets. But the scale of this work, however interesting, does not come close to compensating for what has been lost in conventional newsrooms. And non profit ownership does not seem like a realistic alternative for media ownership. For instance, eliminate profit, printing and distribution from newspapers, and news gathering, web production and marketing alone still costs $20 billion a year. 

The press did not see the banking crisis coming. It focused on the home foreclosures in late 2007, but it largely moved on, and during the summer just prior to the banking and financial industry collapse, the economic story the press was focused on was the price of gas at the pump. Just before the financial collapse in September, the economy was one of its lowest marks of the year as a news story.