ABSTRACT
A lot of professionals (much less students) really don’t understand the media business – which leaves them surprised when their employer makes some of the decisions that are really quite logical if they understood the business side of radio and TV. News is a business, and its survival depends on a business model that enables it to take in more money than it costs to produce news. TV still dominates the media jungle – both in time spent overall and in where people get most of their news, but the internet is rapidly catching up. And the amount of TV news being produced keeps growing, year after year. Measuring media use is difficult, and that difficulty, coupled with problems in methodology and media bias, sometimes leads us to misleading or inaccurate media use numbers. Still, it's clear that we're in a period of significant change. Young adults get more news from the internet than TV; more and more people generally are getting news online. Although there are a variety of new efforts in news delivery, so far the traditional players are the leading suppliers of news, and it's clear that news consumption is not shrinking, even though it is fragmenting.
