Delicious Today: Two Research Reports on Digital Media

#1: European Digital Journalism Survey 2009
Some notable findings of this survey of over 350 European journalists are:

54% of the journalists predict that "the editorial quality will erode because of lack of resources."

42% predict that "In a landscape of 'opinion driven new media,' audiences will return to 'reliable media brands.'"

"When it comes to how publishers have embraced the web, the balance is tipping away from using it purely to archive material to increasingly using it for new content."

The concerns of journalists in the survey echo the result of the Pew survey of American audience this month which reports that press credibility is at its lowest level in two decades. It's expensive to produce quality journalism that is based on rich and deep facts. As so many radio and television programs have become talking heads shows, public broadcasting can make itself stand out by producing more fact driven programs. To help reduce the cost of production, we need to have a new mindset and news ways of engaging our audience, especially those who pledge, and crowdsourcing the tasks of gathering, verifying, and making sense of facts and information.

#2: Citizen journalism will remain part of changing news models, says report

"Citizen journalism is here to stay and journalists must look for ways to work with user-generated content, argues a new paper from Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. .l. While the rise of new forms of newsgathering, such as citizen journalism, and revenues may not be fast enough to compensate for the decline in Western news media, ... 'the impulses underlying the rise of citizen journalist are here to stay'."