US journalism gains from new funding by tech savvy investors: report

A new wave of funding by technology-savvy investors into US media companies was driving momentum in journalism, even as news organisations continued to face challenges, a new report released on Wednesday said.

The Pew Research Center's State of the News Media 2014 report, said the level of media investing activity was forging the underpinnings of "game-changing" developments for the industry, citing funding from entrepreneurs like Amazon's Jeff Bezos and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

According to Amy Mitchell, director of journalism research at Pew and an author of the report, there was an unmistakable sense of new energy that emerged over this last year, Reuters reported. She said it was evident that individuals with ties to technology companies and an innate understanding for technology were moving into reporting.

Amazon founder Bezos, in a stunning move into the media sector last August announced his deal to acquire the Washington Post for $250 million from its long-time owners, the Graham family. According to employees of the newspaper Bezos said they would have to "invent" and "experiment" as the internet revolutionised the news business.

In October, Omidyar announced plans for an independent media organisation that would cover news from sports to politics for mainstream readers.

"In many ways, 2013 and early 2014 brought a level of energy to the news industry not seen for a long time," the report states. "Even as challenges of the past several years continue and new ones emerge, the activities this year have created a new sense of optimism – or perhaps hope – for the future of American journalism."

According to USA Today, Pew was excited about the digital players who were plunging deeply into the serious side of the news business. BuzzFeed, with a news staff of 170 had plunged into investigative reporting, foreign news and long-form journalism, while Vice Media boasted 35 foreign bureaus. Vox Media was launching a website for explanatory journalism under the leadership of highly regarded policy wonk Ezra Klein, formerly of The Washington Post, while tech site Mashable had taken on 70 news staffers in the lineup.

The project also tried to quantify the number of journalism positions at digital-only news organisations, for the first time, and identified 5,000 working across 30 major digital news outlets and 438 smaller ones.

The report however, makes clear that problems continued to persist at traditional news outlets.

Newspaper newsroom jobs were down by 6.4 per cent in 2012 and there were doubtless more losses in 2013, it said, adding that despite all the cool new kids in the game, "the vast majority of bodies producing original reporting still lie within the newspaper industry."