State of the News Media '05

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its second State of the Media report. At the equivalent of 600 pages (hey, is there an editor in the house!), I'm not going to try to summarize it here, although USAToday had a good advancer.

The report cites five broad trends:

• Faster, looser and cheaper are increasingly the models of journalism. The report calls this the "journalism of assertion" rather than the "journalism of verification." (Sure to become this year's catch phrase, so let's just put it on the cliche list now and move on.)
  
• People, by and large, have not become partisan in their news consumption.
• Transparency may be the word of the future -- reporters (and editors, I presume) making what they do and how they do it more public.
• Mainstream media are slow to invest in way to expand audience.
• Broadcast network news is at the edge of momentous change.

Here's last year's report, if you want to compare. (That address has now been corrected to an .asp page.)