Every year, the Pew Research Center releases its State of the News Media report which looks at the rapidly changing landscape of American journalism. This year’s report found that 39 out of 50 top news websites actually have more of their traffic coming from mobile devices than desktop computers.
To learn more about that trend and what it means, Reno Public Radio’s Michelle Bliss talked to Al Stavitsky, dean of the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno for our Reynolds School Media Watch.
In their interview, Stavitsky said that as more people access news in different ways, media outlets are being forced to do more with less.
"Print organizations need to have a presence online and in the mobile space," he explained, "so they need to be active on all these different platforms with far fewer people than they had before. It's causing great strain for these media firms."
Stavitsky said that this shift leaves less time and fewer resources for investigative journalism and creates an industry that requires its workforce to be quite nimble.
"A lot of journalists and media professionals have been losing," Stavitsky said. "Many of them who used to have fairly secure jobs with legacy media organizations are now struggling with startups or as individual journalists trying to develop their own brand."
This instability is why writers for Gawker Media, a prominent digital-only company, actually formed a union to establish some stability in a constantly evolving industry, a move that Stavitsky also discusses in this interview.