Robert G. Picard, Ph.D is director of the Media Management and Transformation Centre at, Jönköping University in,Sweden. The following is an excerpt and link to his paper, “Tremors, Structural Damage and Some Casualties, but No Cataclysm: The News about News Provision,” delivered at the Federal Trade Commission’s “News Media Workshop” held on December 1 and 2, 2009:

During the past decade, the rhetoric about news provision in the United States has become increasingly steeped in the discourse of disaster. Journalists and commentators have spoken of wholesale destruction and devastation caused by crippling changes that have shattered the industry’s business model and left a wounded democracy without means to survive. The language has become increasingly desperate and plaintive.

Calls for government economic assistance equivalent to disaster assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Guard have become common. News providers, journalists, and news industry associations have used their considerable communication skills and access to distribution platforms to make their case for intervention.

While it is clear that the news industry is being seriously shaken by the forces of change, that organizational structures of news providers are being damaged, and that some firms have disappeared or undergone painful restructuring, the situation is not as dire for news firms or journalism as would appear from the dominant discourse.

Much of the misunderstandings surrounding news provision results because those working for news providers typically take a short‐term view and tend to compare today’s situation to 3 to 5 years ago. This provides a skewed picture of the overall develops and tends to lead to misperceptions of root causes of the challenges being faced and the potential effects of policy choices.

I would like to provide a clearer and less alarmist perspective on situation, its causes, and its effects and about the challenges facing news media as they transform in the digital era. I will put the current situation of the industry into context by offering a factual analysis of the situation and I then turn my attention to a discussion of the various policy proposals that have been put forward in the mounting campaign for more public intervention to benefit commercial and non‐commercial news enterprises.

Read his full paper here.