FCC Releases Batch of Media Ownership Studies
Local online news is dominated by traditional media outlets such as TV, radio stations and newspapers, a study commissioned by the FCC said. The study by George Washington University Assistant Professor Matthew Hindman was one of five FCC-commissioned studies about media ownership released by the agency Wednesday. The FCC commissioned a total of 11 studies, the rest of which have yet to be released. It will take comments on the studies after it issues a notice of proposed rulemaking on its media ownership rules, the FCC said. That could be as soon as July, depending on when the 3rd U.S. Court of Appeals rules on challenges to the last FCC ownership proceeding, an attorney following the proceeding said.
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The Hindman study echoes findings of the FCC’s own report on the Information Needs of Communities, nee Future of Media study. “There is little evidence in this data that the Internet has expanded the number of local news outlets,” the study said, citing data from comScore’s online traffic estimates. Furthermore, the surprisingly small audience for local news traffic helps explain the “financial straits local news organizations now face,” the report said. It found just 17 of 1,074 local news sites in the top 100 TV markets are unaffiliated with traditional media companies and attract a significant amount of readers. Sites such as AOL’s Patch and niche blogs may not draw enough traffic to be detected by the comScore data, the report said. “We can say the least about the very smallest online news sources -- those that receive less than a few thousand unique visitors monthly, and are thus unlikely to appear in our data,” the report said. “But above this threshold, we find almost no evidence that the Internet has expanded the number of local news outlets."
Hindman also examined some smaller blogs in a few markets and found a dearth of original content. And even the most successful sites were born out of failed newspapers, the study found. “The fact that sites like SeattlePI.com continue with a skeleton crew is welcome, but it does not represent an expansion of media diversity,” the report found. More troubling is the small size of online news audiences, the report said. “The central problem facing online news sites is that their audiences are small, and proportionally much smaller than many publishers and journalists seem to realize,” it said. The study estimates about $74 per person is spent in online advertising each year. “In the long run, how much of that $74 is going to accrue to a group of sites that gets one-half of one percent of page views in a typical market?"
Other studies released Wednesday examine the effects of media ownership structures on civic engagement, how ownership affects the provision of and consumption of radio news programming, how ownership affects the provision of programming to minority audiences and how ownership structures in a market correlate to the variety of news viewpoints provided. Data from the studies is available for inspection under the terms of a protective order, the FCC said.
The studies will probably play a large role in the FCC’s quadrennial review of its ownership rules, said Corrie Wright, policy counsel for Free Press. But the commission will probably wait for the 3rd Circuit’s opinion before proceeding, she said. “For the sake of efficiency, I don’t think it makes much sense for the FCC to issue a notice of proposed rulemaking until it can see what the court has to say,” Wright said. The court may have specific instructions for the agency, Wright said.
Among the conclusions of the other four studies: Most minority-owned radio stations target minority audiences, but most minority-targeted stations are not minority-owned; there’s no evidence of a relationship between ownership concentration within news and the variety of commercial news stations available on the dial; and while there is variation in levels of political engagement across media markets, that variation can’t be explained by the structural conditions related to ownership.