Newsroom With A View

(Originally posted on May 3, 2011)
The New York Times reports today, “For the first time in 20 years, the number of homes in the United States with television sets has dropped.” It’s not a gigantic drop — 96.7 percent of American households now own sets, down from 98.9 percent — but the unanswered question cited in the story is whether this is the start of a trend because part of the drop is attributed to young adults doing without TV; whatever they watch, they get online. It may be a TV parallel to what has happened with phones, with many young people increasingly doing without landline phones, relying just on their cell phones. So why bring this up in a blog devoted to news? Together with the time-shifting already going on in TV watching due to DVRs, this obviously has implications for the TV ad revenue model, which has implications for everyone — just as changing consumer behaviors have socked newspapers’ advertising model, which in turn socked newsroom (along with every other department’s) budgets.