AUSTIN, Texas — Global market research firm IMS Research has updated its Online TV Set Shipment Database with new information regarding TV shipments split by technology, iDTV demand, and TV households split by reception platform in 68 countries. The update reveals that Latin America is projected to be the fastest growing TV market over the next several years. Additionally, IMS Research expects a change in the demand for several key TV types, including LCDs, OLEDs and iDTVs.

The forecast indicates that in the next five years the TV installed base in Latin America will increase around 26%, significantly higher than in any other region. According to Veronica Thayer, lead researcher for the TV Set Shipment Database, “The main reason behind this increase is the accelerated growth of the average number of TVs per household. Another reason is the governmental support towards a rapid transition to digital broadcasting, along with the widespread adoption of the ISDB-T standard. Finally, as expected worldwide, there will be increasing demand for flat panel televisions.”

Recent updates show changing demand in LCDs, OLEDs and iDTVs through 2015. LCD shipments showed a 29% year-on-year growth in 2010, significantly less than the 43% Y/Y growth in 2009. IMS Research estimates the Y/Y growth for LCD TV shipments will continue to decline and by 2015 will be less than 1%, representing a saturation of the LCD TV market. OLEDs will start gaining presence in the television market, with main manufacturers launching their models in the next couple of years. Thayer adds: “If the technology grows cheaper due to mass production and sizes above 32 inches become available, OLED TV market share will increase to reach around 4% of the world television shipments in 2015, led by North America and Asia.” IMS Research forecasts that by the end of 2015, 86% of the TV sets shipped worldwide will have an integrated digital tuner. A 17% CAGR is expected for iDTVs between 2009 and 2015.

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Read up on the sturm und drang in the news business and you’ll find plenty of pundits predicting the death of print journalism in the next five minutes or so, along with a few (like myself) who think newspapers have still have some life left in them. Whichever side you’re on, the debate seems to mostly focus on delivery systems and business models – print vs. digital, display ads vs. pay-per-click, and so on.

But all the geek-speak loses sight of a more fundamental problem: With each passing year, young people grow less interested in the news, regardless of how it’s delivered.

Statistics bear this out. Both newspaper circulation and network newscast ratings have long been in decline, and the audience that remains grows ever older. (Even morning news shows, once thought immune to such trends, are now losing viewers.) A Harvard survey found that only one in 20 teens and one in 12 young adults read a newspaper on close to a daily basis.

Online news fares little better. A recent study found that in 2008, roughly 64 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds said they had viewed a newspaper online within the last year. But by 2009 that had dropped to 54 percent. The figures are even more worrisome when you consider that the study just measured whether a respondent had read online news at all – even once – in the last year.

I teach journalism at a community college in suburban Philadelphia. At the start of every semester I ask my students how many read a newspaper or news website on a daily basis. Typically, maybe a third to one-half raise their hands. And if this is the response in a journalism class, what might it be in say, an art history course?

Why don’t young people follow the news more closely? In part, it’s difficult for them to see how they’re affected by current events. We live in a large, powerful and relatively insulated country, and it’s easy to feel immune to the boom-and-bust cycles of the global economy if you’re still a student delivering pizzas for Dominos and don’t yet have a mortgage or a 401k plan.

Yes, we are at war in two countries, but unlike Vietnam there’s no draft (and unlike earlier wars no national sense of shared sacrifice, either). And yes, we were attacked on 9/11 in a way that was once unthinkable, but for an 18-year-old college freshman the twin towers fell half a lifetime ago.

All of this is no excuse. As citizens we have a duty to be informed about the world around us. But if young people don’t follow the news I place the blame mostly with those in the news business, and with newspapers especially.

From a Trade to a Profession

For the first half of the 20th century journalism was regarded largely as a trade. Barriers to entry were low – typically just a high school degree was required – and so newsrooms regularly had a healthy influx of young blood.

Then journalism schools – many of them staffed with theoreticians and academics rather than real reporters – sprang up across the country. Journalism became a middle-class job, then a profession. The pay got better. Newspapers, especially large metro dailies, started taking themselves very seriously. No longer could a talented kid just out of college or even one with a few years experience land a job at a paper in New York or Chicago, or even Seattle or Denver. Newsrooms grew older.

By the 1990s and 2000s, newsrooms were increasingly dominated by baby boomers at or approaching middle age. Not surprisingly the tone and content of those papers reflected that mindset, from the news sections to the arts and entertainment pages. If music critics raised on the Beatles and the Rolling Stones struggled to keep up with grunge and hip hop, is it any wonder the news business has been so slow to respond to the Internet revolution going on around it?

Now the news business faces the toughest time in its history. Thousands of journalists have been axed, dozens of papers large and small have closed and still others are bankrupt. The great recession and the transformation of so-called legacy media in the digital age have shaken the industry to its very core.

Yet most of the hand-wringing and analysis still focuses on us, the purveyors of news, and not on the consumers of news. To hear some media pundits tell it, if we just shut down the presses, go all-digital and find a workable business model, readers will follow.

But will they? Will young people suddenly become avid news consumers when the digital transformation is complete? The evidence suggests not. And while solving journalism’s logistical problems seems tough but doable, discovering how to capture the attention of a generation that cares little for news in any form is another matter entirely.

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As I reflect on today’s events, from Fox News’ treatment of Kurt Vonnegut’s death to the endless Anna Nicole Smith updates to the stories that never go beyond the ink of newspapers to today’s events at Virginia Tech University I find myself once again comparing TV News to Newspapers.

Those that know me will tell you, every time I get on this topic I reach the same conclusion. TV News has become too much of a business and isn’t allowed to practice news gathering and reporting the correct way.

I don’t believe that TV folks don’t want to deliver the news that matters, they just aren’t allowed to. And as new people step into the economically driven corporate run news system they are forced to report on the news that brings in viewers.

Think about it, how can we possibly have let the Smith story take precedence over the story of an astronaut in a diaper that got past NASA security and threated to kill a jilted lover? Not only is it much more sensational (come’on diapers!) but it has more to do with national issues of security, the space program, mental health angles and such views that effect the public much more than the passing of a G-List celebrity.

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Shooting a story at a mall, store or other type of retail business seems like an easy assignment. But if you’re not careful, the images you show may have viewers thinking they’re watching a commercial and not a legitimate news piece. Take time to decide what you want to show and how you’ll show it so that it doesn’t appear to be a paid advertisement.

Make Your Own Decisions about What to Show

Walk into an electronics store to shoot a story about the hot new items and you may find an enterprising store worker tagging along telling you what shots to get. Maybe that person’s just trying to be helpful, or maybe he’s trying to earn his commission by getting you to highlight the merchandise he wants to sell.

Either way, the decision on what to show is yours. Maybe you can appease the salesman by shooting video of the items he thinks would make “good TV.” That doesn’t obligate you to put those shots into your story.

Instead, work with your reporter on choosing the video that best matches the focus of the report. That way, the reporter’s writing of the retail story will help dictate what is shown and not just the sales inventory.

Limit Shots of Store Logos

There’s nothing wrong with showing video of a Wal-Mart sign when you’re in the store to do a story on grocery prices. You’re answering a viewer’s basic question of where the story was shot. But after showing the logo early in the story, move on to something else.

You can easily shoot produce, shoppers, grocery buggies and checkout lines without repeating shots of the logo. If the story is specifically about grocery shopping at Wal-Mart, it’s not much of an issue. But if you’re just at Wal-Mart to do a broader story on groceries, make your video more generic and less brand-focused.

If you’ll also be shooting a reporter’s Live intro for the newscast, avoid making the store’s large lighted sign the backdrop. With a typical 15-second reporter intro and 15-second wrap-up, you would have given the store 30 seconds of free exposure, which is sure to make your station’s sales manager’s hairs catch fire. Make the store buy that airtime.

Avoid Shooting in TV Commercial Style

You’ve seen these shots in ads for furniture stores and car dealerships — lots of wide pans of the merchandise and zooms. Just because you’re shooting a story on a retail business doesn’t mean you have to adopt the same style.

Commercials are shot that way so that viewers will say, “Look at all that stuff!”. But news stories make the most impact when they are shot intimately.

That means tight shots. Get creative with your camera work, so that static video of canned corn or car tires doesn’t become boring to watch.

But unless the point of the story is how car dealerships’ lots are full of unsold vehicles, you are under no obligation to show the square footage of great deals that are just waiting to be claimed.

Stories about retail business may seem like boring assignments. But if you approach shooting them in a creative way, you’ll avoid a cookie-cutter commercial approach and instead make the story come to life through your camera lens.

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For anyone interested in the news business, it’s hard to avoid the sense that newspapers are at death’s door. Every day brings more news of layoffs, bankruptcies, and closings in the print journalism industry.

But why are things so dire for newspapers at the moment?

The Decline Begins With Radio & TV

Newspapers have a long and storied history that dates back hundreds of years. And while their roots are in the 1600s, newspapers thrived in the U.S. well into the 20th century.

But with the advent of radio and later TV, newspaper circulation (the number of copies sold) began a gradual but steady decline. By the mid-20th century, people simply didn’t have to rely on newspapers as their only source of news anymore. That was especially true of breaking news, which could be conveyed much more quickly via broadcast media.

And as television newscasts became more sophisticated, TV became the dominant mass medium. This trend accelerated with the rise of CNN and 24-hour cable news networks.

Newspapers Begin to Disappear

Afternoon newspapers were the first casualties. People coming home from work increasingly turned on the TV instead of opening a newspaper, and afternoon papers in the 1950s and 1960s saw their circulations plunge and profits dry up. TV also captured more and more of the ad revenue that newspapers had relied on.

But even with TV grabbing more and more audience and ad dollars, newspapers still managed to survive. Papers couldn’t compete with television in terms of speed, but they could provide the kind of in-depth news coverage that TV news never could.

So savvy editors retooled papers with this in mind. More stories were written with a feature-type approach that emphasized storytelling over breaking news, and papers were redesigned to be more visually appealing, with a greater emphasis on clean layouts and graphic design.

The Emergence of the Internet

But if TV represented a body blow to the newspaper industry, the world wide web may prove to be the nail in the coffin. With the emergence of the internet in the 1990s, vast amounts of information were suddenly free for the taking. Most newspapers, not wanting to be left behind the times, started websites in which they essentially gave away their most valuable commodity – their content – for free. This model continues to be the predominant one in use today.

Now, however, many analysts believe this was possibly a fatal mistake. Many once-loyal newspaper readers realized that if they could conveniently access news online for free, there seemed to be little reason to pay for a newspaper subscription.

The Recession Worsens Print Journalism’s Woes

The recent economic hard times have only accelerated the problem. Revenue from print ads has plunged, and even online ad revenue, which publishers had hoped would make up the difference, has slowed. And websites like Craigslist have eaten away at classified ad revenue.

“The online business model just won’t support newspapers at the level Wall Street demands,” says Chip Scanlan of The Poynter Institute, a journalism thinktank. “Craigslist has decimated newspaper classifieds.”

With profits plunging, newspaper publishers have responded with layoffs and cutbacks, but Scanlan worries this will just makes things worse.

“They’re not helping themselves by whacking sections and laying people off,” he says. “They’re cutting the things that people look for in newspapers.”

Indeed, that’s the conundrum facing newspapers and their readers. All agree that newspapers still represent an unrivaled source of in-depth news, analysis and opinion, and that if papers disappear entirely, there will be nothing to take their place.

What the Future Holds

Opinions abound as to what newspapers must do to survive. Many say papers must start charging for their web content in order to support print issues. Others say printed papers will soon go the way of the Studebaker and that newspapers are destined to become online-only entities.

But what actually will happen remains anybody’s guess.

When Scanlan thinks of the predicament the internet poses for newspapers today, he’s reminded of the Pony Express riders who in 1860 started what was meant to be a speedy mail delivery service, only to be rendered obsolete a year later by the telegraph.

“They represented a great leap in communication delivery but it only lasted a year,” Scanlan says. “As they were whipping their horses into a lather to deliver the mail, beside them were these guys ramming in long wooden poles and connecting wires for the telegraph. It’s a reflection of what changes in technology mean.”

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