Since you're reading about this here, it may not come as a big surprise to learn that:

"Only 35% of online news consumers can identify a 'favorite' news website, and of this most likely group that might pay for the content, only 19% said they would continue to visit the favorite site if they had to pay for it."

That's among the challenging conclusions in the latest Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media report.

As there has been in many recent years, there are several (as the AP puts it) "bleak headlines" for the news industry in the Pew report:

 

— "Newspapers, including online, saw ad revenue fall 26% during the year, which brings the total loss over the last three years to 43%."

— "Local television ad revenue fell 22% in 2009; triple the decline the year before. Radio also was off 22%. Magazine ad revenue dropped 17%, network TV 8% (and news alone probably more). Online ad revenue over all fell about 5%, and revenue to news sites most likely also fared much worse."

— "For newspapers, which still provide the largest share of reportorial journalism in the United States, the metaphor that comes to mind is sand in an hourglass. The shrinking money left in print, which still provides 90% of the industry's funds, is the amount of time left to invent new revenue models online. The industry must find a new model before that money runs out."

— "The losses are already enormous. To quantify the impact, with colleague Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute we estimate that the newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000, or roughly 30%. That leaves an estimated $4.4 billion remaining. Even if the economy improves we predict more cuts in 2010."

The near-term outlook doesn't look so great either:

"Last year was significantly harder on the news industry even than 2008, and the report predicts still more cutbacks in 2010, even with an improving economy," PEJ Director Tom Rosenstiel says in a statement posted with the report. "And while there is more discussion of alternative ways of financing the news, there is not yet much concrete progress."