State of the news biz in 2016? Oh, my god … it’s really bad.

Newsies dread this time of year. It’s when the Pew Research Center releases its annual State of the Media report. And the findings, for print newsies, are bad, bad, bad.

Ad revenue down. Trust measures down. Newsroom staffing down. Circulation down.

Oh, look — digital ad revenue up. You remember back in the early Oughts when  newspapers began to chase that digital ad revenue, right? They were hoping as print ad dollars fell, digital ad dollars would offset the loss, maybe even bring the same high profits. All would be good.

Well, Pew says digital ad revenue is up 20 percent to nearly $60 billion. Wow.

But that digital ad revenue isn’t going to news companies. It’s going to … (drum roll) … Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Twitter. Technology companies that rarely hire journalists and practice accountability journalism are getting nearly two-thirds of the digital ad money newspaper companies once thought they’d get.

Worse, readers are now rarely paying news companies for the products the readers consume. That’s because news companies gave away too much of their “content” (no one says “stories” anymore) for free. Readers got used to that license to steal. In its Digital News Report 2016, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows data that in America, only 9 percent of those surveyed paid for digital news — and only 4 percent of those from 18 to 24 years old.

In the blink of an eye, an audience was lost.

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