Age Gap Narrows

The biggest online trend is... certain key internet uses are becoming more uniformly popular across all age groups. These online activities include seeking health information, purchasing products, making travel reservations, and downloading podcasts.

Even in areas that are still dominated by Millennials, older generations are making notable gains. While the youngest generations are still significantly more likely to use social network sites, the fastest growth has come from internet users 74 and older: social network site usage for this oldest cohort has quadrupled since 2008, from 4% to 16%.

Read More at the Pew Research Center

Amazon Sort-of Allows Kindle E-Book Lending

Amazon quietly launched a new feature for its Kindle e-books — the ability to lend them to others for a two-week period. The move mimics functionality already available on Barnes and Nobles’ competing Nook e-reader, but comes with a serious caveat — namely the publisher of the book has to allow it. Like with the Nook, a Kindle user can lend a book they have bought to another Kindle user for two weeks. During that time, the owner can’t read the book.

Read more at Wired

Social Media Job Postings Up 600%

A recent study published by SocialMediaInfluence.com shows that 59 of the Fortune 100 companies have at least one employee who works full time in social media. It adds that job postings directly related to social media have soared 600% in the last five years.

Working with the job site Indeed.com. the Social Media Influence report researched online job listings. It found more than 21,000 postings related to social media. In 2005, that number was in the low thousands.

Curtis Hougland, founder of the New York-based marketing and social media firm Attention, warns that just as social media hiring has picked up, the pool of qualified talent has failed to keep pace and the resulting imbalance of supply and demand is a sign of hiring inflation.

Hougland says that demand for social media skills in the corporate world has outstripped the supply of candidates with training in communications and the analytical skills to track the effectiveness of a media campaign. He says this void has been filled by a burgeoning workforce of self-proclaimed social media experts, some of whom are qualified, but many are not.

Remember the dot-com boom-and-bust? After the bubble burst, Internet companies were left with an oversupply of programmers, which had been the hot job of the day. But you rarely hear about programmers going hungry.

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2010/12/the-social-media-sector-is-booming-especially-for-new-jobs.html

Bollywood Actress' Skin is 'Whitened'

Elle magazine has stumbled into a race row after allegedly whitening the skin of a Bollywood actress on its cover.
Readers reacted with fury after it was suggested that the fashion magazine might have digitally ‘bleached’ the complexion of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, a former Miss World who has also starred in Bride & Prejudice and The Pink Panther 2. The 37-year-old appears on the cover of this month’s Indian edition of the magazine. However, her skin appears to be several shades lighter than her normal colour.
Inside the magazine, she is again pictured in a series of shots, all showing her with pale skin.

In September this year, black actress Gabourey Sidibe appeared on the cover of the U.S. magazine with a much paler complexion. On that occasion Elle claimed it had not altered the Precious star’s skin any more than that of the other models photographed alongside her.

Read more at the Daily Mail

Cable TV's Ratings Put Networks on Notice

Nielsen figures show the Big 4 and basic cable gained 1% in 2010 as overall viewing continues to rise to a record 34 hours a week. But the fall season has been less kind: Fox is down 15% and ABC is off 5%, offsetting smaller gains by CBS and NBC.

Few cable series outpace broadcast hits, but increasingly the strongest are beating many of their big-network rivals.

"These are eye-popping numbers you didn't see a few years ago," says Jon Marks, senior VP of research at Turner.

Conversely, CNN continued to plummet, down 34%. Hitless VH1 is off 31%, and Hallmark fell 24%. Even top-rated USA is down 4% from a stellar 2009, while Fox News fell 7%.

Read more at USA Today

Video Games Boost Brain Power

Daphne Bavelier is professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. She studies young people playing action video games. Having now conducted more than 20 studies on the topic, Bavelier says... Her studies show that video gamers show improved skills in vision, attention and certain aspects of cognition. And these skills are not just gaming skills, but real-world skills. They perform better than non-gamers on certain tests of attention, speed, accuracy, vision and multitasking, says Bavelier.

Vision, for example, is improved in gamers. Specifically, the kind of vision called "contrast sensitivity," that is, the ability to see subtle shades of gray. Gamers, Bavelier has also found, have better attention than non-gamers — they stay focused. They are able to detect, for example, new information coming at them faster. So as a result, they are more efficient.

Read more at NPR

10 Predictions for the News Media in 2011

In 2011, the focus on mobile will continue to grow with the launch of mobile- and iPad-only news products, but the greater focus for news media in 2011 will be on re-imagining its approach to the open social web. The focus will shift from searchable news to social and share-able news, as social media referrals close the gap on search traffic for more news organizations.

1. Leaks and Journalism: A New Kind of Media Entity
Even if WikiLeaks itself gets shut down, we’re going to see the rise of “leakification” in journalism, and more importantly we’ll see a number of new media entities, not just mirror sites, that will model themselves to serve whistle blowers — WikiLeaks copycats of sorts. Toward the end of this year, we already saw Openleaks, Brusselsleaks, and Tradeleaks.

2. More Media Mergers and Acquisitions
At the tail end of 2010, we saw the acquisition of TechCrunch by AOL and the Newsweek merger with The Daily Beast. In some ways, these moves have been a validation in the value of new media companies and blogs that have built an audience and a business.

3. Tablet-Only and Mobile-First News Companies
In 2010, as news consumption began to shift to mobile devices, we saw news organizations take mobile seriously. Aside from launching mobile apps across various mobile platforms, perhaps the most notable example is News Corp’s plan to launch The Daily, an iPad-only news organization that is set to launch early 2011.

4. Location-Based News Consumption
In 2011, with a continued shift toward mobile news consumption, we’re going to see news organizations implement location-based news features into their mobile apps. And of course if they do not, a startup will enter the market to create a solution to this problem or the likes of Foursquare or another company will begin to pull in geo-tagged content associated with locations as users check in.

5. Social vs. Search
Instead of focusing on search engine optimization (SEO), in 2011 we’ll see social media optimization become a priority at many news organizations, as they continue to see social close the gap on referrals to their sites. Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics and news industry analyst at Outsell, recently pointed out that social networks have become the fastest growing source of traffic referrals for many news sites.

6. The Death of the ‘Foreign Correspondent’
What we’ve known as the role of the foreign correspondent will largely cease to exist in 2011.

7. The Syndication Standard and the Ultimate Curators
Syndication models will be disrupted in 2011. As Clay Shirky recently predicted, more news outlets will get out of the business of re-running the same story on their site that appeared elsewhere. Though this is generally true, the approach to syndication will vary based on the outlet. The reality is that the content market has become highly fragmented, and if content is king, then niche is certainly queen.

8. Social Storytelling Becomes Reality
What if Facebook had a news landing page of the trending news content that users are discussing? Or if Twitter filtered its content to bring you the most relevant and curated tweets around news events?

9. News Organizations Get Smarter With Social Media
In 2011, we’re going to see more news organizations decentralize their social media strategy from one person to multiple editors and journalists, which will create an integrated and more streamlined approach. It won’t just be one editor updating or managing a news organization’s process, but instead news organizations will work toward a model in which each journalist serves as his or her own community manager.

10. The Rise of Interactive TV
In 2011, the accessibility to Internet TV will transform television as we know it in not only the way content is presented, but it will also disrupt the dominance traditional TV has had for years in capturing ad dollars. The problem of being able to have a conversation with others about a show you’re watching has existed for some time, and users have mostly reacted to the problem by hosting informal conversations via Facebook threads and Twitter hashtags. Companies like Twitter are recognizing the problem and finding ways to make the television experience interactive. That doesn’t mean that flat screens are going away; instead, they will only become interconnected to the web and its many content offerings.

Read more at Mashable

The Mission of Journalism

To the extent that news needs to produce profits, the demand ultimately will shape the supply... The choice is not between giving people what they want or what they need. The challenge is to induce people to want what they need.

The answer is not to figure out how to transport 20th century news presentation into 21st century delivery mechanisms but rather to create a new rhetoric of news that can get through to the changed and changing news audience.

Jack Fuller, author of What is happening to News

Read more here

Blogging ‘Peaks,’ But Reports of Its Death Are Exaggerated

(A) new Pew Internet report finds that blogging by teenagers has fallen by half since 2006, and even young adults seem to be dropping the habit.

At the same time, however, blogging’s popularity increased among most older generations, and as a result the rate of blogging for all online adults rose slightly overall from 11 percent in late 2008 to 14 percent in 2010.

Yet, while the act formally known as blogging seems to have peaked, internet users are doing blog-like things in other online spaces as they post updates about their lives, musings about the world, jokes, and links on social networking sites and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.

Read more at Wired

Translation App

Word Lens is an augmented-reality translation app. World Lens looks at any printed text through the iPhone’s camera, reads it, translates between Spanish and English. It does it in real time — but it also matches the color, font and perspective of the text, and remaps it onto the image. Read more at Wired or watch this video.

Top 2010 Tweets

#1 - Stephen Colbert: In honor of oil-soaked birds, 'tweets' are now 'gurgles'
#5 - AlQaeda: “Just noticed Twitter keeps prompting me to ‘Add a location to your tweets.’ Not falling for that one.”

Read more here

Local Broadcast Ads Rise 30%

Local television advertising continues to climb -- now up over 30% for the third quarter over the same period a year ago. The TVB, the TV marketing group, says a booming automotive category -- up 74.1% over a year ago and big political advertising -- help lead the charge for stations, pulling in some $4.1 billion during the period, per data from Kantar Media.

Overall, broadcast television improved 12.5% during the period to $9.9 billion.

Read more at Media Post

Web format has 'contaminated' online journalism

The problem with journalism on the Web today is that it's being contaminated by the Web form factor. What I mean is, journalists are being pushed to do things like slide shows -- stuff meant to attract page views. Articles themselves are condensed to narrow columns of text across 5, 6, 7 pages, and ads that are really distracting for the reader, so it's not a pleasant experience to 'curl up' with a good website.

Journalism is being pushed into a space where I don't think it should ever go, where it's trying to support the monetization model of the Web by driving page views. So what you have is a drop-off of long-form journalism, because long-form pieces are harder to monetize.

What the tablet does, for the first time, is let us hit the reset button on the presentation of content to readers.

So now you're getting these newspaper- and magazine-reading apps that do a much better job of showing the content on a full screen, and with nicer, larger advertisements.

Read more at the LA Times

Harvard, Google Map Cultural Trends

The word “God” peaked in usage in the world’s books about 1830. “Women” overtook “men” in print after 1985. Sigmund Freud has gotten more ink in the past 60 years than Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein.

Researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, teamed up with Google Inc. to survey 5.2 million digitized books -- about 4 percent of all the volumes published in any language -- to analyze language patterns and quantify cultural trends from 1800 to 2000. The four-year project is described today in the journal Science.

The Harvard researchers dub their discipline “culturomics” -- evoking genomics, in which scientists use billions of bits of quantitative data to study genes. Google, which has digitized 12 percent of the 130 million books published worldwide, unveiled today an online tool that enables users to track the frequency of words and phrases.

About 72 percent of the database’s text is in English, followed by French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew. It’s the largest data release in the history of humanities and is available for download, Michel said.

Read more at Businessweek

Bigger and better than Wi-Fi

The spectrum released by TV’s switch to digital broadcasting will soon be put to good use. In some places, this “white space” of unused frequencies separating working channels amounted to as much as 70% of the total bandwidth available for television broadcasting. Mobile-phone operators and other would-be users of wireless spectrum have long lusted after television’s empty airwaves. In America, after two years of wrangling, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington, DC, has finally given the go-ahead for white-space frequencies to be put to use.

In 2008 the FCC voted to reallocate the various segments of white space and unused channels between 54MHz and 806MHz (channels two to 69), which would no longer be needed when the last of the country’s analogue television transmitters switched to digital broadcasting in June 2009. Unlike analogue transmissions, digital signals do not “bleed” into one another and can therefore be packed closer together. As a consequence, television broadcasters now need little more than half the spectrum they hogged before switching to digital. That has not stopped them fighting tooth and claw to hang on to their unused white space. Most had grand plans for using such frequencies to sell information services to the public.

It was not to be. Instead, the FCC has used the switch to digital as an opportunity to liberate huge swathes of bandwidth for others to use. The most valuable frequencies of all, those in the 700MHz band (channels 52-69), have been auctioned off to mobile-phone operators. Between them, Verizon, AT&T and others paid nearly $20 billion to clinch this prime spectrum. The reason these channels are so valuable—and why they were chosen for terrestrial television in the first place—is that their signals travel for miles, can carry a lot of information, are unaffected by weather and foliage, and go through walls to penetrate all the nooks and crannies within the bowels of buildings.

The white space freed up below 700MHz is to be made available for unlicensed use by the public. By doing this, the FCC hopes to trigger another wireless revolution—one potentially bigger than the wave of innovation unleashed a decade or so ago when Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other wireless technologies embraced the unlicensed 2.4GHz band previously reserved for microwave ovens, baby alarms and remote openers for garage doors.

The difference this time is that the frequencies being released will allow much higher data rates.
Enthusiasts talk about white-space devices offering a “third pipe” for access to the internet, to rival cable and telephone broadband. Others see them providing an alternative to mobile phones. When wireless zones cover entire university campuses rather than mere coffee shops, anyone with a smartphone running Skype or something similar would be free of usage charges and operators’ restrictions.

White-space consumer products could then hit the retail market by late 2012.

Read more at The Economist

10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2011

1. Social media will be supersized

Ad agencies, for example, will offer bundles that include layers of creative strategy, campaign management and advertising deals all handled through a central dashboard; telecommunications companies will offer video tools for businesses and consumers with greater bandwidth, storage and syndication; learning management systems (LMS) integrators will add engagement, archiving, training and collaboration tools for a deeper and more engaging academic experience.


2. Companies will integrate social feedback into their decision making process

In 2011 we will see a growing number of companies finally go beyond using social channels merely for building awareness and providing support. As “social thinkers,” these companies will use the social engine to inform strategic decisions, and execute on the organization’'s objectives, marketing plans, product roadmaps and more.


3. Mobile will become our gateway to the world

For the first time, sales of smartphones outpace sales of desktops and laptops, iPhone and iPad applications were downloaded more than 7 billion times and research shows e-mail access is now on the rise on the iPhone while declining on the computer.


4. Video will be everywhere

With plummeting video delivery costs and highly accessible and flexible video management platforms custom-use of video by enterprises online, on mobile devices, and across screens is on the rise across all sectors.

In the coming year, gaps in our video experience will be filled with the integration of filtering, tagging, editing and locating tools into each and every video feed.


5. The next big Online Social Network will not be a network at all

In the coming year we will see the rise of dynamic, engaging, easy-to-use community platforms and applications that will better mimic and facilitate the innate way people seek to manage relationships.

For consumers, this means the ability to create smaller, more intimate, context-specific communities using their existing social graph and livestreams. Every company should think of itself as a media company,” said Tom Foremski, journalist and thought-leader.


6. ROI will be redefined

Companies who hire social media strategists with proven marketing analytics background and business strategy experience will have the upper hand and will place first in the race to cracking the ROI code.


7. Psychology is shifting

We have new levels of cognitive flexibility, which is creating a new way of thinking about the world and about ourselves,” said Dr. Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center and co-founder of A Think Lab.

As the constructs of relationships, privacy and our ability to influence others evolve, we will also face important questions: How do we respond to the changing definition of relationships? How does the elimination of behavioral cues, only available face-to-face, impact our ability to connect? How does our need for emotional balance get addressed in the face of constant change?


8. Citizen activism brings back purpose and power

With the power made possible by social technologies to connect, inform and mobilize, we will see a surge in self-organized and managed citizen activism.


9. Social business intelligence will heat up and so will privacy

Wikileak’s' eruption on the social media waves and Do Not Track are just previews. Every company now looks to tap into the boundless user data being collected in the cloud.

In the year ahead we will witness (and be part of) major data virtualization initiatives designed to map our activities, preferences and choices.


10. The role of the social media strategist will be changing

In 2011, social media strategists will need to contend with much more actionable, and often mundane, tasks such as selecting and piloting new tools, integrating social widgets and analytics, helping to educate the organization, and integrating social-based thinking into the organization’'s process and culture.

Read more at ReadWriteWeb

North Korea Uses Social Media

South Korea has an aggressive effort to block its citizens from accessing the North’s Korean-language online content. To break past the firewall, the North jumped into social media this summer, according to an U.S. intelligence report disclosed today by Public Intelligence. The move was announced by a North Korean website called Urminjokkkiri that’s administered out of China.

South Koreans visiting Urminjokkkiri can find a link to proxy router programs to help them evade the firewall, according to the August report from the Director of National Intelligence’s Open Source Center, “suggesting a connection with efforts to neutralize South Korean censorship.” Pyongyang’s official Twitter account — which has over 10,000 followers — uses TinyURL links, so users don’t get directed to blocked North Korean web addresses.

A mock North Korean Urminjokkkiri account on Facebook is almost entirely blank, except for a message: “THE IMPERIALIST AMERIKAN CENSORS HAVE BLOCKED PUBLISHING RIGHTS, PLEASE KEEP UP GOOD FIGHT FOR DEAR LEADER!” Ridicule: the impenetrable firewall.

Read more at Wired

Microsoft to Announce New Slates

Next month, at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft will (present) a slew of new slates that it hopes will offer some competition to the Apple iPad, which has quickly become the leader in this market. The Samsung device is described as “similar in size and shape to the Apple iPad, although it is not as thin. It also includes a unique and slick keyboard that slides out from below for easy typing.” The people familiar with this device said it would run the Windows 7 operating system when in landscape mode, but will also have a layered interface that will appear when the keyboard is hidden and the device is held in a portrait mode.

Read more at the New York Times

Reuters’ New Wire Service

Reuters will launch a new U.S. news service in an attempt to take on rivals including the Associated Press. Its first client will be Tribune Co., which said it will use less material from the AP and reduce its financial commitment to the news cooperative.

Thomson Reuters' new offering, dubbed Reuters America, will focus on state and regional news and incorporate material from a variety of other sources, including The Wrap.com for entertainment news, SportsDirect Inc. and others for sports, and Examiner.com for local coverage.

Tribune is one of several major news organizations that in recent years have complained about the AP's prices and rigid terms as steep advertising declines put newspapers under growing financial strain. The AP has responded by implementing several fee reductions totaling $65 million and introducing several classes of membership.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

A Sense of Place

One sunny spring day in 2004, Dennis Crowley was running down Waverly Street dressed in yellow, avoiding ghosts. Crowley, then a 27-year-old grad student in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, was participating in a class project called Pac-Manhattan, which used the streets of Greenwich Village for a grueling physical version of the classic arcade game. He was Pac-Man, and—despite a support team that was logging his movements, tracking ghosts, and directing him to power pills—people dressed as Pac-Man spooks eventually cornered him near Fifth Avenue. The New York Times described the experience as “a kind of tableau of digital convergence with the physical world.”

Six years later, Crowley and I are sitting in a NoHo cafè pecking at our iPhones. Using Foursquare, an app Crowley cocreated, we are “checking in” to the restaurant. Like many mobile social applications that use GPS, Foursquare lets you broadcast your location to friends and strangers—and, of course, it lets you see where they are, too.

But Foursquare is more like a game than a newsfeed.

Read more at Wired

NYT Falls from S&P 500

Netflix was added to Standard & Poor’s S&P 500 index, which lists large-cap public companies, mostly from the U.S. It’s also a sign of the times as an old media giant, The New York Times, officially loses the large-cap company title and starts slumming with other mid-sized companies.

Read more at Mashable

WikiLeaks May Impact Newsgathering

There are already indications that Congress could take steps to sanction the publication of certain classified information, moving beyond the current regime in which the confidential source, if exposed, faces the greatest legal exposure.

These moves have sparked intense debate, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other free speech organizations criticizing the U.S response to the leak as censorship akin to the pressure put by the Chinese government on Google. As these organizations point out, government interference with access to websites containing leaked classified documents may be tantamount to a prior restraint and thus may violate the First Amendment principles articulated in the Pentagon Papers case, which involved a high-profile leak of classified documents concerning the Vietnam War.

Read more at the Newsroom Law Blog

Who Uses Twitter?

We added a straightforward question to our tracking survey that took place in November 2010 where we asked online adults: "Do you use Twitter?" In this survey, 8% of online adults said they do use Twitter -- with 2% doing so on a typical day. This survey also showed that 74% of American adults are internet users, meaning that the Twitter cohort amounts to 6% of the entire adult population.

Some of the groups who are notable for their relatively high levels of Twitter use include:

• Young adults: Internet users ages 18-29 are significantly more likely to use Twitter than are older adults.
• African-Americans and Latinos: Minority internet users are more than twice as likely to use Twitter as are white internet users.
• Urbanites: Urban residents are roughly twice as likely to use Twitter as rural dwellers.

Read more from the Pew Research Center

Why NYT Cut Its Social Media Editor

Earlier this week, New York Times Social Media Editor Jennifer Preston tweeted that she would be returning to reporting full-time. The move is part of the Times’ efforts to more fully integrate its print and digital operations. It’s also an acknowledgment that social media needs to be — and is already — a shared responsibility.

Hiring a social media editor is an important first step for newsrooms, Preston said. But she sees the social media editor as more of a temporary role than a permanent one. It becomes less necessary, she said, once more people in the newsroom start regularly using social media.

Read more at Poynter

Metering the News

The big trend in the media (in 2011) will be the return of the paywall, as an increasing number of websites ask users to pay. The most prominent example will be the New York Times, which will switch on a new paywall in January or February, but by April several dozen other American newspapers will have followed suit, says Ken Doctor, a media-industry analyst and the author of “Newsonomics”.

This is, in part, a response to the iPad. Publishers are keen to exploit readers’ apparent willingness to pay for content on mobile devices (they pay for music, games and other apps, after all). But it is difficult to justify charging for content on a tablet computer if you are also giving it away on the web.

A deeper reason for the sudden appearance of paywalls in 2011 is that publishers are at last admitting that web-based advertising revenue will not cover their costs, and so they will have to start charging readers.

At one extreme are very strict paywalls like that of the London Times: only paying subscribers are allowed to see articles, which are even hidden from internet search engines. At the other extreme are newspapers that give everything away and allow anyone to read anything, in order to attract as many readers (and hence advertisers) as possible. There is lots of middle ground. The favoured model is now a “metered” paywall that lets users read a limited number of articles without paying, but asks for payment if they go beyond that number. The advantage of this approach, which was pioneered by the Financial Times and is being adopted by The Economist, is that publishers can “turn the dial” to adjust how many free articles readers are allowed to see, depending on the market conditions.

That does not mean that paywalls will save newspapers, however. A study of British newspapers by Enders Analysis, a consultancy, found that online subscribers produce less than one-third as much revenue as print subscribers.

Read more at The Economist

Curl up with a Good Screen

If 2010 was the year e-readers and tablet computers entered the mainstream, 2011 will be when the electronic reading vessel truly disrupts its content. On multipurpose mobile devices, from smart-phones to the iPad and its emerging competitors, the book will cease to be a book. It will be an “app”.

E-readers and computing tablets will continue their impressive momentum. The number of Americans owning a dedicated reading device trebled in 2010 to 11m, and will pass 15m in 2011, according to Forrester Research. The iPad took off even faster than the iPhone did a few years back. In 2010 Apple sold about 15m of its sexy touch-screen devices, prompting real competition: e-readers suddenly became affordable. Amazon slashed the price of its Kindle. Barnes & Noble and Sony followed suit.

This price war will continue in 2011.

The year will probably see the launch of Google Editions, the third big e-book retailer after Amazon and Apple.

Yet the printed book will never entirely die, as devotees of vinyl and film have shown. Nor should it: human knowledge is too precious to consign to the ether alone.

Read more at The Economist

Survey of iPad Use for News

The Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) recently completed the first phase of a multi-year research project to understand how Apple iPad users consume news content.
Based on the responses gathered from more than 1,600 iPad users, here is what RJI have learned:

• Keeping up with news and current events is their most popular main use
- Using the iPad to follow breaking news reports and current events is the most popular use for the device, with 84.4% of respondents saying this is one of their main uses. Next according to popularity: leisure reading of books, newspapers and magazines (81.5%); browsing the Web (80.8%); and e-mail (75.8%).

- More than three quarters (78.6%) of the users spent at least 30 minutes during a typical day consuming news on their iPad. Respondents spent a similar amount of time with other media at a much lower rate: television (52.5%), personal computers (50.7%), printed Sunday newspapers (30.7%), printed weekday newspapers (18.8%).

- Nearly half (48.9%) of the respondents said they spent an hour or more during a typical day consuming news on their iPad.

• iPad news consumers prefer newspaper apps to newspaper websites; less likely to use print

• Low prices and ease of use are key factors in users' decisions to purchase newspaper subscriptions on the iPad

Read the full report here.

The Power of Television

The robustness of the ardor for television ads is startling some forecasters, who had believed that the intensifying demand for online advertising would cut into sales for TV as it has for, say, newspapers. That does not seem to be the case, even as they point to a sharp climb in spending for Internet ads as another reason the recovery will proceed — and even gain momentum — into next year.

“The success story, perhaps surprisingly, has been television,” said Steve King, chief executive at the ZenithOptimedia media division of the Publicis Groupe. TV is, by his estimates, still gaining share of the overall advertising market, he added, to 40.7 percent in 2010, from 37 percent in 2005.

Brian Wieser, global director for forecasting at Magna Global, part of the Mediabrands division of the Interpublic Group of Companies... said he foresaw no dire effects on traditional television from the growth of what is known as over-the-top TV, which is delivery of programming through the Internet by means like the new Google TV, developed by Google, Intel, Logitech and Sony.

There could be 20 million to 25 million people watching TV that way by 2020, he added. That would be a fraction of those viewers still watching TV through cable systems, satellite or even over the air.

“Despite all the other viewing options, most people still like watching TV at home on a TV set,” said Steve Sternberg, the longtime television research analyst who writes a blog, The Sternberg Report.

Read more at the New York Times

The Pivotal Moment

Investors should back people rather than ideas. What’s new is that the cost of starting certain kinds of businesses (especially web-based ones) has fallen, says Bill Sahlman of Harvard Business School. There has been a “remarkable increase in the degree of entrepreneurial experimentation,” he observes. It is easier to launch and test an idea, and to pivot to another if it flops.

Mr Patricof says that today’s entrepreneurs are more mature. Many have been through the start-up process before and are warier of burning up all their cash than they were in the 1990s. Hence their greater propensity to pirouette.

Fail to twirl and your start-up may become one of the “living dead”, warns Eric Ries, a serial entrepreneur and blogger. He writes that pivoting is particularly important if you are what he calls a “lean start-up”. Yet you can have too much of a good thing, he cautions. An entrepreneur can overdo it and become a “compulsive jumper, never picking a single direction long enough to find out if there’s anything there.”

Read more at The Economist

Google Launches Online Bookstore

Google’s long awaited e-book-only bookstore, Google eBooks, puts the company in competition with Amazon, Apple and Borders for the burgeoning electronic-book market. The move, limited at the start to U.S. customers only, also marks the first real retail venture for the search and online-advertising behemoth, if you don’t count the Android app market. The company claims that it will have more books in its catalog than any other online bookstore — more than 3 million titles, but only about 200,000 of those are books licensed from publishers. About 2.8 million of the books are books no longer under copyright in the United States that Google has scanned from university libraries as part of its controversial Google Books project. Started in 2004, Google Books has scanned millions of books, mostly without permission from copyright holders, making them searchable online.

Google is seeking to differentiate itself from Amazon and its popular Kindle reader by selling books that can be read on a wide range of devices, from iPhones, iPads and Android-based devices, along with computers running any browser that can use JavaScript. Books can also be read on Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Sony’s E Reader, but not on Amazon’s Kindle — because of compatibility issues with the Adobe copyright management DRM attached to the e-books, Google said.

All of the largest publishers, except for Random House, are opting for a model where the publishers set the price and Google and other retailers are simply acting as their agents. In this model, publishers and Google/retailers roughly split the price.

Read more at Wired

Viacom Appeals YouTube Ruling

Viacom appealed Friday its unsuccessful $1 billion copyright lawsuit against Google’s YouTube in a case testing the depths of copyright-infringement protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. (If the June ruling) survives, is a boon for internet freedom — and a decision that would make it more difficult for rights holders to protect their works. (The judge) ruled that YouTube, which Google purchased in 2006 for $1.8 billion, had no way of knowing whether a video was licensed by the owner, was a “fair use” of the material “or even whether its copyright owner or licensee objects to its posting.” The DMCA’s “safe harbor” privilege comes with another price. The law demands intermediaries such as YouTube to take down content in response to a notice from rights holders, without evaluating the claim for reasonableness or accuracy, or considering the fair use rights of users.

Read more at Wired

Newspapers' Ad Revs Dip

While other media appear to be embarking on a tentative recovery, the third quarter of 2010 brought no respite for newspapers, which saw total advertising revenues slip 5.4% to $6.1 billion compared to the same period last year. This was due entirely to a 7.1% drop in print advertising revenue, to $5.4 billion. The print decline was only partially offset by a 10.7% increase in digital ad revenue, to $690 million.

Read more at Media Post

Scientific Journalism

The New Yorker has a profile of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. In the article, Assange endorsed the idea of what he calls as “scientific journalism” as the new way of doing journalistic work. He’s asserting that like any scientific study, anyone who makes a claim about something needs to publish the dataset that he or she used in arriving at the said finding.

Read more at Technorati

Charity to give away 1,000,000 books

A UK-based charity plans to give away a million books - 40,000 copies each of twenty-five selected titles - on March 5 next year. If you live in the UK and Ireland you can sign up as a book-giver - 20,000 will be selected and each will receive a box of books to hand out."

Read more here.

U.S. Mobile Ad Revenues

BIA/Kelsey is releasing a new report that shows that U.S. mobile advertising revenues will grow from $491 million in 2009 to $2.9 billion in 2014. During the forecast period, BIA/Kelsey expects U.S. mobile search ad revenues to grow from $59 million to $1.6 billion, U.S. mobile display ad revenues to grow from $206 million to $803 million, and U.S. mobile SMS ad revenues to grow from $226 million to $562 million.

In terms of the local breakdown, BIA/Kelsey expects U.S. mobile local advertising revenues to grow from $213 million in 2009 to $2.03 billion in 2014. This represents 44 percent of total U.S. mobile ad revenues in 2009, growing to 69 percent in 2014. BIA/Kelsey defines mobile local advertising as ads that are targeted based on a user’s location.

Read more at Tech Crunch.

Google to Launch E-Book Venture

Google Inc. is in the final stages of launching its long-awaited e-book retailing venture, Google Editions. Google Editions hopes to upend the existing e-book market by offering an open, "read anywhere" model that is different from many competitors. Users will be able to buy books directly from Google or from multiple online retailers—including independent bookstores—and add them to an online library tied to a Google account. They will be able to access their Google accounts on most devices with a Web browser, including personal computers, smartphones and tablets.

That's a different approach from Amazon.com Inc., which is estimated to have as much as 65% of the market. Users of its proprietary Kindle device can purchase books only from an Amazon store. Digital book sales are expected to more than triple to $966 million this year, according to Forrester Research, from $301 million in 2009.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.

The Web Rewires Brains

The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There’s the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. Every time we shift our attention, the brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources. Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll overlook or misinterpret important information. On the Internet, where we generally juggle several tasks, the switching costs pile ever higher. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the fragmentation of our attention, and the thinning of our thoughts in return for the wealth of compelling, or at least diverting, information we receive.

In a Science article published in early 2009, prominent developmental psychologist Patricia Greenfield reviewed more than 40 studies of the effects of various types of media on intelligence and learning ability. She concluded that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies, she wrote, has led to the “widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills.” But those gains go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacity for the kind of “deep processing” that underpins “mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.”

The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the Net’s treasures, we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture.

We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.

From Nicholas Carr's The Shallows. Read more at Wired

The Web Shatters Focus

What kind of brain is the Web giving us? Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.

A 2007 scholarly review of hypertext experiments concluded that jumping between digital documents impedes understanding. And if links are bad for concentration and comprehension, it shouldn’t be surprising that more recent research suggests that links surrounded by images, videos, and advertisements could be even worse.

When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time. And that short-term storage is fragile: A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind.

Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in moving information from working memory into long-term memory. On the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from tap to tap. We transfer only a small jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream. When the load exceeds our mind’s ability to process and store it, we’re unable to retain the information or to draw connections with other memories.

From Nicholas Carr's The Shallows. Read more at Wired

Affluent Viewers Love TV

Affluent adults are watching the same amount of TV as they did a year ago, according to a new report. Research shows that individuals in homes with incomes of $100,000-plus watch an average of 17.6 hours a week this year, tied with 2009. However, Internet usage has shown a 12% bump, rising from an average of 22.6 hours a week in 2009 to 25.3 this year, according to the annual Mendelsohn Affluent Survey.

The research also found evidence that TV advertising reaches more adults than other media. Of a projected group of 44.1 million affluent Americans, 38.6 million saw an ad on TV in a six-month period. Magazines were second at 35.5 million. Web sites were fifth at 33.4 million (following direct mail and newspapers).

Read more at Media Post

Spammers

Spammers are moving onto social-networking sites such as Facebook because they find e-mail increasingly unrewarding. Online-security firms stop more than 98% from reaching its target.

Typical junk mail comes from freelancers who are paid to direct traffic to websites that sell fake pills and counterfeit brands. But fraud and forgery are illegal. Instead of tricking consumers into a purchase, they are stealing their money directly. Links used to direct the gullible to a site selling counterfeits. Now they install “Trojan” software that ransacks hard drives for bank details and the like.

Nor is Facebook as safe as Mr Zuckerberg would wish. As an experiment, BitDefender, an online-security firm, set up fake profiles on the social network and asked strangers to enter into a digital friendship. They were able to create as many as 100 new friends a day. Offering a profile picture, particularly of a pretty woman, increased their odds. When the firm’s researchers expanded their requests to strangers who shared even one mutual friend, almost half accepted. Worse, a quarter of BitDefender’s new friends clicked on links posted by the firm, even when the destination was obscured.

Read more at The Economist

Dotconomy

PayPal is one of a growing band of online companies dipping into the data they gather in an effort to divine trends in the American economy. Last month Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, revealed that the search-engine giant had developed a “Google Price Index”, based on web-shopping data it holds—though it has yet to decide whether to publish it. While Google flirts with inflation, Intuit monitors employment. The firm, which offers online payroll, tax and other services to small businesses, produces a monthly small-business employment index based on aggregated data from 59,000 of its customers.

Tayloe Stansbury, Intuit’s chief technology officer, says that most of the firm’s data mining is geared to helping its customers. But some economic policymakers are paying attention to web firms’ statistics, for a couple of reasons.

The first is the speed with which the data are generated and crunched. Because web businesses gather data rapidly, their indicators can sometimes identify trends before official statistics. Take the case of Monster Worldwide, an online job service that publishes an index tracking jobs posted on its own and other sites. This fell sharply in 2007 before official numbers showed employment in America weakening

A second reason that web firms’ indicators are gaining popularity is the detailed data that underpin them.

Some economists caution that web firms’ data have big handicaps. Many of the indices have only a short history, which means they are of little value to policymakers interested in long-term trends. And they often measure only online transactions, which limits their appeal.

Read more at The Economist.

Ad Revenue Report

Online advertising revenue increased 17 percent in the 3rd Quarter of 2010 when compared to the same period in 2009. Internet ad revenue set a record in the process hitting $6.4 billion, according to the The Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Read more here.

66 Mexican journalists killed

In the last five years, 66 journalists have been killed and 12 journalists have disappeared in Mexico, according to a report by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). There has been a conviction in only 10% of the cases.

Habits of Online Newspaper Readers

Less than one percent of all online news views are made on tablet devices. The overwhelming majority of views, 97 percent, still come from desktop computers. Mobile readership came in at a whopping 2 percent. Mobile views peak during the morning commute hours, while iPad readers prefer to view in the evening. And desktop views? Strongest during the middle of the day.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.

Your own Private Matrix

"Mirror Worlds" is only one of David Gelernter’s big ideas. Another is “lifestreams”—in essence, vast electronic diaries. “Every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream,” he wrote in the mid-1990s together with Eric Freeman, who produced a doctoral thesis on the topic. Putting electronic documents in chronological order, they said, would make it easier for people to manage all their digital output and experiences. The latest trend is “life-tracking”. Practitioners keep meticulous digital records of things they do. The first self-trackers were mostly über-geeks fascinated by numbers. But the more recent converts simply want to learn more about themselves, says Gary Wolf, a technology writer and co-founder of a blog called “The Quantified Self”. They want to use technology to help them identify factors that make them depressed, keep them from sleeping or affect their cognitive performance. One self-tracker learned, for instance, that eating a lot of butter allowed him to solve arithmetic problems faster.

Read more at The Economist.

A Sea of Sensors

RFID tags, which have been used to identify everything from cattle to tombstones, will not be the only type of sensor crowding the planet. Anything and anyone—machines, devices, everyday things and particularly humans—can become a sensor, gathering and transmitting information about the real world.

The concept of the “internet of things” dates back to the late 1980s, when researchers at Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in Silicon Valley imagined a future in which the virtual and the real world would be connected. In the following years much of the academic work concentrated on bringing this about with RFID tags, which are reliable, inexpensive and do not require a power supply. When exposed to a radio signal, they use its energy to send back the information they contain, mostly a long number identifying an object.

Now it is “active” tags (which have their own power source) and, even more, wireless sensors that are attracting most of the interest. As with all things electronic, these are becoming ever smaller and more versatile.

Engineers working on sensors think this will eventually lead to “smart dust”—sensors as small as dust particles that can be dispersed on a battlefield, say, to spy on the enemy’s movements. Such devices are still far off, but at Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Silicon Valley a taste—or more precisely, a feel—of things to come is on offer even now. To demonstrate the firm’s new accelerometer, a device the size of a cigarette box that measures the acceleration of an object, Peter Hartwell, a researcher, puts it on his chest, and a graph of his heartbeat appears on a screen beside him. “This sensor”, he proudly explains, “is one thousand times more sensitive than those in your smartphone.”

Read more at The Economist.

Radio Stabilized, Newspapers Slammed In 3Q

A quick glance over third-quarter results from big publishers and radio groups suggests their fortunes are diverging, following a long period of tandem decline. In short, radio is perking up as the economy enters a slow, tentative recovery -- but newspapers are continuing to suffer losses. Most big radio groups reported single-digit growth in revenues in the third quarter compared to last year -- modest, but noteworthy on the heels of two years of straight declines. Conversely, big newspaper publishers continued to struggle, with single-digit declines across the board.

Read More at Media Post.

The Real and the Digital Worlds are Converging

WHAT if there were two worlds, the real one and its digital reflection? The real one is strewn with sensors, picking up everything from movement to smell. The digital one, an edifice built of software, takes in all that information and automatically acts on it. If a door opens in the real world, so does its virtual equivalent. If the temperature in the room with the open door falls below a certain level, the digital world automatically turns on the heat.

This was the vision that David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, put forward in his book “Mirror Worlds” in the early 1990s. “You will look into a computer screen and see reality,” he predicted. “Some part of your world—the town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital—will hang there in a sharp colour image, abstract but recognisable, moving subtly in a thousand places.”

Yet it is the smartphone and its “apps” (small downloadable applications that run on these devices) that is speeding up the convergence of the physical and the digital worlds. Smartphones are packed with sensors, measuring everything from the user’s location to the ambient light. Much of that information is then pumped back into the network. Apps, for their part, are miniature versions of smart systems that allow users to do a great variety of things, from tracking their friends to controlling appliances in their homes.

Smartphones are also where the virtual and the real meet most directly and merge into something with yet another fancy name: “augmented reality”. Download an app called “Layar” onto your smartphone, turn on its video camera, point at a street, and the software will overlay the picture on the screen with all kinds of digital information, such as the names of the businesses on the street or if a house is for sale.

Read more at The Economist.

Bestseller Lists for E-Books

The New York Times says it will begin publishing bestseller lists for e-book fiction and nonfiction in early 2011. The addition of two new lists for e-books points to the growing importance of the medium to the industry — and underlines the fact that what may be selling best in hardback or paperback may not be what’s selling best in electronic format. U.S. consumers are projected to spend $1 billion in e-books this year, according to a recent report from Forrester, who also expects that sales will surpass $3 billion by 2015.

Read more at Mashable.

Still in Standard Def

Even though 56% of U.S. households have high-def, more than 80% of television viewing is still done in standard definition, according to a report this week by Nielsen. Even on HD sets, though, about 20% of programs are viewed through non-HD feeds.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.

The 'Aspirational' Consumer: R.I.P.

The spending habits of the utmost tier of earners remains robust, but everyone below has cut back and plans to stay there. “If you look at the 10-15% [sales volume] declines for upscale retailers and brands, it was [due to] people spending beyond their means and not being able to sustain it,” said AARC president Ron Kurtz. Even within the sphere most would consider well-off ($250,000 average annual household earnings), 41 percent reported they’re making a conscious effort to reduce expenditures for the next 12 months.

Isolated data? Hardly. Consumer Edge Research recently found that skipping top-shelf brands in favor of lower-end ones is most common in households with incomes of $100,000 or higher. A study conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers/Kantar Retail earlier this year revealed that 93 percent of shoppers say they’ve changed their shopping behavior—with 17 percent opting for cheaper brands. “Although we’re starting to see signs of shoppers getting tired of trading down, they remain cognizant of today’s economic realities,” said a Kantar official in a statement. These findings are in line with last year's McKinsey study, which revealed 41 percent of consumers think that premium brands are “not worth the money.”

So much for life’s little indulgences.

Read more at Brand Week.

Born digital

IN THE digital realm, things seem always to happen the wrong way round. Whereas Google has hurried to scan books into its digital catalogue, a group of national libraries has begun saving what the online giant leaves behind. For although search engines such as Google index the web, they do not archive it. Many websites just disappear when their owner runs out of money or interest.

In 1996 Brewster Kahle, a computer scientist and internet entrepreneur, founded the Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving websites. He also began gently harassing national libraries to worry about preserving the web.

Another issue is ensuring that the data is stored in a format that makes it available in centuries to come. Ancient manuscripts are still readable. But much digital media from the past is readable only on a handful of fragile and antique machines, if at all. Audio and video programmes based on proprietary formats such as Windows Media Player are another challenge. What happens if Microsoft is bankrupt and forgotten in 2210?

Read more at The Economist.

A Social Music Chart

Entrepreneur Eric Garland thinks he has a better music chart. His secret? Tweets, status updates, and web chatter. BigChampagne, based in Beverly Hills, tracks sales, downloads, and listening activity on just about every music-distribution platform, from iTunes to FM radio to MySpace. (And, yes, it still tracks illegal file sharing too.). BigChampagne then analyzes and sells the data to record labels, talent agents, and radio stations that are looking to find under-the-radar acts.

In late July, BigChampagne unveiled its latest creation, the Ultimate Chart, which supplements widely available data on sales on Amazon (AMZN) and iTunes with metrics that measure a song's buzz: YouTube (GOOG) and MySpace hits, Twitter and Facebook mentions, Clear Channel radio spins, and Rhapsody and Last.fm streams.

Read more here.

TV Station Mocks Social Media

Newspaper Circulation Falls

Newspapers across the country broadly reported falling circulation from April through September, though the rate of decline has slowed. Figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations showed that overall weekday circulation at 635 newspapers declined 5 percent from circulation in the same six months last year. The decline last year was at more than twice that rate.

Read more at the New York Times.

Local TV: Value Drops

Local TV station advertising revenue and overall profits may be skyrocketing upwards -- but station value is not rising for media investors. Looking at the six pure-play TV station groups, New York-based media investment company M.C. Alcamo & Co. says companies are trading at less than they did at the start of the year -- even though revenues and profits are higher. At the same time, these 15 media companies -- pure-play and integrated media companies -- have seen 12.1% more revenue in the second quarter of 2010 versus a comparable period in 2009. In addition, profitability among this media group has improved 5 percentage points to 39% from 35% a year ago.

Read more here.

Paper Credit Deteriorating

The credit outlook for the U.S. newspaper sector is getting worse, Moody's says, as it revised its outlook for the industry from stable to negative. According to Moody's, newspaper revenues are likely to drop 5%-6% this year, with a mid-single-digit drop next year, following a 22% decline in 2009.

Read more at Barron's.

The Top 25 U.S. Newspapers

If you ranked the top 25 U.S. newspapers by PageRank (by Google) instead of circulation, the list looks like this:

• 9/10 - The New York Times stands alone as far as Google concerned – it has the highest PageRank of the top 25 U.S. newspapers
• 
  
• 8/10 – The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, NY Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle and StarTribune have equal authority at 8/10
• 
  
• 7/10 – The Dallas Morning News, The Chicago Sun-Times, Detroit Free Press, Houston Chronicle, The Arizona Republic, The Oregonian, The Star-Ledger, The San Diego Union-Tribune and Newsday are tied for third place with a PageRank of 7/10

Take popular blogs like The Huffington Post or TechCrunch for example. Both blogs have a Google PageRank of 8/10 – do those blogs have the same authority as The Wall Street Journal or USA Today? As far as Google is concerned they do.

Read more here.

BBC Guidelines

The BBC posts a new set of guidelines for online and social journalists here.

Texting "Gone Mad"

The average teenager sends over 3,000 texts per month. That's more than six texts per waking hour. According to a new study from Nielsen, our society has gone mad with texting, data usage and app downloads. Teens are sending 8 percent more texts than they were this time last year. Other age groups don't even come close, either; the average 18 to 24-year-old sends "only" 1,630 texts per month. The average only drops with other age groups. However, in every age bracket, the number of texts sent has increased when compared to last year. Texting is a more important means of communication than ever.

Read more here.

Making Money in the Music Business

For the past ten years sales of recorded music have declined so steeply as to become a cautionary tale about the disruptive power of the internet. The rise of illegal file-sharing and the end of the digital “replacement cycle”, in which people bought CDs to replace tapes and records, caused spending to collapse. In Japan, the world’s biggest CD sales market, the number of discs sold fell by 6% in 2008 and 24% in 2009.

Yet the music business is surprisingly healthy, and becoming more so. The longest, loudest boom is in live music. Between 1999 and 2009 concert-ticket sales in America tripled in value, from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion (see chart 1). It is not that more people are going to concerts. Rather, they are paying more to get in. Fans complain bitterly about the rising price of live music.

Music’s best business customer is television. “Watch an evening’s worth of TV and count how many times you hear music in the background,” says Jeremy Lascelles, chief executive of Chrysalis.

In a sense, the recorded-music market is not so much dying as greying. America’s bestselling album since 2000 is “1”, a collection of Beatles hits from the 1960s. Some music executives fret that the stadium-filling acts will not be replaced.

Read more in The Economist.

Digital Forensics

How do we check the accuracy of news images, particularly in moments of breaking-news urgency? Though we’re seeing a blossoming of fact-checking in text-based journalism, we have yet to see an equivalent movement in image-based news reporting — mostly, of course, because we lack good tools for determining whether images are authentic or manipulated, whether they depict what they claim to or something else entirely.

Enter Hany Farid. A computer science professor at Dartmouth, Farid is a pioneer in the field of digital forensics, figuring out how to analyze images to determine their authenticity. (Think CSI: Photojournalism.) Now, photo-tampering is becoming so prevalent, Farid notes, that mistrust of images is slowly becoming our default. “There’s almost a backlash,” he says, “and now there’s this over-skepticism of everything out there. It’s amazing.”

Read more here.

Facebook's 'Herding Instinct'

Research from Oxford University shows that consumers have a herding instinct to "follow the crowd" once a clear winner is established. However, this instinct appears to switch off almost entirely if the product fails to achieve a certain popularity threshold. The study concludes that while some books and films are highly advertised by their producers, that element is only a small fraction, leaving the great majority of books and films exposed to the forces of social influence.

The study concludes that social influence had a key role in whether apps became flops or hits.
They discovered that once an app had reached a rate of about 55 installations a day, its popularity then soared to reach stellar proportions.

Read more here.

The Other Social Network

What The Social Network film doesn't mention are all the other college social networks that Facebook shoved aside as it expanded across the country. Of those sites, perhaps the greatest threat to Facebook's dominance was Campus Network, then called CU Community after Columbia University, where it was founded. Why did Facebook succeed where Campus Network failed? The simplest explanation is, well, its simplicity. Yes, Campus Network had advanced features that Facebook was missing. While Campus Network blitzed first-time users right away, Facebook updated its features incrementally. Facebook respected the Web's learning curve. Campus Network did too much too soon. Neither site, of course, can claim to be the first social network—Friendster and MySpace already had large followings in 2003. But both Facebook and Campus Network had the crucial insight that overlaying a virtual community on top of an existing community—a college campus—would cement users' trust and loyalty. Campus Network figured it out first. Facebook just executed it better.


Read more at Slate.

Papers Thrive in India

Since 2005 the number of paid-for Indian daily newspaper titles has surged by 44% to 2,700, according to the World Association of Newspapers. That gives India more paid-for newspapers than any other country. One reason why the internet has not yet started destroying Indian newspapers is that only 7% of Indians surf the web regularly. Granted, only 65% of Indian adults can read—a pitiful figure. But it is nearly twice what it was three decades ago. The Times of India, whose circulation of 4m makes it the world’s biggest English-language newspaper, charges roughly ten times more than regional dailies do. The circulation of Hindi papers rose from less than 8m in the early 1990s to more than 25m last year.

The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, a trade body, and KPMG, a consultancy, predict that in the next four years the newspaper industry’s revenues will grow by 9% a year, to $5.9 billion. One day, the internet will start to hurt print. Around 16m Indians visited online news sites in October last year, up by 37% from the previous October.

Read more at The Economist

Skills from Zapping 'em

THE relentless march of technology into everyday life has always given rise to debate about whether it is a good or a bad thing. Some believe that the internet and computer software are making humans more stupid or shallow. But others argue that computer programs in the form of video games can make people smarter or improve specific skills, such as spatial awareness. Indeed, an entire industry has emerged to help people “train” or improve their brains.

Shawn Green, Alexandre Pouget and Daphne Bavelier, from the University of Rochester, in New York state, set out to find an answer. The researchers conclude that video-games players develop an enhanced sensitivity to what is going on around them and that this may help with activities such as multitasking, driving, reading small print, navigation and keeping track of friends or children in a crowd.

Read more at The Economist.

The Return of Advertising

Advertising is still leaching out of newspapers, particularly regional ones. It is returning only slowly to magazines. Billboards are faring better. Yet the greatest old-media winner is television—in most countries the main advertising medium.

Many newspaper readers have moved online, where they are worth less to advertisers. Not so TV viewers. In the first quarter of this year the average American spent 158 hours per month in front of the box, according to Nielsen, a research firm. That was two hours more than a year earlier. B

Television’s ability to build brands by surrounding adverts with gripping content is unsurpassed. Online video is still not a serious competitor, partly because viewers are less tolerant of ads, partly because much of it is poor. Yet some websites are closing the gap. Many companies are experimenting with social networks, where people are more engaged.

Read more at The Economist.

Rise of the App Culture

As the mobile phone has morphed from a voice device to a multi-channel device to an internet-accessing mini-computer, a large market of mobile software applications, or “apps,” has arisen.
35% of adults have cell phones with apps, but only two-thirds of those who have apps actually use them. Of the 82% of adults today who are cell phone users, 43% have software applications or “apps” on their phones. When taken as a portion of the entire U.S. adult population, that equates to 35% who have cell phones with apps.

Yet having apps and using apps are not synonymous. Of those who have apps on their phones, only about two-thirds of this group (68%) actually use that software. Overall, that means that 24% of U.S. adults are active apps users. Older adult cell phone users in particular do not use the apps that are on their phones, and one in ten adults with a cell phone (11%) are not even sure if their phone is equipped with apps.

When compared with other cell phone using adults, and the entire U.S. adult population, the apps user population skews male, and is much younger, more affluent, and more educated than other adults. Overall, the apps-using population also skews slightly Hispanic when compared with other adult cell phone users.

Read more here.

Magazine Pubs Change Name

The Magazine Publishers of America is being renamed MPA — the Association of Magazine Media (dash and all). The dispatching of “publishers” from the name is meant to signal how readers can engage with magazines beyond the printed page through nontraditional means like Web sites, mobile devices, tablets, events, social media, books, retail presences and even branded merchandise.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, magazine ad spending, which reached $14.4 billion in 2007, fell to $13.3 billion in 2008 and $10.5 billion last year. The declines are expected to continue, PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated, to $9.8 billion this year and $9.5 billion in 2011. That cumulative decline from 2007 to 2011 would be 34 percent.

Read more at the New York Times.

Facebook Myths

1. Facebook is used mostly by college kids. While Facebook's base still skews young, about two-thirds of its 134 million American members are older than 26. Outside the United States, Facebook's fastest growth has been among middle-age women.

Facebook messaging is beginning to replace e-mail among the Italian educated elite and among businesspeople in Colombia. And in Indonesia, Facebook's third-largest country, if you use the Internet you are almost certainly a member: Of the 30 million people online there, 27.8 million of them use Facebook.

3. Facebook users are up in arms about privacy. In an experiment, security firm Sophos invited Facebook users to befriend someone named Freddi Staur, whose profile contained almost no information but showed a photo of a small green plastic frog. The request was accepted by 41 percent of users.

Read more at The Washington Post.

Nielsen Online Ratings

For TV and digital media advertisers looking for a comparable metric to its traditional TV ratings, Nielsen will start up a new service called Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings. The new system will be fully available in 2011.

Read more at Media Post.

English. It's dead to me.

The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the "youngest" daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their "younger" daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the "Obama's." This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened, English died of shame.

Beset by the need to cut costs, and influenced by decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in an era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication, newspaper publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing, sometimes eliminating it entirely.

The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of "spading and neutering." The Miami Herald reported on someone who "eeks out a living" -- alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a "doggy dog world." The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to report on the treatment of "prostrate cancer."

Read more at the Washington Post.

Journalism Barbie Marks the End of Real News

Mattel unveiled their 125th Barbie yesterday. Coincidentally (or not) News Anchor Barbie (we’ll call her Journalism Barbie) has come into existence at exactly the same time that real, respectable news reporting is fading into nonexistence. Images of the doll show the impossibly-proportioned classic girly girl in a pink fuzzy blazer, a frill skirt and high heels, with a microphone in hand. One has to wonder—is she doing her reporting for the “E!” channel?

Journalism Barbie’s aforementioned outfit, while it may look nice for the reporting part of her job, would be very uncomfortable for actual journalism. I can’t imagine that she’d be very comfortable visiting Afghanistan in those high-heel Mary Janes, and all of her investigative interviews would have to take place over the phone for her to have any hope of being taken seriously.

That said, career Barbies are obviously dolls and didn’t exactly become famous for their realism in the first place. It would almost be weird if Journalism Barbie wasn’t wearing pink.

What’s actually disturbing about the doll is what they got right: Besides her outfit, Barbie looks exactly like a modern reporter, i.e., a beauty pageant contestant on Valium.

Lately the hotness of the people reporting our news seems to be an inverse function of the quality of the content. I’m not saying that the hot reporters are dumb. I’m merely observing that journalism has become dumb, and that bosses are hiring pretty faces to report instead of people who make us feel safe—the Walter Cronkites and Connie Chungs (no offence to Connie).

At the New York Toy Fair last February, a spokesperson from Mattel announced that the 125th anniversary edition of Barbie would either be an architect, a computer engineer, an environmentalist, a surgeon or a journalist, and that it would be up to a world-wide vote of Barbie fans to decide which she’d be.

It seems as though the girls who used to be obsessed with Barbies grew up into journalists and voted this new doll into existence. Whenever I meet an astoundingly dumb, over-dressed female, it almost invariably comes up that she majored in journalism. It seems the journalism major is the new psych major. And now we’re all on Lexapro.

Journalism Barbie is a hallmark for the fall of journalism. She should be Blogger Barbie. It seems like that’s where we’re headed, both in online and on-air reporting. The only problem is that she’d have to wear something different, because in all likeliness, her job will be an unpaid internship.

Read more here.

iPads on College Campuses?

At the iPad's January launch, Apple CEO Steve Jobs eagerly touted the iPad as a game-changer for education. Sales of the gizmo may have soared to more than 3.2 million units so far, according to Apple, and analysts predict sales of 30 million by next year. But in education, it's a different story.

Despite the high-profile initiatives, most colleges don't have special iPad programs, and anecdotal evidence suggests that without a friendly free boost, the tablet is almost non-existent on many college campuses.

Read more at Fox News.

Steve Jobs: Please Leave Us Alone

A journalism student complained to Apple CEO Steve Jobs about his company's unhelpful PR department. He replied: “Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry.” She replied to Jobs, lecturing him on "common courtesy." In response, Steve Jobs wrote: “Nope. We have over 300 million users and we can't respond to their requests unless they involve a problem of some kind. Sorry.”

Read more here.

Shield Laws

Senator Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat from New York, has said he wants to revise a proposed shield law in the United States. Questions about whether such a law is needed and about the to exclude organizations like WikiLeaks, which post unedited material online.

In theory, European shields are among the most robust in the world; Europe may lack the First Amendment, the American constitutional guarantee to free speech, but protection for the reporter-source relationship is cited in the European Convention on Human Rights, and many European countries have written it into law. In practice, however, there are still plenty of gray areas, resulting in long and expensive legal battles.

Read more at New York Times.

‘International Journalism’ Academy

International media company Bertelsmann on Thursday founded an Academy of Journalism that will advocate the spread of the ideals of press freedom and promote expertise and networking among journalistic talent worldwide. The founding act, which took place on Thursday evening in Berlin at a ceremony to mark Bertelsmann’s 175th year.

Each year, the Academy will convey the tools of the trade for the digital future of journalism to a select group of journalists worldwide, by means of on-site workshops and e-learning modules. Its primary target group are aspiring journalistic talents, mainly from countries where press freedom is nonexistent or at risk.

The “International Academy of Journalism” will be built up in the months ahead and officially take up its teaching activity at the end of 2011.

Read more here.

Television Bureau of Advertising Name Change

After being known for years as TVB, the Television Bureau of Advertising in New York is adopting TVB as its official name. More than 600 stations are its members. The rebranding echoes a decision by the American Association of Advertising Agencies to adopt a shorthand designation, the Four A’s, as its name. A goal of the changes is to acknowledge that when it comes to advertising, “it’s no longer just about local spot television” and to remind marketers that local stations now also have “digital subchannels, mobile, Web sites and hyperlocal Web sites” on which they can buy commercial time and ad space.

Spending by advertisers on spot, or local, television rose 25.1 percent in the first half of 2010 compared with a year earlier, according to a report released on Monday by the Kantar Media unit of WPP.

Read more here.

A Virtual Counter-Revolution

Fifteen years after its first manifestation as a global, unifying network, (the Internet) has entered its second phase: it appears to be balkanising, torn apart by three separate, but related forces.

First, governments are increasingly reasserting their sovereignty. Second, big IT companies are building their own digital territories, where they set the rules and control or limit connections to other parts of the internet. Third, network owners would like to treat different types of traffic differently, in effect creating faster and slower lanes on the internet.

It is still too early to say that the internet has fragmented into “internets”, but there is a danger that it may splinter along geographical and commercial boundaries.

Even more important, the internet is an open platform, rather than one built for a specific service, like the telephone network. Mr Zittrain calls it “generative”: people can tinker with it, creating new services and elbowing existing ones aside. Any young company can build a device or develop an application that connects to the internet, provided it follows certain, mostly technical conventions. In a more closed and controlled environment, an Amazon, a Facebook or a Google would probably never have blossomed as it did.

However, this very success has given rise to the forces that are now pulling the internet apart. The cracks are most visible along geographical boundaries. The internet is too important for governments to ignore. They are increasingly finding ways to enforce their laws in the digital realm.

Many media companies have already gone one step further. They use another part of the internet’s address system, the “IP numbers” that identify computers on the network, to block access to content if consumers are not in certain countries. Try viewing a television show on Hulu, a popular American video service, from Europe. Similarly, Spotify, a popular European music-streaming service, cannot be reached from America.

A lot of ink, however, has already been spilt on another form of balkanisation: in the plumbing of the internet. Most of this debate, particularly in America, is about “net neutrality”. This is one of the internet’s founding principles: that every packet of data, regardless of its contents, should be treated the same way, and the best effort should always be made to forward it. If operators were allowed to charge for better service, they could extort protection money from every website. Those not willing to pay for their data to be transmitted quickly would be left to crawl in the slow lane. The issue is not as black and white as it seems. The internet has never been as neutral as some would have it. Network providers do not guarantee a certain quality of service, but merely promise to do their best. That may not matter for personal e-mails, but it does for time-sensitive data such as video. What is more, large internet firms like Amazon and Google have long redirected traffic onto private fast lanes that bypass the public internet to speed up access to their websites.

As mobile devices and networks improve, a standards-based browser could become the dominant access software on the wireless internet as well.

The danger is not that these islands become physically separated, says Andrew Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota. There is just too much value in universal connectivity, he argues. “The real question is how high the walls between these walled gardens will be.”

Read more at The Economist.

The Virtual Curmudgeon

FROM “Wikinomics” to “Cognitive Surplus” to “Crowdsourcing”, there is no shortage of books lauding the “Web 2.0” era and celebrating the online collaboration, interaction and sharing that it makes possible. Today anyone can publish a blog or put a video on YouTube, and thousands of online volunteers can collectively produce an operating system like Linux or an encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Isn’t that great?

No, says Jaron Lanier, a technologist, musician and polymath who is best known for his pioneering work in the field of virtual reality. His book, “You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto”, published earlier this year, is a provocative attack on many of the internet’s sacred cows. Mr Lanier lays into the Web 2.0 culture, arguing that what passes for creativity today is really just endlessly rehashed content and that the “fake friendship” of social networks “is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers”. For Mr Lanier there is no wisdom of crowds, only a cruel mob. “Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless,” he writes, “but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.”

Read more at The Economist.

Untangling the social web

TELECOMS operators naturally prize mobile-phone subscribers who spend a lot, but some thriftier customers, it turns out, are actually more valuable. Known as “influencers”, these subscribers frequently persuade their friends, family and colleagues to follow them when they switch to a rival operator. The trick, then, is to identify such trendsetting subscribers and keep them on board with special discounts and promotions.

Companies can spot these influencers, and work out all sorts of other things about their customers, by crunching vast quantities of calling data with sophisticated “network analysis” software. The market for such software is booming. By one estimate there are more than 100 programs for network analysis, also known as link analysis or predictive analysis. In the past five years IBM has spent more than $11 billion buying makers of network-analysis software. Gartner, a market-research firm, ranks the technology at number two in its list of strategic business operations meriting significant investment this year.

Read more at The Economist.

Putting your money where your mouse is

WIKIPEDIA (is) an example of “crowdsourcing”, it demonstrates that on the internet, as in the real world, many hands make light work. Can the same approach be applied to money as well as time? That is the idea behind “crowdfunding”, in which lots of small contributions are aggregated online to support artistic or creative ventures.

Millions of dollars, in increments as small as $5, have poured into efforts that connect artists, musicians, writers and others with people willing to fund their projects. crowdfunding works by raising money for a well-defined project within a specified time limit and with a goal of raising a particular minimum sum (typically around $2,500). If the goal is not met, no funds are collected. Donors usually get some kind of reward or recognition (a mention in a film’s credits, for example), but they do not have any rights in the resulting work.

Read more at The Economist.

iTunes for Journalism

Ebyline — an angel-financed startup founded by two former Los Angeles Times executives that launched today - believes it can make journalism more efficient by creating an open marketplace: a kind of iTunes for journalism. Freelancers have to cold-call publishers and then negotiate their own rates, then they have to invoice and manage their own billing and payment. Ebyline automates that process, handling all the billing and payment between the writer and the publisher. Freelancers can also “self-syndicate” by putting their content up for bid in Ebyline’s marketplace. Selling content produced by freelance writers makes Ebyline sound a little like Demand Media, Associated Content and other so-called “content farms,” but Ebyline handles only content produced by trained journalists. The company is already working with Variety magazine, ProPublica, MinnPost and the Texas Observer, and is currently trying to raise a Series A financing round.

Read more here.