Saturday, April 24

Broadcasters & Social Media

Highlights from the RTDNA/Hoftra University study of television, radio and online.
  • Only 20 percent of TV newsrooms have a Facebook page.
  • Here’s the breakdown of how actively TV newsrooms use Twitter:
    Constantly — 36 percent
    Daily — 35 percent
    Periodically — 16 percent
    Not at all — 13 percent
  • While TV stations are increasingly including audio and video on their Web sites, many are cutting online features that have not proven to be attractions. For example, far fewer stations are streaming entire newscasts online now.
  • The most common online elements for TV Web sites are, according to the study:
    Text, stills and video — 90 percent
    Blogs, live cameras and audio — 60 percent
    Streaming audio, recorded newscasts — more than 30 percent
  • Nearly half of all news directors don’t know what their Web site traffic is.
  • About 35 percent of TV Web sites are profitable
  • By the end of 2009, 762 TV stations were originating local news.
  • The average amount of TV news on the air rose to its highest level ever.
  • TV news staffing fell again but not as much as in 2008.
  • Radio news does not make much use of social media.
  • the typical radio station has only a one-person news staff.
  • Only 1 percent of radio newsrooms have a Facebook page, while 37 percent say neither the station nor the newsroom has a Facebook page.
  • The study also found that 73 percent of radio newsrooms do nothing on Twitter.
  • Almost all radio stations have a Web site that includes news, but a surprising number do not include newscasts or news story audio on their sites. The study found that 60 percent of sites include text, 20 percent include recorded newscasts and podcasts, and just under 10 percent include news video.
  • Here's how many stations are sharing resources or information with a partner:
    Local radio stations -- 28 percent
    Other TV station -- 24 percent
    Local newspaper -- 24 percent
    Not sharing with any partners -- 39 percent

Read more at Poynter.

The Splinternet

Prepare for the Splinternet. The whole framework of the Web (and Web marketing) is based around the idea that everything is in a compatible format. Any browser, any computer, any connection, you see pretty much the same thing. Now with iPhones, Androids, Kindles, Tablets, and TVs connecting to the Web, that's not true. Your site may not work right on these devices, especially if it includes flash or assumes mouse-based navigation.

Meanwhile, more and more of the interesting stuff on the Web is hidden behind a login and password. Take Facebook for example. Not only do its applications not work anywhere else, Google can't see most of it.

Web marketing has grown since 1995, based on the idea that everything is connected. Google works because the Web is standardized. Not any more. Each new device has its own ad networks, format, and technology. Each new social site has its login and many hide content from search engines.

We call this new world the Splinternet. Here's what to do: choose your devices carefully -- investments in one cannot be transferred easily to others if you make a mistake.

Read more here.

Friday, April 23

Appeals Court: Blogger is not a Journalist

A New Jersey appeals court says a lower court ruled right when it decided a libel defendant could not use the reporter's shield law because not all bloggers are journalists, and the defendant was not engaged in journalism.

Too Much Media sued Shellee Hale after she posted comments stating that the company, which works with websites in the adult entertainment industry, was profiting from a security breach in its program. Although Hale kept a blog, the court said she was not engaged in newsgathering at the time she made the postings and therefore not protected by the shield law. The court's opinion said "New media should not be confused with news media. There is a distinction between personal diaries, opinions, impressions and expressive writing and news reporting.

Read more at the Reporters Committee.

Copyright Lawsuits

Righthaven has filed five lawsuits against Web sites that allegedly lifted articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal including NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), the association Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, real estate agent and blogger Matt Farnham, gambling site MajorWager.com.

Copyright lawsuits over news items remain rare. What's more, when cases are filed, they tend to be against defendants who compete for readers, as happened when Gatehouse Media sued Boston.com or Dow Jones sued Briefing.com. The Righthaven cases, by contrast, are against companies that are not in the news business.

The cases seemed to have come as a surprise to some of the defendants. Farnham, the realtor who was sued last week for allegedly posting portions of two articles to his blog, says no one ever asked him to remove the material. "I would have taken it down in a heartbeat," he says.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act does not require content owners to send publishers takedown demands before suing unless infringing content is uploaded by third-parties. That holds true even if the infringement is relatively insignificant.

Read more at Media Post.

Thursday, April 22

How Films Depict Journalism

A genre began in 1931 with the classic The Front Page which was a big influence, and not just on other newspaper films. The attitude, the machine-gun dialogue. After that, reporters start showing up in pretty much every movie, it seems, and they’re interesting types A's. They’re outlaws, outsiders. Their editors’ grouchiness hid a slightly bruised idealism. Their boozy heroes. And, often, newsmen became screenwriters.

Herman Mankiewicz was one of the first, a reporter who abandoned the Algonquin Round Table for a Paramount contract in 1926. Within a decade, the busiest screenwriters were recovering journalists.

There were, basically, two kinds of newspaper films. In the first, the story was all about The Story — and how one dogged newshound got it. The methods were hardly pretty. The newspaper business was seen as exciting, important and fun.

The second kind of film used the reporter as a type. Clark Gable in “It Happened One Night,” Jean Arthur in “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” Barbara Stanwyck in “Meet John Doe” Rediscovering their idealism, these were comic fables in which the newspaper business was presented as slightly suspect, a metaphor for cynicism.

In 1941’s “Citizen Kane,” offered lofty tones of social reform and the sharp elbows of an all-out circulation war.

But “Kane's obituary is written not by a print journalist, but by a newsreel reporter. A decade later, “Deadline U.S.A” told a smaller, sadder story, as editor Humphrey Bogart oversees an investigative project even as his struggling paper is being sold.

“It’s not enough any more to give ‘em just news,” Bogart snarls at one point. “They want comics, contests, puzzles. They want to know how to bake a cake, win friends and influence the future. Ergo, horoscopes, tips on the horses, interpretation of dreams so they can win on the numbers lottery. And, if they accidentally stumble on the first page, news!” He is a dinosaur and the tar pits are just around the corner. He believes in newspapering as a calling, a vocation, a service for the public good.

In Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole,” Kirk Douglas is a former star reporter who gets a break — a mining disaster. And Douglas happily exploits the tragedy (and endangers one man’s life) so he can sell papers, sell himself, make a buck.

In “Sweet Smell of Success,” Burt Lancaster is J.J. Hunsecker, a dead-eyed New York gossip columnist, using his newspaper like a razor to mutilate the reputations of anyone who stands in his way.

Film like “All the President’s Men” cast reporters as crusaders.

But then that began to change. In “Absence of Malice,” the reporter isn’t the hero but the problem, with an untrue story making a man “guilty until proven innocent.” In succeeding films, reporters are pushed to the sidelines, existing only as gossip-obsessed nuisances (a reflection not only of the tabloidization of news but Hollywood’s own increasingly antagonistic relationship with the press).

There are some modern newspaper films that get the new world right. “The Paper” caught the working-parents workplace stress; “State of Play,” a bit of the tension from internet innovations. But most, like “Sex and the City” seem to see print journalism only as a job that pays large sums of money to very attractive people for minimal amounts of work.

Read more here.

Wednesday, April 21

Curfew for Young Gamers

South Korea has imposed a gaming curfew to try to crack down on what authorities call an epidemic of video game addiction among the young. The Culture Ministry announced anyone under 18 would be blocked form accessing three popular online computer games after midnight.

In one incident, a couple was charged with letting their infant starve to death while they raised a "virtual child" on the Internet.

From The Week magazine.

TV Stations Online Revenue to Grow

TV stations' Web businesses fared better than newspapers' declining digital efforts in 2009, but TV is still behind in overall advertising share of media dollars. TV stations grew their share of local online advertising from 8.3 percent to 8.7 percent, according to a new Borrell Associates report released by the Television Bureau of Advertising. The only other medium to increase local online share was pure-play Internet companies such as Local.com, ReachLocal and Yahoo, which claim more than six times the local online revenue of TV stations.

This year, TV station online advertising is expected to grow 21 percent to nearly $1.4 billion, doubling last year's 10 percent growth rate. After this year, Borrell is calling for growth to moderate to 13 percent in 2011 and 7 percent in 2012. While growth is robust, for most stations, online revenue is less than 5 percent of a stations' total gross revenue. As far as audience is concerned, TV Web sites still lag their newspaper counterparts. In the 95 markets measured by The Media Audit, TV sites led in 22 markets, while the major daily newspaper led in 73.

Read more at Media Week and Media Post.

Tuesday, April 20

Teen Texting Skyrockets

A third of US teenagers with cell phones send more than 100 texts a day. The study by the Pew Research Center found that texting eclipses cell phone calls, instant messaging, social networks -- and talking face-to-face. Girls typically send or receive 80 text messages per day and boys, 30 per day. Nnow teens expect other teens to respond to text messaging and to be available. While boys don't typically use punctuation, for girls such nuances are critical.

Read more from Reuters.

Falling Book Sales

Overall book sales in the US dropped 1.8 percent in 2009, to approximately $23.9 billion not adjusted for inflation, according to the Association of American Publishers.

E-books accounted for just 1.3 percent of all book sales. But their sales skyrocketed 176.6 percent over the previous year.

Read more at the New York Times.

Monday, April 19

Advergame for World Cup

PepsiCo International and Microsoft have teamed up to create an integrated digital advergaming campaign to take advantage of what's expected to be increasing interest in soccer as the World Cup gets underway. As part of the program, Microsoft Advertising's Creative Solutions team created an interactive game, in which users move from "Zero to Hero," manipulating avatars through five interactive games, unlocking reward videos to share via instant messaging, e-mail and social networks. The games will be integrated into content on a dedicated PepsiCo International-branded Football Hero Web site as well as games on several Microsoft properties, like Windows Live Messenger, Xbox.com, XboxLive, Hotmail and MSN sports and entertainment channels.

Read more at Media Post.