This introduction to the world of journalism encourages proactive thinking about the future of media and journalists' place in it, focusing on the need to remain on the innovation curve.
Saturday, May 22
Google TV
Google hopes to provide this missing piece. Using the search engine’s Android platform and the Google Chrome Web browser, Google TV aims to seamlessly integrate traditional TV with DVR and the Web. Viewers will be able to watch shows from TV providers, the Web and personal collections or use video chat with smart phones controlling the equipment.
Read more here.
Friday, May 21
Magazine Audience Numbers Stabilize
Comparing 2009 to 2010, total magazine readership for 215 consumer magazines tracked by MRI increased 1% from about 1.819 billion in spring 2009 to 1.838 billion in spring 2010 (both figures obviously included a great deal of audience duplication between magazines).
Big gains were seen at some women's fashion and beauty titles. A number of celebrity mags also enjoyed audience growth and health and fitness titles. These gains were partially offset by double-digit percentage drops at titles including Newsweek, down 13.8% to 15.2 million, Parenting, down 15.7% to 8.6 million, and TV Guide, down 12.6% to 14.8 million.
E-Books Rewrite Bookselling
The digital revolution sweeping the media world is rewriting the rules of the book industry, upending the established players which have dominated for decades. Electronic books are still in their infancy, comprising an estimated 3% to 5% of the market today. But they are fast accelerating the decline of physical books, forcing retailers, publishers, authors and agents to reinvent their business models or be painfully crippled.
"By the end of 2012, digital books will be 20% to 25% of unit sales, and that's on the conservative side," predicts Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of the Idea Logical Co., publishing consultants. "Add in another 25% of units sold online, and roughly half of all unit sales will be on the Internet."
Read more at the Wall Street Journal.
Highest First-Quarter Revenue for Internet Ads
Read more here.
Thursday, May 20
Google App Store
Read more at the Wall Street Journal.
Wednesday, May 19
Using Online Games to Get Movie Audiences Involved
Ambitious Web games that interlock with social networking sites are an increasing focus. The goal is to reverse the consumer-advertiser relationship. Traditional marketing pushes a message over and over. If people instead pull bits of information into their lives through a game, they are more likely to feel a sense of ownership.
Successful movie games get over a million plays, with some soaring to 10 million and movie-related iPhone apps can be downloaded in “the high hundreds of thousands of times. The challenge is to make these kinds of efforts feel organic. It has to be an experience in and of itself that is powerful enough that people will forget that they are being marketed to.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal.
Tuesday, May 18
Google to offer internet on your TV
Many TV set-makers already offer the internet in some form on integrated systems or through set-top boxes via cable or satellite. Yahoo! has been pushing its Connected TV widgets platform, which gives users access to certain websites such as eBay and Facebook and provides movies and TV shows streamed over the internet. But the market has yet to take off.
Read more at the London Times.
Newspaper Industry in Germany
Read more at the New York Times.
Writing Online Headlines
Keep in mind that all of the things that make headlines meaningful in print — photographs, placement and context — are nowhere in sight on the Web. Headlines have become, as Gabriel Snyder, the recently appointed executive editor of Newsweek.com, said, “naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.”
The Huffington Post knows its way around search engine optimization, or S.E.O. as it’s known. A story about whether the president would play golf with Rush Limbaugh was headlined: “Obama Rejects Rush Limbaugh Golf Match: Rush ‘Can Play With Himself.’ ” It’s digital nirvana: two highly searched proper nouns followed by a smutty entendre, a headline that both the red and the blue may be compelled to click, and the readers of the site can have a laugh while the headline delivers great visibility out on the Web.
The Huffington Post sometimes tests two different headlines in real time to see which the audience is responding to. (“How to Reduce Your Oil Footprint” did better than “How to Say No to Big Oil and Reduce Your Oil Footprint.” Go figure.) The site also uses its Twitter account to solicit reader suggestions on headlines.
There’s no room for that kind of discursive, descriptive run-on on the Web. Google’s crawlers and aggregators like Digg quit paying attention after 60 characters or so, long before readers might. The need to attract attention from computer-generated algorithms sometimes makes the headlines seem like a machine thought them up as well.
‘Ivana Be Left Alone’ is a great headline, but it wouldn’t work on the Web because there’s no Trump in there and anybody looking for that information would be looking for Trump.
Read more at the New York Times.
Monday, May 17
The Pocket Guide to Defensive Branding
Read more at Advertising Age.