China: Social Media Threat

A Chinese government-backed think tank has accused the U.S. and other Western governments of using social-networking sites such as Facebook to spur political unrest and called for stepped-up scrutiny of the wildly popular sites.

Read more at Associated Press.

The Age Of Bookless Libraries

The periodical shelves at Stanford University’s Engineering Library are nearly bare. Library chief Helen Josephine says that in the past five years, most engineering periodicals have been moved online, making their print versions pretty obsolete — and books aren't doing much better.

The new library is set to open in August with 10,000 engineering books on the shelves — a decrease of more than 85 percent from the old library. Stanford library director Michael Keller says the librarians determined which books to keep on the shelf by looking at how frequently a book was checked out. They found that the vast majority of the collection hadn't been taken off the shelf in five years. Keller expects that, eventually, there won't be any books on the shelves at all.

Read more at NPR.

3-D TV off to Slow Start

The first sales figures on 3-D TVs and a new consumer survey indicate that the industry has a long way to go before the technology catches on in a big way, if it ever does.In the sets' first three months on the market, beginning in February, consumers nationwide spent about $55 million on 3-D-capable TVs and related equipment, according to an NPD Group.

Read more at Media Post.

Twitter, Facebook Lack Mobile Influence

Twitter, Facebook Lack Mobile Influence Twitter and other social services like Facebook that allow people to update their status still lack clout on wireless devices. Only 10% of the 59% of adult Americans who go online wirelessly have used their mobile phone or wireless laptop to access a status update service, according to a study released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Read more at Media Post.

NPR is now NPR

National Public Radio now says it wants to be known simply as NPR. NPR says it's abbreviating the name it has used since its debut in 1971 because it's more than radio these days. Its news, music and informational programming is heard over a variety of digital devices that aren't radios; it also operates news and music Web sites. Some station managers have grumbled that NPR has invested in digital operations at the expense of more and better radio programs.

Read more at the Washington Post.

Video Game Age Restrictions

Video game aficionados might have to enter a credit card or find another way to verify their age before playing a networked game, thanks to a new push from advocacy groups who say they want to protect minors from in-game advertising messages. Not only young children are at risk, but the FTC "should seek ways to provide protections to teens," the coalition recommends.

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, has claimed that "Grand Theft Auto 3 portrays the brutal murder of women, minorities, the elderly, and police officers."
Video games can contribute to "physical and mental-health problems," the American Academy of Pediatrics has warned.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that older minors do enjoy First Amendment rights of their own. In general, the justices ruled in a 1975 case, speech "cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable. In most circumstances, the values protected by the First Amendment are no less applicable when government seeks to control the flow of information to minors."

Free speech advocates--the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Szoka's group--have assailed expanding the scope of existing federal regulations that cover minors younger than 13 who use the Internet.

Gamers release personal information when registering their accounts. In addition, behavior is tracked as they play games.

Read more here.

Postal Rate Hike For Mags

The potential increase compounds a number of negative trends, including rising costs for ink and paper, just as some magazine publishers were seeing signs of hope for a tentative recovery. The rate hike, which could take effect at the beginning of next year if approved by the Postal Regulatory Commission, would include an 8% bump for magazines; it would also affect catalogs, mailers, where the rate is set to rise 5%. Postal rates would also go up for first-class stamps, from $0.44 to $0.46. Magazine publishers are also facing projected price increases of up to 10% for paper and ink in 2010.

Read more at Media Post.

Product Placement in Music Videos

At least two related trends have contributed to the growing popularity of placements: the move of videos from television to the Internet and the attempt by record labels to make videos a revenue source and not just a marketing tool for selling CDs. According to a report released last week by PQ Media, a research firm, the money spent on product placement in recorded music grew 8 percent in 2009 compared with the year before, while overall paid product placement declined 2.8 percent, to $3.6 billion. Revenue from product placement in music videos totaled $15 million to $20 million last year, more than double the amount in 2000, and he expected that to grow again this year.

Read more at the New York Times.

Video Games Sap Attention

Video games can sap a child's attention just as much as the tube, a new study suggests. Elementary school children who play video games more than two hours a day are 67 percent more likely than their peers who play less to have greater-than-average attention problems, according to the study, which appears in the journal Pediatrics. Playing video games and watching TV appear to have roughly the same link to attention problems, even though video games are considered a less passive activity, the researchers say. It could be that kids who have short attention spans to begin with might be more likely to pick up a joystick than a book, for instance.

In addition to surveying the elementary school kids, the researchers asked 210 college students about their TV and video-game use and how they felt it affected their attention. The students who logged more than two hours of TV and video games a day were about twice as likely to have attention problems, the researchers found.

Read more from CNN.

Yahoo: Searches Steer Coverage

Yahoo will introduce a news blog that will rely on search queries to help guide its reporting and writing on national affairs, politics and the media. Search-generated content has been growing on the Internet, linked to the success of companies like Associated Content, which Yahoo recently bought, and Demand Media, which has used freelance writers to create an online library of more than a million instructional articles.

Yahoo software continuously tracks common words, phrases and topics that are popular among users across its vast online network. To help create content for the blog, called The Upshot, a team of people will analyze those patterns and pass along their findings to Yahoo’s news staff of two editors and six bloggers.

The news staff will then use that search data to create articles that — if the process works as intended — will allow them to focus more precisely on readers.

Yahoo paid more than $100 million this year for Associated Content, which pays writers small sums to write articles based on queries like “How do I tile a floor?” or “How do I make French toast?”

This niche approach to the news, filling in gaps in the coverage where other media outlets are not providing content, is the best way Mr. Pitaro feels The Upshot (at news.yahoo.com/upshot) can gain traction in a crowded media landscape.

“If you’re a news start-up, focusing on breadth would be the wrong way to go,” he said. “What we’re seeing is the market getting increasingly fragmented. And because of that you can survive by owning a niche category.”

“There’s a middle ground here in which publishers and news organizations can learn a lot about their audiences and what they want in real time and take that into account generally,” he said. “But that does not need to affect the specific story assignments.”

Read more at the New York Times.

Paywall for UK Times

Readers of The Times website, the online presence of one the UK's oldest and most well respected papers goes behind a paywall today. Long gone is free-browsing of The Times articles, with access now restricted to those willing to pay a premium.

There will be multiple ways of paying for the content on The Times. Readers will be asked to pay £1 for the first 30 days of access to the site, and then £2 a week from there on in. You'll also be able to pick up a 24 hour pass for £1 a pop.

Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Times umbrella company News International, believes that the higher quality of reportage on the site will retain enough users to become far more profitable than their current model.

Read more here.