All the World's a Game

The latest installment, “Modern Warfare 3”, released on November 8th, set a record of its own with $750m in its first five days. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a consulting firm, the global video-game market was worth around $56 billion last year. That is more than twice the size of the recorded-music industry, nearly a quarter more than the magazine business and about three-fifths the size of the film industry, counting DVD sales as well as box-office receipts (see chart below). PwC predicts that video games will be the fastest-growing form of media over the next few years, with sales rising to $82 billion by 2015. Read more at The Economist

Why video games will be an enduring success

Video Games have become the most exciting branch of the entertainment industry. They are a “killer app” that is helping to drive mobile-phone sales, and a key ingredient in the popularity of social-networking sites. Should other media firms worry that games will take over? The numbers can look ominous. In revenue terms, video games already dwarf radio. They are twice the size of the music business and by 2015 will be worth more than the newspaper industry. Just before the recession the games industry was growing by 20-25% a year. Things have slowed down since then, but gaming is still expected to grow by an average of over 8% a year between now and 2015, and is likely to remain the fastest-growing part of the media industry over that period. Read more at The Economist

The moral panic about video games is subsiding

Since gaming has become more mainstream, the proportion of violent games has fallen. According to vgchartz, a website that tracks games sales, the ten bestselling console games of 2010 included just three violent shooters. The rest were inoffensive sports and fitness titles. Still, many games require the player to dispose of great numbers of Nazis, gangsters, aliens and other bad guys. A few games serve up stylised violence for its own sake. And the critics say there is a crucial difference between films, plays or books, where the players are just passive onlookers, and video games, where they are active participants in the simulated slayings. But the evidence is hard to pin down. Read more here.

Smartphones Are Changing Photography

Although global smartphone adoption is still just below 30 percent, smartphone photography is growing in popularity, disrupting traditional camera use in the process. NPD made this trend clear in its Imaging Confluence Study, which found that smartphones accounted for 27 percent of photos shot this year — last year, the number was 17 percent. Accordingly, photos shot with dedicated cameras dropped from 52 to 44 percent. And it’s not just average Joes who think that smartphones make a decent camera. Famed celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz said that the iPhone is “the snapshot camera of today” and that it’s “accessible and easy” during a November appearance on NBC. And how’s this for a telling statistic: In June, the iPhone 4 surpassed the Nikon D90 and Canon EOS 5D Mark II as the top camera on Flickr. The iPhone has even been used in place of a traditional camera to document war in Afghanistan and to snap memorable photos of the Tour de France. Apple’s decision to choose popular photo-sharing social network Instagram as its 2011 iPhone app of the year is also a nod to the trend and popularity of smartphone photography. An independent U.S. filmographer even shot a full-length movie with a Nokia N8 smartphone. The film, Olive, stars 81-year old Oscar nominated actress Gena Rowlands, and is regarded to be the first feature film ever shot completely with a smartphone. Read more here.

Retail therapy

Sigmund Freud argued that people are governed by irrational, unconscious urges over a century ago. And in America in the 1930s another Viennese psychologist named Ernest Dichter spun this insight into a million-dollar business. His genius was in seeing the opportunity that irrational buying offered for smart selling. Dichter understood that every product has an image, even a “soul”, and is bought not merely for the purpose it serves but for the values it seems to embody. Our possessions are extensions of our own personalities, which serve as a “kind of mirror which reflects our own image”. Dichter’s message to advertisers was: figure out the personality of a product, and you will understand how to market it. Recent developments in neuroscience have inspired fresh questions about instincts and desires, unconscious prophesies and gut decisions. New information about human cognition has led the hard sciences back to the same sort of concerns that preoccupied psychoanalysts in Vienna a century ago.what was once the domain of Freud and Dichter has been appropriated by researchers in lab coats. Yet many of the theories sound remarkably similar—albeit with rather less emphasis on Oedipal urges and castration anxieties. “Recent published findings in neuroscience indicate it is emotion, and not reason, that drives our purchasing decisions,” reported Mobile Marketer magazine earlier this year. The quantitative trends that tossed Dichter aside have ultimately led back to his ideas. Read more at The Economist

How Luther went viral

The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed. That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform. The important factor was not the printing press itself (which had been around since the 1450s), but the wider system of media sharing along social networks—what is called “social media” today. Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries, grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very quickly, and saw how it could spread his message. Read the story at The Economist.

Information’s Deadly Price

The Committee to Protect Journalists issued its annual report on journalists killed in the line of duty and the numbers were grim. At least 43 journalists were killed around the world in direct relation to their work in 2011, with the seven deaths in Pakistan marking the heaviest losses in a single nation. Libya and Iraq, each with five fatalities, and Mexico, with three deaths, also ranked high worldwide for journalism-related fatalities. The global tally is consistent with the toll recorded in 2010, when 44 journalists died in connection with their work.

Read more at the New York Times

2011: At least 106 journalists killed

According to the figures registered by the Press Emblem Campaign, at least 106 journalists have been killed during the current year in 39 countries -- around 2 every week. The revolutions of the Arab Spring resulted in at least 20 journalists killed. Compared with 2010, the figure on 18th December shows no improvement - while 2009 was a record year, largely owing to the massacre of 32 journalists in the Philippines in one day, for a total of 122 killed. 91 journalists were killed in 2008 and 115 in 2007. In addition to the killing of more than 20 journalists during the Arab Spring, more than 100 others were attacked, intimidated, arrested and wounded in countries of the region, including Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen.
Mexico, Pakistan most dangerous countries -- For the second year in a row, Mexico has been the most dangerous country for media work with 12 journalists killed since January. Iraq is tied for third place with Libya with 7 journalists killed.

Read more here

Newspapers have five years to live

The San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and just about every newspaper in America will be gone in five years, if you believe an upcoming report from USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism.

“Is America at a Digital Turning Point?” predicts only four major American newspapers are likely to survive, and none of those are west of Washington D.C. If you live outside the Washington to New York corridor, you will be reliant upon online sites, social networks, broadcasters and weekly newspapers for your news and information.

More at SFBay: http://sfbay.ca/2011/12/20/newspapers-have-five-years-to-live/#ixzz1h5b7G34i

Viewership Steady For Cable, Broadcast Nets

Cable networks and broadcast networks appear to be performing at mostly the same pace -- with little change in viewership in the fourth quarter. The broadcast networks had no change in either 18-49 viewers (10.9 overall rating) or total viewers (12.3 rating) from the fourth quarter 2010.

Read more here

Only 14% Use Online Devices For Rented Movies

Though Internet-connected entertainment devices (televisions, tablets, gaming consoles, smartphones) are all the rage among consumers, people still not renting movies to play on them. According to new research from The NPD Group, only 5% of the 134 million consumers who own devices capable of playing rented, streamed movies (iVOD) have used them for those purposes. Even when it comes to devices whose sole purpose is streaming entertainment, only 14% have used them to rent movies. Netflix, which is the leader of streaming movies, was not included because NPD classifies it as a subscription streaming service, rather than iVOD.

Read more here

AP Stylebook’s New Tool Automatically Edits Your Writing

The Associated Press unleashed software Thursday that proofreads content using AP Stylebook’s guidelines on spelling, language, punctuation, usage and journalistic style.

The new plug-in software — AP StyleGuard — works in Microsoft Word and will come in handy for writers and editors who produce and publish news articles and press releases.

Read more here

Publishing in Latin America

Paid-for daily newspaper circulation in Latin America rose by 5% (21% in Brazil and 16% in Mexico) between 2005 and 2009, according to Larry Kilman of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.

In books, the picture is more mixed. Publishers are churning out more new titles than ever. Sales in (Portuguese-speaking) Brazil, the biggest market, are rising. On December 5th Britain’s Pearson (which owns 50% of The Economist) announced the purchase by its Penguin subsidiary of 45% of Companhia das Letras, Brazil’s most innovative literary publisher. Things are less bright in the Spanish-speaking world. In Mexico and Argentina, Latin America’s second and third markets, book sales have been falling. Mexico’s publishers’ association says that total sales last year were 139m copies, down by 12% from 2005. Internet bookselling has been hampered by relatively low levels of broadband penetration and poor postal services.

Read more at The Economist

The serious business of fun

Today a gamer is as likely to be a middle-aged commuter playing “Angry Birds” on her smartphone. In America, the biggest market, the average game-player is 37 years old. Two-fifths are female.

Over the past ten years the video-game industry has grown from a small niche business to a huge, mainstream one. With global sales of $56 billion in 2010, it is more than twice the size of the recorded-music industry. Despite the downturn, it is growing by almost 9% a year. Video gaming, unlike music, film or television, had the luck to be born digital: it never faced the struggle to convert from analogue.

Read more at The Economist

Newspapers' Digital Audience Skews Younger, More Affluent

People who read newspapers’ digital content tend to be younger, better-educated and more affluent than the print audience for newspapers, according to a new national survey by Pulse Research. Pulse found that the average age of digital newspaper readers is 44, compared to an average age of 51 for print readers, with disproportionate representation for young adults in digital readership.

Read more here

Facebook Brand Pages

In an effort to catch your eye on their Facebook pages, brands have experimented with apps and splashy profile photos. But in almost all cases, it turns out, the humble Facebook wall itself steals the show.

In an webcam eye-tracking study for Mashable by EyeTrackShop, the 30 participants who viewed top Facebook brand pages almost always looked at pages’ walls first — usually for at least four times longer than any other element on the page.

Read more here.

Modern Warfare 3's billion-dollar milestone

Modern Warfare 3 notches up $1 billion in sales after barely two weeks on the market. That's faster than most Hollywood blockbusters hit 10 figures.

In 2009, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 eclipsed the first-week box office receipts of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and The Dark Knight. This year, Activision says Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 took down Avatar. Here, a by-the-numbers look at MW3's golden November:

16
Days it took Modern Warfare 3 to reach $1 billion in sales

17
Days it took Avatar to hit $1 billion in sales

6.5 million
Number of those copies sold in the first 24 hours

Read more here

If We Are All Journalists, Should We All Be Protected?

There are so-called journalist “shield laws” in about 40 different states, but some have been updated to include newer forms of media such as blogs, and others haven’t.
In a decision by the Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit earlier this year, a judge ruled that a man who recorded a video of police beating a man in Boston was entitled to the same protection as the mainstream press. Judge Kermit Lipez said this protection arguably extended to any “citizen journalist” and not just to members of the traditional media, saying the availability of devices like smartphones “means that … news stories are now just as likely to be broken by a blogger at her computer as a reporter at a major newspaper” and that such changes “make clear why the news-gathering protections of the First Amendment cannot turn on professional credentials or status.”

Read more at Business Week

Marketers Struggle With Social Media

Marketers are struggling to fully integrate social into their overarching marketing strategies, according to a new report from the Chief Marketing Officer Council.

Read more here.

The trial of Stephen Glass

The state Supreme Court agreed in November to hear arguments on Stephen Glass’s moral fitness to become a member of the State Bar of California. He gained worldwide notoriety in 1998 after dozens of stories he wrote while working as a Washington journalist in the mid-to-late 1990s were discovered to be fabricated. These pieces described incidents that never took place and attributed quotations to made-up people. The scam ended in May 1998 after reporting and inquires from Forbes Digital Tool editor Adam L. Penenberg tipped the New Republic off about the fishiness of Glass’s piece about “Jukt Micronics,” and all of his journalistic work was scrutinized for lies. Depending on how you read them, the documents reveal a fully reformed Glass, or the same old Stephen, cutting corners and conning people as he did in the old days.

Read more here.

Work: Life without email

Is email obsolete? asked Steven Rosenbaum in FastCompany.com. Atos, Europe’s largest IT firm, thinks so. The company last week announced that it was banning internal email, as CEO Thierry Breton thinks that 90 percent of messages sent between employees are a waste of time. Instead, Breton wants his 74,000 staff members to talk to one another in person or on the phone, and switch to “real time” messaging tools like Facebook. It looks as if other companies will soon follow suit. By 2014, a technology research group has predicted, social networking will replace email as the main method of communication for 20 percent of businesses.

The younger generation has all but given up on it—visits to email sites by 12- to 17-year-olds fell 18 percent in 2010—and digitally savvy teens now communicate “almost entirely via social networks and instant-messenger services.

Read more at The Week

New Twitter formalizes news wire service function

As part of a major redesign, Twitter is launching a new “discover” section — a personalized stream of news stories and other information “based on your current location, what you follow and what’s happening in the world.”

In other words, it’s acting like a news service. Raw information meets (automated) editorial judgment, and out comes a digital front page of headlines, photos, videos or hashtags it thinks a user will be interested in.

Twitter took some baby steps this way by featuring related top stories in search results. But this is a big leap, and has positive implications for news publishers hoping to reach audiences through Twitter.

While some news organizations embrace the intangible benefits of engagement and interactivity, most are on Twitter primarily to drive traffic to their stories. The discover section promises to do that more effectively, as people who might have missed the specific tweets in their stream about a news story will still see it showcased in the discover section.

Journalists love Storify, for good reason, to tell a story using tweets and other social media. But sometimes you just want to embed one or two tweets in a story, and the new Twitter (finally) supports that.

Read more here

Drone journalism?

This January, the FAA will be proposing new rules on the use of drones in American airspace — a possibility some see as positively Orwellian, but others, including some journalists, see as an opportunity.

For journalism professor Matt Waite, the time is ripe to study how drones will affect his industry. This November, he started the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to study the legality, ethicality and practicality of drones in journalism. The lab’s site describes drones as “an ideal platform for journalism.”

For shrinking newsrooms staffs, drones that cost around $40,000 sound a bit more budget-friendly than helicopters that cost in the millions. Drones could also provide much better coverage of natural disasters, such as the widespread fires in Texas, or in a nuclear disaster such as the Fukushima-Daachii plant. Drones could also be put to use in media blackout zones, such as during the Occupy Wall Street eviction, when journalists were barred from Zuccotti Park out of safety concerns.

With the possibilities, also come concerns. The technology raises major privacy flags. In a world post-phone-hacking scandal, the technology could easily be taken advantage of by celebrity trackers. It could also mean journalists could be kept under survelliance as well.

Read more at the Washington Post

Syria Bans iPhones to Prevent Citizen Journalism

Syria has banned the iPhone, reports say, as the government tries to control information getting out of the country. In a statement apparently issued by the customs department of the Syrian finance ministry and seen by Lebanese and German media, the authorities "warn anyone against using the iPhone in Syria".

The UN believes 4,000 people have been killed in Syria since March. Most international media have been banned from Syria since the uprising began, so footage of the violent crackdown has primarily come from activists filming material themselves and posting it on the internet.

Read more at the BBC

Forecasts for 2012 Ad Spending Revised Downward

Ad spending is expected to see single-digital growth next year. However, two firms--Publicis Groupe's ZenithOptimedia and WPP's Group M--are now getting more conservative in their predictions about the business in 2012.

The latest forecast by ZenithOptimedia shows that global ad spending in major media will grow 4.7% to $486 billion in 2012, 5.2% in 2013 and 5.8% in 2014. That's a dip from what it said in October.

Separately, Group M says it expects a 6.4% increase in global ad spending in 2012, which is down from a July report forecasting a 6.8% increase. Its new report predicts that 2011 will show a 5% increase in spending over 2010, to $490 billion.

One of the most striking statistics in ZenithOptimedia's report was this one: over the next three years, nearly half (48%) of all the world's growth in ad expenditure will come from just ten emerging markets.

Read more here

Two Giant Radio Groups Form Daily-Deal Alliance

Two of the fastest-growing trends in media have been daily-deal Web sites and the aggregation of entertainment content online. Now the two biggest radio companies have formed an alliance to compete on both fronts.

Read more at the New York Times

10 Historical Events Affected by Social Media

Today we turn to social media when an influential event occurs as a way to share our personal experiences and relate to the people most affected. It provides us with the reassurance that we’re not alone, but also gives us the opportunity to help.

Here are 10 moments in history affected by social media. How would social media have changed the outcome of other historical events?

Read more here

Newspaper Revs Dive In Q3

There has been no relief for the newspaper business in the second half of this year, judging by the latest figures from the Newspaper Association of America, which have total ad revenues declining 8.9% from $6.1 billion in the third quarter of 2010 to $5.56 billion in the third quarter of 2011. The overall percentage decline in the third quarter was actually larger than in the two previous quarters, dashing hopes that the rate of decline might at least be slowing. This marks the 21st straight quarter of consecutive year-over-year ad revenue declines for the newspaper business.

Read more here

the Future of Printed Books

Back in the ’80s, the rise of word processors and email convinced a lot of people that paper would vanish. Why print anything when you could simply squirt documents around electronically? We all know how that turned out. Paper use exploded; indeed, firms that adopted email used 40 percent more paper. That’s because even in a world of screens, paper offers unique ways to organize and share your thoughts, as Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper noted in The Myth of the Paperless Office. There’s also this technology truism to consider: When you make something easier to do, people do more of it.

“Print-on-demand” publishing is about to do the same thing to books. In a precise parallel to the office-printing boom, print-on-demand is creating an odd new phenomenon that Blurb founder Eileen Gittens calls social publishing. In traditional print publishing, the number of new titles increased by 5 percent from 2009 to 2010, rising to 316,000. In contrast, print-on-demand and self-publishing boomed by 169 percent—hitting a stunning 2.8 million unique titles. Granted, few of those titles have been printed more than a handful of times; print-on-demand is still a small fraction of total book production. But the trend is obvious.

Read more here

Why Kids Can’t Search

We’re often told that young people tend to be the most tech-savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing Pan (found) students generally rely on the web pages at the top of Google’s results list. But Pan pulled a trick: He changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren’t assessing information sources on their own merit—they’re putting too much trust in the machine.

Other studies have found the same thing: High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching.

Google makes broad-based knowledge more important, not less. A good education is the true key to effective search.

Read more at Wired

Supreme Court will hear disgraced journalist’s moral character case

For the first time in 11 years, the California Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of a would-be lawyer denied admission to the State Bar because of moral character issues. The bar petitioned the court to consider the case of Stephen Glass, a disgraced former journalist who won national infamy for making up whole or parts of stories and now wants to practice law in California. Although the Committee of Bar Examiners (CBE) denied Glass admission on moral character grounds, it was overruled by both a State Bar Court hearing judge and a split review panel that said he should be admitted.

Read more here

Video games hit higher level of U.S. education

Engineering professor Brianno Coller's (video game for) third-year students at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb (has them) build virtual race cars, complete with roaring engines and screeching tires, that must maneuver an increasingly challenging course. Along the way, they're exposed to computational math, a basic building block of engineering.

Around the country, pockets of faculty have been adding games to their courses as a way to stimulate learning. At Boston College, nursing students conduct forensics at a virtual crime scene. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a game called Melody Mixer teaches students how to read and compose music. Students at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., play World of Warcraft, a multiplayer online game, in a course on intelligence studies.

Read more here

Fun at the FactFest

PolitiFact.com and FactCheck.org (are) the two best-known of various sites that trawl through politicians’ public statements and dig out their lies, evasions and economies with the truth.

The FactFest produced a lot of theoretical proposals. Better crowd-sourcing tools, to help catch falsehoods. Snazzy stuff, if it works. But with the web increasingly divided into like-minded echo chambers, it’s not clear whether such a flood of factuality would inform people better—or just reinforce their convictions about what a lying bunch the other lot are.

Read more at The Economist

Tool Reveals Which Celebs, Models Have Been Photoshopped

Researchers at the Department of Science at Dartmouth College have developed a software tool that can rate photographs based on how much they have been digitally altered with programs such as Adobe Photoshop. The proposed tool is part of an effort to bring truth to advertising and restore the perception of natural beauty.

Read more here

Stephen Colbert on CNN's iReporters

Tablet Owners Define New Category of Shoppers

The increasing number of tablet owners in the U.S. is changing the way people shop from in-store to online — 20% of all mobile ecommerce sales now come from tablets and 60% of tablet owners have purchased goods using a tablet.

Tablet users spend an average of one hour and 35 minutes on their devices and typically spend 10-20% more on purchases than shoppers without tablets. By 2016, mobile commerce is expected to increase to $31 billion in the U.S. – a tremendous jump from only $3 billion in 2010.

Read more at Mashable

Flash Robs

Many different types of crowd disturbance have bubbled up during 2011, but perhaps the oddest category has been the “flash mob robbery,” or “flash rob.”

It’s a fad that started in Washington, D.C. back in April, when around 20 people filed into a high-end jeans store in Dupont Circle and quickly made off with $20,000 in stock. Since then, the practice has spread — Dallas, Las Vegas, Ottawa, and Upper Darby, Pa. have all reported incidents since then — though the targets have gotten a bit more downscale, with most of the thefts taking place in convenience stores.

The latest crowd theft took place Saturday night at a 7-Eleven in Silver Spring, Md., and it fit the familiar pattern. Kids pour into the store, calmly help themselves to merchandise, and then stream out again.

Read more at Wired

Redefining Public Relations in the Age of Social Media

The industry’s largest organization, the Public Relations Society of America, is embarking on an effort to develop a better definition of “public relations,” one more appropriate for the 21st century. The effort is being spurred by the profound changes in public relations since the last time the organization updated its definition, in 1982.

Attempts to write new definitions in 2003 and 2007 did not move forward, leaving in place this vague definition: “Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.” Perhaps the most significant changes have occurred most recently, as the Internet and social media like blogs, Facebook and Twitter have transformed the relationship between the members of the public and those communicating with them.

Read more from the New York Times

Radio Revs Edge Up Again

The radio business is continuing its gradual recovery, with total spending increasing 2% from $4.44 billion in the third quarter of 2010 to $4.53 billion in the third quarter of 2011, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau. For the first nine months of 2011 revenue is also up 2% to $12.89 billion. The RAB attributed the overall growth to increases in network, digital, and off-air spending.

Read more here

Social Media: Weak on Customer Loyalty

A new study from Pitney Bowes found social media to be one of the least effective engagement techniques for encouraging customer loyalty for larger and small businesses alike.

The survey found that just 18% of the respondents believed that interaction with a larger company or its brands on social media would encourage them to buy from that business again. The social media approach was deemed even less effective for smaller businesses, where just 15% of those responding said it would encourage their loyalty to a company.

"..sophisticated social media and Web interaction can be time-consuming and expensive and outcomes are difficult to measure."

Read more here

What Happens When Journalism Is Everywhere?

Are citizen reporters who use social media a threat to normal news sources? Should journalists be licensed? What happens to freedom of the press?

One of the things the NYC police have been trying to do to keep a lid on the (Occupy Wall Street) protests is corral and/or exclude journalists from certain areas—and in many cases even arrest them—and then argue that only “registered” journalists are allowed to move freely (in an Orwellian move, the New York police restricted them to what they called “Free Speech Zones”).

one college student created a summary of the event that got tens of thousands of views in a matter of hours and was embedded by the Washington Post. Does that make him a journalist? Of course it does—in exactly the same way that Pakistani programmer Sohaib Athar became a journalist by live-tweeting the raid on Osama bin Laden, something NPR digital editor Andy Carvin described as a “random act of journalism.”

So what does the world look like when journalism is everywhere? We are beginning to find out. And while it may be a frightening prospect if you are a traditional media company, there is a lot to be optimistic about if you are just interested in the news. A world where everyone is a journalist may be a bit more chaotic and a bit more complicated than the one we are used to, but it will also be a bit freer, and that is clearly a good thing.

Read more at Business Week

Drone Journalism Arrives

Now that cellphone cameras have turned every protester with a Twitter account or a YouTube channel into a potential multimedia journalist, police officers in several American cities appear to be having trouble distinguishing between activists and reporters.

Two days ago, as police officers raided the Occupy Wall Street protest camp, several reporters were arrested and many more were denied access to the site. At the same location on Thursday, my colleague Colin Moynihan reported, “Several officers could be seen shoving and punching protesters and journalists” alike.

All of which makes it a good time to report that a Polish firm called RoboKopter scored something of a coup last week when it demonstrated that its miniature flying drone was capable of recording spectacular aerial views of a chaotic protest in Warsaw.

Read more at the New York Times

Local Social Media Ad Spending: 2.3 Billion In 2015

Locally focused advertising in social media is expected to grow at annual rate of 33% from $400 million in 2010 to $2.3 billion by 2015, according to a new forecast from BIA/Kelsey. That would make local advertising roughly a third of the total of $8.1 billion in U.S. social media ad revenue that the research firm projects in four years.

Read more here

How Mainstream Media Uses Twitter

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism studied every tweet sent in one week by six newspapers (The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today,The Wall Street Journal, Arizona Republic, The Toledo Blade) five broadcasters (NPR, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC News), and two websites (Huffington Post, Daily Caller), as well as the most-followed individual journalist at each.

The key finding: “News organizations use Twitter in limited ways — primarily as an added means to disseminate their own material. Both the sharing of outside content and engagement with followers are rare.”

Read more here

One-third have broken up by Facebook, text or e-mail

A survey conducted by market researchers Lot 42 declares that 33 percent of human beings have broken up with their beloveds by text, e-mail, or Facebook.

Yes, Facebook.

You might imagine that I am talking about 13-year-olds. Because you definitely, surely have to be 13 to be on Facebook. Yet, no. This survey purports to offer the truths of 550 people older than 18--and, clearly, over the first flushes of love.

Read more at C-net

Cable's Future May Already Have Passed

Television advertising that allows viewer participation via a remote control has been a dream of the cable industry for at least a quarter century. This year, Canoe Ventures (bankrolled by cable companies) finished building a platform that allows advertisers to include interactive elements in commercials - with Canoe collecting a fee for each ad campaign sold. There's just one problem: The Web got there first.

Canoe's cable network reach, while growing, is only about 23 million households, a far cry from Facebook's 800 million users. The explosion of mobile devices is pushing advertisers toward bypassing the set-top box.

Read more here

the U.S. government’s plans to auction off spectrum to wireless carriers won’t help innovation

Last February, Cisco Systems (CSCO) estimated that mobile data will increase 26-fold from 2010’s numbers by 2015. Almost one-third of this will move through Wi-Fi networks, which use unlicensed spectrum and don’t burden wireless carriers such as AT&T (T) or Verizon Wireless (VZ). But the carriers have adopted the phrase “spectrum crunch,” designed to make vivid the pain of a hypothetical moment when there are more data than the available spectrum can handle.

The Obama Administration has decided that wireless carriers need more spectrum.

In 1994, rather than grant all licenses for free, the FCC began auctioning rights to pieces of spectrum, mostly to wireless carriers. Now all the easy pickings in spectrum have been auctioned off, according to Blair Levin, who headed last year’s national broadband plan for the FCC. And so the Administration has adopted Levin’s idea for opening up more spectrum to wireless companies: “incentive auctions.” Television broadcasters will be offered the chance to give up some of their spectrum in return for an as-yet-unknown percentage of the auction proceeds.

Read more here

Modern Warfare 3 Hauls In $400 Million Overnight, The Biggest Gaming Launch Ever

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 beat the previous one-day video game sales record, bringing in $400 million in the United States and the UK after it was on sale for one day. Activision-Blizzard said today it sold more than 6.5 million copies of the game after it went on sale on Tuesday.

The last Call of Duty game, Black Ops, brought in $360 million on its first day last year. Modern Warfare 2 brought in $310 million. Rival Battlefield 3, published by Electronic Arts, sold 5 million copies in its first week on sale — bringing in around $300 million.

Read more here

Mobile Tool to Authenticate Citizen-Media Reports

Computer scientists at Duke University have built a prototype of a new system, called YouProve, that tracks changes in images or audio captured with mobile phones.
YouProve is an add-on to the Android operating system that records significant alterations of media files, like adding content or pixelizing a license plate. It could be useful for someone participating in a rally who wants to preserve someone’s anonymity by blurring his face before publishing a photo on a site like CNN iReport.
YouProve creates a “fidelity certificate” detailing how the image has been altered. It posts that certificate along with the edited image online. Read more here

Adobe Halts Flash for Mobile Devices

Software developer Adobe is reported to be throwing in the towel when it comes to getting multimedia platform Flash to run on mobile devices. The company is halting development on future mobile versions of Flash for Android and Research In Motion's PlayBook, among other mobile operating systems. The move would be a major blow to Android device makers, who have long touted Flash compatibility as a key competitive advantage over Apple's iPhone and iPad.

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No Relationship Between Clicks And Sales

Nielsen reiterated this week that it has found virtually no relationship between clicks and brand metrics, or offline sales.

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News organizations can finally create Google+ pages

Google+ has launched brand pages for businesses, finally enabling news organizations and other businesses, institutions or products to engage with people on the social network.

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Starbucks Augmented Reality for the Holidays

Here’s How You Make a Documentary Only Using HTML5 and WebGL Graphics

One Millionth Tower is part of Highrise, a series of mini-documentaries about the history of high rise towers and their effect on society. What sets this one apart from the others is that it was made using HTML5 technologies such as WebGL and Javascript.

Google Ponders Pay-TV Business

Internet giant Google Inc. is considering a plan to offer paid cable-TV services to consumers, a move that could unleash a new wave of competition within the traditional TV business.

The discussions underscore the intensifying battle for control of the TV set. In recent years phone companies have jumped into a market previously dominated by cable-TV operators and satellite-TV providers. Now companies such as Amazon.com Inc. are bulking up their content offerings, while Apple Inc. and others are trying to reinvent the viewing experience with iPads and other devices, and potentially a new type of television set. Meanwhile, Comcast Corp. and other incumbent cable and satellite operators are fighting back, creating their own apps and lining up Internet-rights to programs that tie into their existing offline TV subscriptions.

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Deals Top Social Marketing Driver

According to new research from Nielsen/McKinsey's NM Incite, the top reason for following or liking a brand, company or celebrity on social networking sites is to receive discounts and special offers, according to a recent survey of global online consumers conducted by Nielsen. In the U.S., NM Incite found that nearly 60% of social media users visit social networks to receive coupons or promotions, with 23% saying they do this on a weekly basis. At 45%, North American consumers showed the strongest interest in using social media for deals, followed by consumers in Asia-Pacific regions -- 34% -- and Latin America -- 33%.

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CIA tracks revolt by Tweet, Facebook

In an anonymous industrial park, CIA analysts who jokingly call themselves the "ninja librarians" are mining the mass of information people publish about themselves overseas, tracking everything from common public opinion to revolutions.

The group's effort gives the White House a daily snapshot of the world built from tweets, newspaper articles and Facebook updates. The agency's Open Source Center sometimes looks at 5 million tweets a day. The center's several hundred analysts - the actual number is classified - track a broad range of subjects, including Chinese Internet access and the mood on the street in Pakistan. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have become a key resource for following a fast-moving crisis.

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Angry Birds - Half a Billion Downloads

Facial Monitoring

Making online ads that not only know you are looking at them but also respond to your emotions will soon be possible, thanks to the power of image-processing software and the ubiquity of tiny cameras in computers and mobile devices.

Uses for this technology would not, of course, be confined to advertising. There is ample scope to deploy it in areas like security, computer gaming, education and health care. But admen are among the first to embrace the idea in earnest. That is because it helps answer, at least online, clients’ perennial carp: that they know half the money they spend on advertising is wasted, but they don’t know which half.

Advertising firms already film how people react to ads, usually in an artificial setting. This work is now moving online. Higher-quality cameras and smarter computer-vision software mean that volunteers can work from home and no longer need to wear clunky headgear.

One of the companies doing such work, Realeyes, which is based in London, has been developing a system that combines eye-spying webcams with emotional analysis. In fact, webcams that monitor a person’s heart rate are soon to appear. To calculate the heart rate the camera detects tiny changes in the colour of the skin.

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Amazon’s Flow iPhone App Brings Augmented Reality To Barcode Scanning And Product Search

Amazon subsidiary A9.com has just launched a new augmented reality iPhone app—Flow Powered by Amazon. Flow uses augmented reality to help users explore and discover tens of millions of products in a real world setting... to give shoppers interactive product information about these items in the real world. You can point the app toward a book, video game, CD, DVD or other product with a UPC barcode. When the app recognized the product, it will display the Amazon.com product information, including the option to play multimedia content and read customer reviews.

For some products, you’ll be able to see trailers and other media previews in the app. Flow will also save all of the history of the items scanned.

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Newspaper Circs Sink Again

Many of the nation’s large and mid-sized regional newspapers saw their daily circulation figures decrease between September 2010 and September 2011, according to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Although there were some notable exceptions, with several newspapers reporting big increases in weekday circulation, the general trend continues the downward slope in evidence over the last decade.

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Why the social media editor job may be a transitional one

Is the most up-and-coming job in journalism — the social media editor — a permanent position at news outlets, or a transitional role? At a panel discussing social media best practices at the Journalism Interactive conference this morning, The New York Times’ co-social media editor, Liz Heron, said that her own position probably falls on the side of transitional. “I think my job will probably not exist in five years,” she said.

But! That’s “not because social media will die out or fade,” Heron noted. Quite the opposite. We’re in a moment of disruption right now — social media may be slowly transforming some formerly standard newsroom practices. That won’t be the case for much longer, Heron suggested. (As Heron’s co-panelist, NBC’s Jim Long, put it: In a few years, having a social media editor will make as much sense as having a telephone consultant.) Social media, and innovation in their use, will become more of a team effort.

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Clear Channel Cuts D.J.’s Across the Country

Clear Channel Communications, the largest radio station operator in the United States, dismissed dozens of local D.J.’s this week, affecting small stations from Syracuse to Spokane, Wash., and raising fresh concerns about the homogenization of radio programming.
Clear Channel Radio, which operates about 850 stations in the United States and employs 12,000 people, declined to say how many employees were dismissed, but some of the D.J.’s said they believed that the number was in the hundreds.

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Pay Wall Won't Offset 'NYT' Print Declines

 The New York Times has raised substantial circulation revenues from its online paywall, but these are unlikely to make up for continuing losses on the print advertising side, according to Citigroup analyst Leo Kulp, who cited the company’s precarious finances in a note to investors, when he downgraded The New York Times Co. stock from “buy” to “neutral.”
 Regardless of the actual amount, however, the company will be hard-pressed to make up for losses suffered on the print side since the middle of the last decade. From 2006 to 2010, NYTCO’s total revenues declined 27.4% from $3.29 billion to $2.39 billion, due mostly to a steep decline in advertising revenue, from $2.15 billion to $1.3 billion -- a 39.5% drop in just five years.

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Facebook Is Serious TV Rival

Facebook is closing in on being a mass medium -- just like TV, according to a study by Frank N. Magid Associates Generational Strategies. More consumers use Facebook during work-day hours, 9 p.m. to 5 p.m,. than watch TV. The survey says only baby boomers are the exception, where 35% report they watching TV versus 26% who say they are using Facebook. Things are different in prime time where TV still dominates.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/161078/facebook-is-serious-tv-rival.html

Tablets Used 90 Minutes Per Day on Average

According to research conducted by the Pew Research Center and The Economist Group, the 77% of tablet owners who use the device daily are on them an average of 90 minutes a day.

What are those tablet owners — a category that now includes 11% of U.S. adults, according to Pew’s estimates — doing with their devices? After browsing the web, which two-thirds of tablet owners do on their tablets on a daily basis, the most popular activities are checking email (54%) and reading news (53%). One in four access social networks through the device, and a third play games on a daily basis. Another 17% read books, and 13% watch movies or videos.

Getting tablet owners to pay for this content is another matter, however. A mere 14% of those who regularly read news on their tablets have directly paid for content on the devices. Twenty-three percent do, however, pay for a print subscription that includes digital access — meaning that more than a third are paying for news access in some form or other.

http://mashable.com/2011/10/25/pew-tablet-news-study/

Nielsen: Nearly Half Of Americans Are Watching Online Video

One of the reasons online video is the fastest growing ad segment is because nearly half of all Americans are watching some form of streaming, according to Nielsen’s Cross-Platform report. But online video is still a long way off from attracting half of marketers’ advertising dollars.

TV is still king: For all the excitement over online video, the TV set is still the thing. But interactivity has surely helped, rather than hurt, TV viewing—quite the opposite of the cannibalization that newspapers have seen from digital.

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Revenue Declines for Big Newspapers

The nation’s largest newspaper publishers all reported continuing declines in advertising revenues in the third quarter of 2011. What’s more, digital ad revenue continues to grow at a lackluster pace -- if at all.

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Twitter: 100 Million Monthly Active Users

Twitter has more than 100 million active users and that signups via iOS device have tripled since the launch of iOS 5. The company surpassed 200 million tweets per day in June, but has since jumped to nearly 250 million daily tweets. The growth has been tremendous: Twitter had around 100 million tweets per day in January 2011.

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Profit and Ad Revenue Fall at Gannett

Gannett reported on Monday a severe decline in advertising revenue at its newspaper division in the third quarter, pointing to a pullback in consumer and business spending.

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A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work

Social media drive TV ratings

It’s one of the most-asked questions around social TV: social media is great, but does it drive ratings? Yes, according to a new study by NM Incite, a Nielsen company.

The study found a “statistically significant” connection (proof!) between social buzz and TV ratings among all age groups, “with the strongest correlation among younger demos (people ages 12-17 and 18-34), and a slightly stronger overall correlation for women compared to men.”

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Magazine Ad Pages Fall 5.6%

The weak recovery in consumer magazine publishing appears to have lost its momentum, judging by the latest figures from the Publisher’s Information Bureau, which show total ad pages declining 5.6% in the third quarter, compared to the same period last year.

For the year to date, ad pages are down 1.1%.

Ad page declines in the third quarter were fairly widespread, with 134 out of 210 titles tracked by PIB (63.8%) showing year-over-year drops.

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Making sense of a torrent of tweets

MOST tweets are inane, but a million may contain valuable information. Fed through clever algorithms, a torrent of microblogs can reveal changes in a nation’s mood. Hence the excitement about a new market: the sale and analysis of real-time social-media data. DataSift, a start-up, will soon launch a marketplace for such information.

Both DataSift and Gnip are striving to be “data platforms”. Both Gnip and DataSift have built robust networks which can cope with massive amounts of data in real time. Buyers are mostly social-media monitoring companies, which analyse the data for a fee. Sysomos, a Canadian firm, for example, allows firms to track in real time what people think about certain products. Lexalytics, for instance, analyses the sentiment of messages and posts. Klout measures the influence of social-media users (some firms give people with a high Klout score preferential treatment).

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The Walmart of the web

On September 28th Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, unveiled a tablet computer called the Kindle Fire. It will compete with gadgets such as B&N’s Nook Color tablet and Apple’s iPad. The new Amazon tablet, which has a somewhat smaller screen than the iPad and only offers Wi-Fi connectivity, is likely to be just the first salvo in a titanic battle.

Like Apple, Amazon boasts a huge collection of online content, including e-books, films and music. And like Apple, it lets people store their content in a computing “cloud” and retrieve it from almost anywhere. But the two firms part company when it comes to pricing. The Kindle Fire, which will be available from mid-November in America, will cost only $199. That is far less than the cheapest iPad, a Wi-Fi-only device which costs $499.

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A marketing guru reveals some of the secrets of his profession

VANCE PACKARD was the Malcolm Gladwell of his day, a journalist with a gift for explaining business to the general public. But in his 1957 classic “The Hidden Persuaders”, he out-Gladwelled Gladwell. The book not only had a perfect title. It also revealed for the first time the psychological tricks that the advertising industry used to make Americans want stuff, instantly transforming the image of America’s advertising executives from glamorous Mad Men into servants of Mephistopheles.

“Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy” is an attempt to write a modern version of “The Hidden Persuaders”.

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Social Media News Site Gains Clout

As portals like Yahoo scramble to hold onto an audience that is becoming less drawn to general-interest news, Mashable, Business Insider and Gawker are among a group of smaller niche sites with devoted audiences that are appealing to advertisers. Analysts credit much of Mashable’s rise to its skillful use of search optimization and a large catalog of articles about how to use social media tools. Then there’s Mashable’s influential online audience, which shares and distributes its links across the Web, further fueling the site’s growth.

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Magazines, Newspapers Set for More Decline

The outlook for print advertising remains particularly gloomy, at least in the U.S., with ZenithOptimedia predicting continuing declines in 2011, 2012 and 2013.

Newspapers will undoubtedly get the worst of it, with ZO forecasting consecutive annual revenue declines of 8.5%, 8% and 8% in 2011, 2012 and 2013, respectively.

Combining these predictions with print advertising data from the Newspaper Association of America, that implies that total print newspaper ad revenues will fall from $22.8 billion in 2010 to $20.9 billion in 2011, $19.2 billion in 2012, and $17.7 billion in 2013. That represents just 37% of the peak print ad revenue figure of $47.4 billion in 2005, also per the NAA.

American magazines appear to be somewhat better off in the latest ZO forecast, but publishers won't be breaking out the champagne any time soon. After a tepid recovery in 2010, ZO has total ad revenues flat in 2011, followed by consecutive declines of 2% per year in 2012 and 2013.

Radio is set for modest growth of 2% in 2011, 2.1% in 2012 and 2.9% in 2013, although (like other media tracked by ZO) these gains will be somewhat diminished by inflation. The Internet is poised for double-digit annual growth for the foreseeable future.

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Tablet Users Devour 48% More Internet

If early adopter metrics are a fair indication, then the tablet is poised to be a genuine game changer in both the ways in which people access the Web and the sheer volume of their use. According to research from Knowledge Networks, tablet-owning consumers on average spend 48% more time each day with the Internet -- 4 hours and 19 minutes across platforms compared to 2 hours and 55 minutes for all users.

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HTML5 Gaining But Mobile Fragmentation Remains

The HTML5 programming language may be gaining ground as a standard for the mobile Web, but there's still a long way to go before it leads to a seamless user experience on devices. That's the upshot of a new study (registration required) by mobile software firm Netbiscuits, which found that a majority of the top-selling 10 smartphones in the U.S. have adopted HTML5 features.

HTML5 has gather growing support for mobile Web development in the last year from prominent publishers including The New York Times, Conde Nast and Meredith, in addition to backing from major technology companies including Apple and Google. But most smartphone users prefer to access content on their phones using native apps.

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Cassette tapes see new life after mp3s

The editors of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary decided to remove the term "cassette tape" from its pages this summer to help make room for 400 new words including "cyberbullying" and "retweet."

It's starting to look like that move may have been premature. A growing number of indie bands are turning to the format to get their music out more quickly and inexpensively, according to Rob Mason, the owner of Old Flame Records.

Regardless of format, music consumption is at an all-time high, says David Bakula, the senior vice president of analytics entertainment for Nielsen. But even as sales of vinyl records continue to grow -- they've increased 37% from last year, he said -- it's uncertain whether cassette nostalgia will reach those same heights.

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"The Daily" Shows Some Promise

Seven months ago when (Rupert Murdoch) launched The Daily, the first (and still only) "iPad newspaper" (it) was a $30 million bet on both the tablet as a medium and the public's willingness to pay for news.

Today The Daily has 120,000 active weekly readers, 80,000 of whom are actually paying for the app, according to Publisher Greg Clayman. The bigger number includes 40,000 non-paying readers on a two-week introductory trial period. But The Daily still has a long way to go before it proves anything about paid media or the tablet. While its subscriber rolls remain well short of the 500,000 paying readers that Mr. Murdoch said would make it a viable business. The Daily's numbers put it in the ballpark with some established print brands' digital editions.

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Can AOL and Yahoo Come Back to Life?

AOL (and) Yahoo (have) joined the ranks of the Web’s walking dead—not yet in the ground, but hearts barely beating—alongside other former stars such as Myspace, Digg, and RealNetworks. Yahoo and AOL have tried to live by Old Media rules while masquerading as New Media powerhouses. They have been and continue to be successful at building audiences... But unlike Google or Facebook, Yahoo and AOL earn revenues the old-fashioned way—by employing rafts of reporters and maintaining costly ad sales teams to make sure the articles and deals keep flowing... says Citigroup’s Mahaney. “There’s no real way for them to lock in customers.” As a result, Yahoo and AOL have to spend a lot just to keep pace.. With less of a cash cushion, it’s hard to focus on new markets.

Read more at Business Week

Pay-TV subscriber losses

With more young adults tuning out this TV season, the industry is confronting a generation of viewers who say they won’t pay the typical $75 monthly cable or satellite bill. Nielsen (NLSN), whose TV ratings influence ad rates, in May cut the estimated number of U.S. TV households by 1 percent, to 114.7 million, the first drop since 1990. College towns such as Boston, Madison, Wisc., and Austin, Tex., posted some of the biggest declines.

It’s also because of the growing appetite for Internet-delivered TV programming among younger viewers. To many of them, there’s no difference between watching Gossip Girl online or on the tube, says David F. Poltrack, chief research officer at CBS (CBS). College-age audiences are relying more on laptops than TVs to watch favorite shows...
When students watch sports, however, increasingly they gather in common rooms with TVs, Poltrack says.

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Amazon's Fire

On the new frontier of the magazine industry: Amazon debuted a new tablet computer to compete with Apple, while Hearst reported strong circulation growth for its digital editions, among other digital-related news.

On the tablet front, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the new Kindle Fire, a full-color touchscreen tablet computer that costs $199, making it significantly cheaper than Apple's iPad, which retails for $499 or more, depending on options.

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Internet Ads Reach $15 Billion, First-Half 2011

Internet ad revenue rose 24.1% to $7.7 billion in Q2 2011, contributing a 23% uptick to $14.9 billion in the first half of the year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers U.S. stats.

Aside from display ads, paid search ads continue to take the majority of the media buy.

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No paper might mean no news

A Pew Research Center survey reveals a disconnect by news consumers about where their information originates. It turns out that the audience doesn't merely fail to recognize who produces most local news. Even those who do give credit to their local paper don't express particular concern about finding an alternative if their paper goes away, a new and detailed survey of community news consumption habits shows.

Americans turn to their newspapers (and attendant websites) on more topics than any other local news source, according to a survey released this week by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. But, despite their own reading habits, more than two-thirds told pollsters that if their hometown paper disappeared, it would not seriously hurt their ability to keep up with the news.

TV news remains the No. 1 source for local news, with 74% of Americans saying they tune in at least once a week, usually to on-air programming, though sometimes to station websites. Half of those surveyed said they get information once a week or more from newspapers or their websites. But the audience turned to newspapers for a much greater variety of information.

Yet the Pew survey also found that Americans now turn to a variety of sources for their information, with no particular loyalty to any one. Fully 69% of those questioned (here comes the disconnect) said there would be little or no impact on their ability to keep up with local news without their newspaper. And nearly half of adults, 45%, said they do not have a favorite local news source.

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Video games may not boost cognition

Researchers say that previous studies that claim video game players have higher cognition than non gamers are flawed. U.S. researchers say several influential studies showing action gamers' skills are superior to those of non-gamers suffer from a host of methodological flaws.

Walter Boot, an assistant professor at Florida State University, and Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois, and colleagues say many of the studies compared the cognitive skills of frequent gamers to non-gamers and found gamers to be superior.

However, Boot and co-authors point out that this doesn't necessarily mean game experience caused better perceptual and cognitive abilities -- it could be that individuals who have the abilities required to be successful gamers are simply drawn to gaming. Boot says. "But we found no benefits of video game training."

The findings are published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

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What Can’t you Live Without?

Facebook is more important than having a flushing toilet. That’s the finding of a survey by London’s Science Museum. It asked 3,000 adults what they couldn't live without. Facebook came in 5^th while a toilet ranked 9^th. The winner was sunshine, followed by being on the internet, clean drinking water and a refrigerator.

The tools of the digital made a strong showing. Email was 8^th and possessing a mobile phone 10th. Google came in at 22, Ipods at 37, Computer spell-checks claimed the 41st spot and the last position went to Twitter. The Wii and Xbox made the list as well.

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Magazine Audiences Dipped 2010-2011

After enjoying several years of stability, the total audience for 70 major American consumer magazines dipped from 2010-2011, according to a MediaPost analysis of data from GfK MRI. Although there have been audience fluctuations in the past, this large year-over-year decrease is ominous, coming as it does alongside falling newsstand sales and stagnant ad pages.

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News Trends Tilt Toward Niche Sites

Like newspapers, portals like AOL and Yahoo are confronting the cold fact that there is less general interest in general interest news. Readers have peeled off into verticals of information — TMZ for gossip, Politico for politics and Deadspin for sports, and so on.

Part of the problem is the result of a fundamental shift in Web behavior. Media stalwarts erected a frame around the Web and organized, and sometimes produced, content. Now the frame around content is the Web browser itself, and consumers do their own programming and are more inclined to see news consumption as a kind of voting, selecting smaller brands that reflect their sensibilities.

Many of the news sites that are now having success on the Web — Business Insider, Gawker and Mashable, to name a few — are built on sensibility, which is generally a product of a small group of like minds.

There are exceptions. TMZ has thrived as a division of Time Warner, College Humor continues to crack wise as part of IAC/InterActiveCorp and CBS seems to have done well by CNET after acquiring it.

There are some parallels with the television world. The name NBC communicates very little other than generic bigness, while right now, FX, HBO, AMC and Showtime each convey a cachet that the big networks lack.

Business Insider has become marginally profitable in a short amount of time, Politico has begun to make money and TMZ has a sturdy enough Web brand that it was able to successfully build a television show of the same name. But all of them are hemmed in by the tyranny of small numbers.

Read more at the New York Times

Magazine Newsstand Sales Halved from 2001-2011

The combined newsstand sales of 68 major American magazines declined by nearly half from 2001-2011, a MediaPost analysis of Audit Bureau of Circulations data revealed. According to ABC FAS-FAX circulation reports, this group of leading weekly and monthly magazines saw total average newsstand sales plunge from 22,019,953 in the six-month period ending June 2001 to 11,562,028 in the six-month period ending June 2011 -- a 47.5% decline over the course of the decade. Newsstand sales have declined steadily, dropping every single year from 2001-2011. After slowly declining from 22 million in 2001 to just over 17 million in 2007, shedding 23% over the course of seven years, the rate of loss increased from 2008 to 2011 -- shedding another 32% in just four years.

In one of the more ominous developments, women seem to be losing interest in many newsstand titles traditionally aimed at them, which are responsible for a large share of total newsstand sales.

Although magazine publishers are looking to sell both digital single copies and subscription intended for consumption with tablet computers, e-readers and online, digital newsstand sales remain fairly low. In August Time Inc. revealed that it had sold a total of about 600,000 digital copies of People, Time, Sports Illustrated and Fortune across all platforms, and Conde Nast said it had sold a total of about 106,000 digital editions of its various magazines through Apple's iTunes store in the preceding six weeks, per Adweek.

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Print Media Ad Revenues Continue To Slide

According to a recent note by UBS, print ad growth came in at negative 8.9%, below estimates of a 7.7% decline, to the benefit of other media segments which will receive funds flowing out of print media. Revenues on classified sections deteriorated substantially, with growth down to negative 10.9% versus estimates of a decline of 5.1%. National print advertising was marginally better than expected, falling 8.8% compared with estimates of a 10% drop.

UBS now estimates full year 2011 print advertising growth to fall 6.6%, while in 2012 they expect a decline of 5%, in both cases worse than their previous expectations.

With New York Times’ total company advertising declining 4% in the second quarter and no positive revisions on digital ad revenue growth, UBS now expects The Gray Lady’s third quarter advertising revenues to decline 5.5%.

Read more at Forbes

Report Details Rise of Social Media

Social media account for 22.5 percent of the time that Americans spend online, according to (a new Nielsen Company report), compared with 9.8 percent for online games and 7.6 percent for e-mail. That makes social media the No. 1 specific category and the No. 2 category over all, behind “other” ways Americans spend time online, among them perusing adult content, visiting retail Web sites and reading about subjects like sports and health.

The social media brand that Americans spend the most time with, the report finds, is Facebook, by an enormous margin. During May, when the report was compiled, Americans spent 53.5 billion minutes on facebook.com from computers at home and work. (That was up 6 percent from 50.6 billion minutes in May 2010.)

Behind Facebook during May was Blogger, at 723.8 million minutes; Tumblr, at 623.5 million minutes; Twitter, at 565.2 million minutes; and LinkedIn, at 325.7 million minutes.

Read ore at the New York Times

Computer Generated Articles Gaining Traction

Narrative Science, a start-up in Evanston, Ill., offers proof of the progress of artificial intelligence — the ability of computers to mimic human reasoning. The innovative work at Narrative Science raises the broader issue of whether such applications of artificial intelligence will mainly assist human workers or replace them. Technology is already undermining the economics of traditional journalism... will “robot journalists” replace flesh-and-blood journalists in newsrooms?

The company, founded last year, has 20 customers so far. Narrative Science (earns) less than $10 for each article of about 500 words — and the price will very likely decline over time. Even at $10, the cost is far less, by industry estimates, than the average cost per article of local online news ventures like AOL’s Patch or answer sites, like those run by Demand Media.

Read more at the New York Times

Great digital expectations

In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books. It accounts for less than a quarter of physical book sales. But Amazon sells 60-70% of e-books in America.

Read more at The Economist

Disappearing ink

More quickly than almost anyone predicted, e-books are emerging as a serious alternative to the paper kind. Amazon, comfortably the biggest e-book retailer, has lowered the price of its Kindle e-readers to the point where people do not fear to take them to the beach. In America, the most advanced market, about one-fifth of the largest publishers’ sales are of e-books. Newly released blockbusters may sell as many digital copies as paper ones. The proportion is growing quickly, not least because many bookshops are closing.

The music and film industries have started to bundle electronic with physical versions of their products—by, for instance, providing those who buy a DVD of a movie with a code to download it from the internet. Publishers, similarly, should bundle e-books with paper books.

Read more atThe Economist

5 Signs of an Online Lie

Words longer than eight letters: Long words aren’t typically used in day-to-day conversation, so people who deploy them may be trying too hard to sound authentic—when, in fact, they’re pulling the wool over your eyes.

A lack of me, myself, and I: “In deceptive text, expect fewer first-person pronouns,” says Subbalakshmi. “This is because deceivers try to dissociate themselves from their words. This is done to avoid personal responsibility for their behavior.”

Too much you: Text riddled with second-person pronouns like you, your, or y’all are also suspect. Often, it’s an attempt to deflect attention from the liar toward the person he’s trying to dupe.

No ifs, buts, or withouts: “Since lying requires cognitive resources, deceivers tend to tell a less complex story,” explains Subbalakshmi. “They typically do not distinguish between various branches in the story. This could be characterized in the form of a fewer number of exclusive words, like except, but, or without.”

A lot of hate, sad, and bad: “The act of deception induces short-term as well as long-term guilt,” says Subbalakshmi. “This leads to a higher frequency of negative emotion words.”

Read more at Mental Floss

E-books' popularity is rewriting the sales story

"It's been a watershed year for e-books," says Tina Jordan of the Association of American Publishers. "Any publisher will tell you that a best-selling title from a branded author can run upwards of 30% to 40% in digital sales."

Despite surges in new technology and strong e-reader and e-book sales, print books are holding their own; publishers see them as key for the future. They want consumers to have many choices in reading formats and ease of buying.

Read more at USA Today

Book Challenges

US schools have banned more than 20 books and faced more than 50 other challenges this year, the American Library Association reports, and many more are expected this fall.

Read more at USA Today

Spotting the pirates

Since 2000, when the file-sharing service Napster first became popular, digital piracy has dogged the media industry. As broadband speeds have increased, pirates have gone from downloading single songs to grabbing artists’ entire catalogues. Yet piracy has not exactly swept the world. It is endemic in some countries but a niche activity in others. Media piracy is more common in the developing world than in the rich world. The most piratical countries are places like China, Nigeria and Russia, where virtually all media that is not downloaded illegally is sold in the form of knock-off CDs and DVDs.

Read more at The Economist

Newspaper Revenues Slip 7%

The latest figures from the Newspaper Association of America show total newspaper advertising revenues (including print and online) decreasing 6.9% from $6.43 billion in the second quarter of 2010 to $5.99 billion in the second quarter. This is the 20th straight quarter to see year-over-year declines in total advertising revenue.

Online advertising continued to enjoy a healthy growth rate. However, the proportion of total revenues derived from online advertising remains relatively modest, at 15.5%, up from 11.6% in the same quarter of 2010.

As in previous quarters, the revenue declines were spread fairly evenly across the major advertising categories.

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Winners and Losers: The Changing Media Ad Landscape, 1980-2011

Anyone who follows the media business cannot fail to be impressed by how much -- and how fast -- the media landscape has changed in recent decades. In addition to the rapid evolution of media technology and consumption habits, one of the most remarkable trends has been the upheaval in the advertising landscape.

They include the rise of the Internet, the continued expansion of cable TV, and the dramatic decline of print -- especially newspapers. Plus, broadcast TV and radio are struggling to hold on to their share, in a situation where the only certainty is further change, as a continuing economic downturn accelerates long-term secular shifts.

The following is a quick overview of the changing media landscape, including winners, losers and everyone in between.

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Google and Facebook Top Web Brands

Initial Nielsen results for its new "Total Internet Audience" metric, which looks to aggregate usage at home, work and elsewhere, shows Google led Facebook handily in unique users in July. Add Google with sibling YouTube and that figure is not far from doubling Facebook.

Facebook, however, topped other sites in the top 10 in time spent per person, with an average of five hours and 19 minutes, a figure Nielsen said is actually under-reported due to an alteration in data gathering. The next closest was AOL Media Network at two hours and 18 minutes.

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Tablets Trump Smartphones For M-Commerce

Smartphones may be good for mobile shopping, but tablets are where buying gets done. That's the implication of new research from e-commerce software firm Ability Commerce, which shows the iPad has driven more revenues for retail clients than smartphones, even though handsets account for the bulk of their mobile traffic.

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Google and Facebook Top Web Brands

Initial Nielsen results for its new "Total Internet Audience" metric, which looks to aggregate usage at home, work and elsewhere, shows Google led Facebook handily in unique users in July. Add Google with sibling YouTube and that figure is not far from doubling Facebook.

Facebook, however, topped other sites in the top 10 in time spent per person, with an average of five hours and 19 minutes, a figure Nielsen said is actually under-reported due to an alteration in data gathering. The next closest was AOL Media Network at two hours and 18 minutes.

Read more here

Study Reveals Facebook Age Gap: Older Users Don't 'Like' It, But Are More Likely To Click Through

Don't expect Facebook users age 50+ to "Like" a product or service in an ad, but do expect them to click through to the landing page or Web site, according to a new study.
The study from SocialCode... shows that for ads with a "Like" button, older Facebook users tend to click through to the Web site, while younger users tend to "Like" something in the Facebook ad. Consumers age 50 and older, the oldest segment in the study, are 28.2% more likely to click through and 9% less likely to click "Like," compared with those ages 18 to 29, the youngest group monitored.

Think about the goals of the brand. If the brand appeals to younger men, and the marketer wants to build up a Fan base, (the study) suggests deploying the "like" technology. When doing that know a more mature female audience will not likely respond to this type of ad, she said. Age influences CTRs for women much more than men.

It may take longer for the older audience to become comfortable with this technology. They seem to take more time and consider the offer before acting on it."

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First Circuit upholds right to record public police action

The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that there is a clearly-established First Amendment right to film police officers performing their duties in a public space.

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Hispanic media faring better than mainstream media

Hispanic newspapers overall — weekly and daily — lost circulation in 2010, but not nearly to the extent of the English-language press, reports Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Spanish-language television had an even more positive year, with Univision now competing with — and in some timeslots outpacing — audiences for ABC, CBS and NBC. On the digital front, while Hispanic Americans don’t access the Internet at the same rates as other Americans, there is growth, and bilingual Latinos are already heavily online. Hispanic radio and magazines also showed growth, according to the PEJ study.

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Breaking the (Cable) box

FIFTEEN years ago nearly all the television shows that excited critics and won awards appeared on free broadcast channels. Pay-television (or, as many Americans call it, “cable”) was the domain of repeats, music videos and televangelists. Then HBO, a subscription outfit mostly known for boxing and films, decided to try its hand at hour-long dramas.

But pay-television is now under threat, especially in America. Prices have been driven so high at a time of economic malaise that many people simply cannot afford it. Disruptive, deep-pocketed firms like Amazon and Netflix lurk, whispering promises of internet-delivered films and television shows for little or no money. Whether the lure of such alternatives or poverty is what is causing people to cancel their subscriptions is not clear. But the proportion of Americans who pay for TV is falling.

Read more at The Economist

Don't touch that radio dial — Arbitron is listening

In August 2008, the Arbitron radio ratings service (began using) Portable People Meters, or PPMs, pager-sized devices that automatically registered everything the wearer heard.Since then, the new, theoretically more objective measurements have made broadcasters question some long-held ideas and have led to changes in what their audiences hear. PPM made obsolete many broadcasters' ancient rituals: Incessant repetition of the station call letters, so Arbitron listeners couldn't possibly forget where their dials were tuned. Or starting a contest at 7:25 a.m., so the station would get credit in the diary for both the 7:15 and the 7:30 quarter-hours. Or having promotions reach a crescendo toward the end of the survey week — which ran from Thursday to Wednesday — knowing that many diary keepers would procrastinate until then to fill out all their entries.

Some formats with the most fiercely loyal listeners — urban, country and Spanish-language — suffered in the switch from diaries to PPMs. The new figures also showed that most radio listening wasn't in weekday mornings (6-10 a.m.), as had been thought, but midday (10 a.m.-3 p.m.): There was more at-work listening than previously reported. And there wasn't much drop-off at other times, or on weekends.

Kevin Weatherly, program director at KROQ and senior vice president of programming for the CBS Radio chain, said he has implemented other PPM lessons: Eliminate clutter, cut down on DJ patter and be judicious with new music.

Read more at the LA Times

Local TV Newscasts Expanding

Coming soon to (St. Louis) television screens: more news at 4 in the morning, again at 10, and at 4 in the afternoon. KSDK, the local NBC affiliate, is adding newscasts to those time slots next month, giving it six and a half hours of local news each weekday, its highest count to date.

This is what the rebound in local television looks like. The more popular stations in markets like St. Louis are adding newscasts and in some cases employees — though not as many as were dismissed during the downturn. Local TV news is consistently identified in surveys as the top news source for most Americans.

Because weather is consistently identified as the most important part of local newscasts, KSDK recently hired a fifth full-time member of its weather team and is adding dashboard cameras to its trucks to transmit live video via the Internet during severe weather.

Read more at the New York Times

Smartphones and Tablets More Popular

Chadwick Martin Bailey, a Boston-based custom research firm, conducted a recent study on more than 1,400 U.S. consumers and found that smartphones and tablets are steadily increasing in popularity. The study also indicates that consumer preference for smartphones and tablets will overtake new technology entertainment and media devices such as portable gaming systems and TVs. A growing number of consumers use their smartphones and tablets for playing games and watching feature-length movies these days as opposed to using dedicated gaming devices such as portable gaming systems and entertainment and media devices such as TV's and DVD players.

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Augmented reality apps have some work to do

Augmented reality or AR combines a camera, GPS and compass in a smartphone, so that the phone can "recognize" an object or spot that a user is pointing to by computing location data and displaying it on the screen. A traveler points the phone's camera at a particular spot and small icons appear on the screen, representing various points of interest: restaurants, museums, hotels, transit stations. Tapping on the icon renders more information: address, phone number, historical background or Wikipedia description.

Augmented reality is a nifty and fun time-waster, but I don't think it's ready for prime time in its current form. Too often, the icons are twitchy and stacked on top of others, making them difficult to separate and read. AR apps could be more helpful if they could point to a building or a structure and tell travelers what they are looking at or what shops or tenants are inside.

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MediaNews Erects Paywalls At 23 Newspapers

MediaNews Group, which publishes 57 daily newspapers around the U.S., unveiled a new online paywall model for 23 of its smaller newspaper Web sites, requiring online readers to pay for access to digital content. Unusual for the newspaper and magazine business, this includes people who subscribe to the print edition... visitors to the MNG sites will get to see up to five articles for free per month.

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Tencent: March of the Penguins

The Chinese Internet colossus with the cuddly mascot is admired for its success, loathed as a predatory copycat, and full of big plans to break into the U.S.

Tencent is the Internet Goliath you’ve either never heard of or know little about. Yet 674 million Chinese actively use its QQ service, and hundreds of millions more are familiar with its cute cartoon mascot, a winking, scarf-wearing penguin that has helped make Tencent one of the most recognized brands in the country. With 11,400 employees and more than $3 billion in revenue in 2010, it’s become the largest—and, by its competitors, most criticized—Internet company in China. Now Tencent’s ambitions are expanding into the U.S. and elsewhere.

Read more at Business Week

U.K. Prime Minister Suggests ‘Pre-Crime’ Blocking of Social Media

British Prime Minister David Cameron has told Parliament that he is investigating whether to stop people communicating via social networking sites if they are known to be planning criminal activity. In the statement he released to the media before he spoke to Parliament, he also said: “when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them.”

Read more at Wired

Most Popular Online Activities

According to a Pew Internet Project report reveals that 92% of adults who go online use email, with 61% using it on an average day. These numbers that put search and email at the top online activities by U.S. adults make search engine marketing increasingly important. Search remains most popular among young adult Internet users ages 18 to 29.

Experts believe the proliferation of smartphones continues to keep this medium at the top of the list. Companies such as Buckaroo continue to build new features into email platforms that pull in other media, such as search and social.

Read more at Media Post

Think different

Clay Christensen revolutionised the study of (innovation) with “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, a book that popularised the term “disruptive innovation”. This month he publishes a new study, “The Innovator’s DNA”, co-written with Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen, which tries to take us inside the minds of successful innovators.

Mr Christensen and his colleagues list five habits of mind that characterise disruptive innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. Innovators excel at connecting seemingly unconnected things. Innovators are constantly asking why things aren’t done differently. For all their reputation as misfits, innovators tend to be great networkers. But they hang around gabfests to pick up ideas, not to win contracts.

For all their insistence that innovation can be learned, Mr Christensen and co produce a lot of evidence that the disruptive sort requires genius.

Read more at The Economist

Mixed Sales for News Magazines

By and large, circulation trends at weeklies were flat from January through June as sales across the magazine industry fell more than 9 percent over all. Subscription numbers can be manipulated by publishers cutting prices or deciding to cut back on unwanted circulation. For that reason, newsstand sales are often seen as a good proxy for the overall health of a magazine.

With newsstand sales falling, there was some concern that advertising could be next.

Read more at the New York Times

Ad Money Reliably Goes to Television

The economy is faltering and consumers are scared, but you wouldn’t know it by watching television, where advertisers are still pouring in money. Last week, companies like Viacom, CBS and Time Warner reported windfalls in television revenue, much of it from growing ad spending.

Other corners of the media industry — like publishing — may have fewer reasons to be confident about their prospects. The Washington Post on Friday said that print advertising revenues had slid by 12 percent in the second quarter, while revenue from display ads on its Web sites slid by 16 percent. The New York Times had a 6.4 percent decline in print advertising revenues at its properties in the quarter, but a 2.6 percent increase in online advertising.

Broadly speaking, forecasters have been anticipating a slight pullback in ad spending growth this year.

Read more at the New York Times