The newspaper business is not getting any relief in 2011, as multiple publishers report continuing declines in print ad revenue. This week the McClatchy Co. joined the New York Times Co., Gannett, and Media General, all of which have seen total revenues fall by single-digit percentages.
McClatchy Co. revealed that total revenues declined 8.1% from $342 million in the second quarter of 2010 to $314.3 million in the second quarter of 2011. Circulation revenues also decreased 3.7% to $65.1 million, reflecting a 3.4% decline in daily circulation.
Read more here
Saturday, July 30
Friday, July 29
Redesigning News Websites
In digital media—websites in particular—news outlets seldom if ever treat content with any sort of dignity and most news sites are wedded to a broken profit model that compels them to present a nearly unusable mishmash of pink noise... which they call content.
Instead of working with a handful of redundant, mitigating formats (websites, mobile sites, apps, etc…) for content delivery to popular devices, news organizations should simply deliver it correctly in the first place, one time; using html, css, JavaScript, …oh, and design. The employment of content design would be quite refreshing, actually.
Read more here
Instead of working with a handful of redundant, mitigating formats (websites, mobile sites, apps, etc…) for content delivery to popular devices, news organizations should simply deliver it correctly in the first place, one time; using html, css, JavaScript, …oh, and design. The employment of content design would be quite refreshing, actually.
Read more here
Educators: Web filters verge on book banning
Online filtering software and school rules designed to keep out violence and pornography are also blocking educational and otherwise useful sites, teachers say, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube -- not to mention Google and National Geographic.
Read more at USA Today
Read more at USA Today
Thursday, July 28
Mag Ad Banned
Makeup ads featuring Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington won't be part of a U.K. ad campaign after the U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority deemed the airbrushing used in post-production to be misleading to the consumer. The ASA made its decision that the ads were indeed misleading, but did so without the help of before and after shots.
Read more here
Read more here
Sunday, July 24
News is becoming a social medium again
Until the early 19th century there was no technology for disseminating news to large numbers of people in a short space of time. It travelled as people chatted in marketplaces and taverns or exchanged letters with their friends.
In many ways news is going back to its pre-industrial form, but supercharged by the internet. Camera-phones and social media such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter may seem entirely new, but they echo the ways in which people used to collect, share and exchange information in the past.
The biggest shift is that journalism is no longer the exclusive preserve of journalists. Ordinary people are playing a more active role in the news system, along with a host of technology firms, news start-ups and not-for-profit groups. Social media are certainly not a fad, and their impact is only just beginning to be felt. Successful media organisations will be the ones that accept this new reality. They need to reorient themselves towards serving readers rather than advertisers, embrace social features and collaboration, get off political and moral high horses and stop trying to erect barriers around journalism to protect their position. The digital future of news has much in common with its chaotic, ink-stained past.
Read more at The Economist
In many ways news is going back to its pre-industrial form, but supercharged by the internet. Camera-phones and social media such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter may seem entirely new, but they echo the ways in which people used to collect, share and exchange information in the past.
The biggest shift is that journalism is no longer the exclusive preserve of journalists. Ordinary people are playing a more active role in the news system, along with a host of technology firms, news start-ups and not-for-profit groups. Social media are certainly not a fad, and their impact is only just beginning to be felt. Successful media organisations will be the ones that accept this new reality. They need to reorient themselves towards serving readers rather than advertisers, embrace social features and collaboration, get off political and moral high horses and stop trying to erect barriers around journalism to protect their position. The digital future of news has much in common with its chaotic, ink-stained past.
Read more at The Economist
The people formerly known as the audience
Thanks to the rise of social media, news is no longer gathered exclusively by reporters and turned into a story but emerges from an ecosystem in which journalists, sources, readers and viewers exchange information. The change began around 1999, when blogging tools first became widely available, says Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University. The result was “the shift of the tools of production to the people formerly known as the audience,” he says. This was followed by a further shift: the rise of “horizontal media” that made it quick and easy for anyone to share links (via Facebook or Twitter, for example) with large numbers of people without the involvement of a traditional media organisation. In other words, people can collectively act as a broadcast network.
Read more at The Economist
Read more at The Economist
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