Friday, September 28

More Declines Predicted For Newspapers

All the trend lines for newspaper advertising are pointing down, and the latest forecast from eMarketer does nothing to dispel this gloomy picture. According to the research firm’s most recent report, total ad revenues for newspapers will decline from $22.5 billion in 2012 to $21.5 billion in 2013, $21 billion in 2014, $20.63 billion in 2015, and $20.4 billion in 2016, for a 9.5% drop over the next four years.

Separately, newspapers’ digital ad revenues will continue to experience modest growth, but not enough to offset losses on the print side. Here, eMarketer sees total digital ad revenues edging up from $3.4 billion in 2012 to $4 billion in 2016, for a 17.6% increase in four years.

According to the Newspaper Association of America, total newspaper ad revenues -- including print and digital -- plunged from $49 billion in 2006 to $24 billion in 2011, for a 51.5% decline in just five years.

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Television Top Source of Local News

A Pew study released Wednesday finds television to be the top source of local news in both rural and urban areas. The study is divided into four categories — large cities, suburbs near large cities, small towns or cities and rural areas. Local television tops each category as the most-accessed news source among survey respondents, besting word of mouth, local radio and the print version of a local newspaper.

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Tuesday, September 25

TV Remains Decision Driver For Purchases

A study commissioned by the TVB shows that local television is the dominant influencer of decisions throughout the purchase funnel from awareness at the top through purchase at the bottom. Research shows that 64% of respondents say TV is the “primary action driver” of awareness and 39% of purchase. Newspapers came in second with awareness at 10%. The Internet (online behavior save email) was second at 10% for purchase.

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Sunday, September 23

A journalist’s quick guide to Reddit

Sure, Reddit was already the unofficial “front page of the Internet,” the soul of all things meme, the secret sauce behind BuzzFeed’s viral posts, a breaking news curator and a Q&A forum for journalists, celebrities, newsmakers.

But then President Obama did a surprise Q&A appearance Wednesday that nearly crashed servers and drew almost 23,000 comments and questions. Obama didn’t bestow legitimacy upon Reddit — with nearly 40 million visitors and 3.2 billion pageviews a month, it already had that. But the visit from a sitting president certainly says something about its increasingly mainstream relevance.

The structure: Reddit consists of a bunch of “subreddits,” or topic sections. The most popular stuff bubbles up to the front page, but each post starts and lives on a specific subreddit. Every post, and every comment on every post, can be upvoted or downvoted by each user. Votes are how the community determines the best content, which rises to the top.

Definitions: Like many online communities, Reddit has developed its own shorthand. AMA, the type of post Obama did, stands for “Ask Me Anything.” It’s an open Q&A thread where one notable person answers questions from everyone else. TIL is short for “Today I Learned…” TIL usually precedes a specific surprising fact. Both AMAs and TILs could be occasional sources of story ideas for journalists.

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