FB still #1

Some 73% of online adults now use a social networking site of some kind. Facebook is the dominant social networking platform in the number of users, but a striking number of users are now diversifying onto other platforms. Some 42% of online adults now use multiple social networking sites. In addition, Instagram users are nearly as likely as Facebook users to check in to the site on a daily basis. These are among the key findings on social networking site usage and adoption from a new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project.

Read more at the Pew Research Center

The Limits of Videogame Storytelling Reveal Themselves in The Novelist

In the PC/Mac game The Novelist, you play a very nosy ghost living in a house the Kaplan family rented for the summer.

Videogames might one day be a great way of telling a story like The Novelist, but before that can happen interactive storytelling in videogames must be more interesting... The truth is videogames are not yet as good as novels or films when it comes to telling stories. The Novelist crashes headlong into that reality by throwing the full weight of a story upon the best storytelling tools games currently have to offer. It doesn’t work, but it reveals something about the medium, and for that reason The Novelist is important.

Read more at Wired

The internet is changing television habits

In 2014 online video will become a more influential cultural force, changing conversations, communities and what people watch. Several factors will speed up television’s move to the internet. Faster broadband will make it easier to watch videos delivered online without having to wait ages for them to load. People will buy more internet-enabled “smart” television sets, bringing websites once accessible mainly from laptops and tablets to bigger screens. In 2014 firms such as Sony and Intel will launch “over the top” services, which deliver television programmes over the internet. Apple’s long-awaited television offering may come to fruition. In 2014 some of the world’s biggest creators of programmes, including Disney, will start to make exclusive programmes for new platforms.

Read more at The Economist

Better times for the music industry

Streaming is still a small part of the music business globally, but will bolster it in the years ahead. Like a popular rocker who burns out, only to try to stage a comeback a decade later, the sickly music industry will probably never regain its previous vigour. But even modest growth is welcome news for the industry... It will become more common for bands and managers to use data about where fans are listening to them in order to decide where to tour.

Read more at The Economist

Here's Why Instagram's Demographics Are So Attractive To Brands

Before buying Instagram ads, advertisers need to understand who is on the social network. Over 90% of the 150 million people on Instagram are under the age of 35.. Though it's owned by Facebook, Instagram is a mobile app with distinct demographics.

Instagram is largely made up of urban, youthful demographics, with a significant skew towards women.

Instagram also leans toward urban users; 17% of U.S. adult residents who live in urban areas use Instagram, compared to only 11% in suburban and rural areas.

Instagram is about quality not quantity. Instagram accounts for 7% of daily photo uploads among the top four photo-sharing platforms (544 million daily uploads total). So it's not as much of a heavyweight, in volume terms, as some might believe.

Read more at Business Insider

A New Map Reveals the Geography of American TV News

Georgetown scholar Kalev Leetaru tracked all the locations mentioned on U.S. television news between June 2009 and October 2013, then plotted them on a world map.

Read more in the Atlantic

Ubiquitous cameras

It is getting ever easier to record anything, or everything, that you see. This opens fascinating possibilities—and alarming ones.

Thanks to digital technology the world is replete with cheap and highly capable cameras. ABI, a research firm, reckons there were a billion built into the mobile phones and tablets shipped in 2012 (many boast more than one). Adding a run-of-the-mill digital camera to a phone, or pretty much anything else, costs about $10. Narrative, a Swedish company that has raised $500,000 through Kickstarter, is marketing a clip-on life-logger the size of a coin.

Read more at The Economist

The Chinese Stream

Around the world online video is becoming a bigger and more sophisticated business, but nowhere is that truer than in China. The country has the largest number of online-video viewers: around 450m, or nearly 80% of the internet-connected population. Their numbers will rise to around 700m by 2016, according to iResearch, which tracks the industry. In America and Europe, online video has yet to supplant broadcast- and pay-TV, but in China it seems rapidly to have done so.

Read more at The Economist

Local TV gets wave of runaway consolidation

So far this year, 223 local TV stations have changed hands. This is the biggest wave of media consolidation ever — and it's all happening in small and mid-level markets, involving companies most people have never heard of. Leading this wave is Hunt Valley-based Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair alone is behind seven deals this year, including a $985-million deal to buy nine stations from Allbritton Communications. But it's not alone; other media companies are also racing to gobble up stations.

Read more in the Baltimore Sun

5 indicators of nonprofit news sustainability

One of the major nonprofit news funders, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, released a report Tuesday that deeply examines the vital signs of 18 well-established nonprofit news outlets.The report’s findings include some positive trends, with 14 of the 18 outlets showing a surplus in 2012. But some challenges remain, particularly when it comes to the level of investment these nonprofits are making in technology and business development.

Read more at Pew

The media has a message ...

Two forces, working in grudging symbiosis, control the media: content producers and content distributors. If information travels along a highway, then the distributors own the road, and the providers make the stuff that rides on it. Neither has value without the other. But control both the road and its travelers, and a company might master its own destiny.

Read more at Fortune

Texting in Class

A new study has found that more than 90 percent of students admit to using their devices for non-class activities during class times. Less than 8 percent said that they never do so. Texting in class is a source of constant frustration to professors, but about 30 percent of students reported that their instructors did not have a policy on the subject. (Of course there is a chance some of those students didn't read the syllabus.) Given how attached students are to their devices, it is perhaps not surprising that only 9 percent favor a ban on having them in classrooms. However, 54 percent said that they thought it reasonable to have a policy.

Read more at Inside Higher Ed

Media bosses hope mobile devices will help, rather than hurt, television

Around three-quarters of American internet users regularly fiddle with a mobile device while watching the gogglebox. Media executives are abuzz working out how to turn this distraction into profitable transactions. Viewers who are multitasking with other devices tend to tune in for longer, because they are commenting on the shows online or interacting with extra content through the networks’ apps.

Read more at the Economist

The Role of News on Facebook

Facebook exposes some people to news who otherwise might not get it. While only 38% of heavy news followers who get news on Facebook say the site is an important way they get news, that figure rises to 47% among those who follow the news less often.

The most popular topic is entertainment news, which 73% of Facebook news consumers get regularly on the site. Close behind is news about events in one’s own community (65%). National politics and government rank fourth, reaching 55% of these consumers regularly, just behind sports, which reaches 57% regularly. Still, Facebook has yet to become a platform for learning about news events as they happen. Just 28% of Facebook news consumers have ever turned there for breaking news.

Read more at the Pew Center

Twitter Is Selling Access to Your Tweets for Millions

Twitter’s data mining initiative has similarities with LinkedIn’s Recruiter program, which charges businesses as much as $8,000 per log-in to access the site’s full database of 238 million resumes. While LinkedIn manages Recruiter internally and generates massive revenue from it, Twitter has chosen a more hands-off approach that provides a small but straightforward revenue stream while leaving the major infrastructure costs to third parties.

Read more at TIME.

Internet ad revenues hit historic high

Internet ad revenues surged to a landmark $20.1 billion, according to a just-released IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report prepared by the New Media Group of PwC US. This is an 18% increase over last year’s first-half ad revenues of $17 billion.

Read more here

Media Map

An interactive media map by state here.

Half Of Online Americans Listen To Internet Radio

For the first time, more than half (53%) of online Americans are listening to Internet radio, according to new data released this week by Edison Research. Some 27% are listening to streaming audio from live radio stations, both local and outside, while 18% are listening to on-demand services, which involve paying a subscription for access to music libraries. Time spent listening to online radio is clearly increasing, with 67% of Internet radio listeners saying they are listening to the medium more than they were a year ago, and 32% saying they are listening “a lot” more.

Read more at Media Post

How ‘Cord Never’ Generation Poses Sales Drag for Pay TV

A generation of technology-savvy, budget-conscious consumers who are taking advantage of the availability of high-speed Internet connections and the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, lower-cost TVs and other gadgets that make it easy to consume downloadable shows in a snap.

The shift in viewing habits is putting pressure on cable, satellite and phone companies by pinching subscriber numbers, which may have a knock-on effect on revenue growth. The impact on the $80 billion pay-TV industry is already being felt, with 2013 on pace to be the first year ever that total U.S. pay-TV subscriptions will decline, falling to 100.8 million from 100.9 million last year, according to researcher IHS.

Read more at Bloomberg

Court: Facebook ‘Like’ Is Protected By the First Amendment

“Liking” something on Facebook is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday, reviving a closely watched case over the extent to which the Constitution shields what we do online. In doing so, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a former deputy sheriff in Hampton, Va., who said he was sacked for “liking” the Facebook page of a man running against his boss for city sheriff.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Google may kiss 'cookies' goodbye

Google is developing an anonymous identifier for advertising, or AdID, that would replace third-party cookies as the way advertisers track people's Internet browsing activity for marketing purposes, according to a person familiar with the plan.

Read more at USA Today

Video games improve cognitive ability in the elderly

The improvement in multi-tasking was so great that the amount of cognitive effort required by the oldies after their training was no more than if they were in their 20s and playing the game for the first time. Furthermore, the changes seemed to last for some time. After a six-month break from playing, the older participants were still nimble-minded.

Read more at the Economist

Internet users whinge about passwords but are none too keen on the alternatives

Some of the new ideas involve biometric data—in theory unique to each user. Apple may have a fingerprint reader in its latest iPhone, which is due to go on sale later this month. On September 3rd Bionym, a Canadian firm, launched Nymi, a bracelet which detects the wearer’s heartbeat. The Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology in Tokyo has developed a chair which detects—with 99% accuracy—the unique shape of a user’s bottom.

One answer is to supplement passwords (and gadgets) with something else.. A British start-up called PixelPin asks users to select some objects, in a preset order, from an image they have uploaded. Barclays, a bank, sets multiple-choice questions which require detailed knowledge of the customers’ past life and times.

Read more at the Economist

A Quest to Save AM Before It’s Lost in the Static

In 1978.. half of all radio listening was on the AM dial. By 2011 AM listenership had fallen to 15 percent, or an average of 3.1 million people, according to a survey by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a private investment firm. While the number of FM listeners has declined, too, they still averaged 18 million in 2011.

Although five of the top 10 radio stations in the country, as measured by advertising dollars, are AM — among them WCBS in New York and KFI in Los Angeles — the wealth drops rapidly after that.

Read more at the New York Times

How the News Got Less Mean

Researchers are discovering that people want to create positive images of themselves online by sharing upbeat stories. And with more people turning to Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s happening in the world, news stories may need to cheer up in order to court an audience. If social is the future of media, then optimistic stories might be media’s future.

Read more here

Media companies get cash from digital sources is at last repairing some of the damage

According to eMarketer, a research firm, this year Americans will spend more time online or using computerised media than watching television. “All-access” services, such as Netflix (for film and TV) or Spotify (for music), which give unlimited content on mobile devices for a monthly fee, are prompting people to spend more on digital products.

After years of wreaking havoc, the internet is helping media companies to grow. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), a professional-services firm, reckons that revenues for online media and entertainment will increase by around 13% a year for the next five years.

The most obvious change in the past few years is the decline of “physical” products, such as CDs, DVDs and print newspapers. In 2008 nearly nine-tenths of consumer cash went on them; by 2017 it will be a little over half, with digital grabbing the rest.

Read more at The Economist

Gaps between how journalism educators and journalists view j-schools

More than 80 percent of educators say a journalism degree is extremely important when it comes to learning news gathering skills, compared to 25 percent of media professionals. One in five media professionals finds a degree in the discipline is not at all important or only slightly important in learning news gathering (according to a new Poynter study).

Read more at Inside Higher Ed

3 takes on why bookstores are dead

Management consultant Joseph Esposito writes, “With bookstores collapsing everywhere, the print business collapses along with it.” As bookstores close, Esposito argues, readers have fewer places to discover print books. Instead, he says, they learn about titles online — through Twitter, Goodreads, or Amazon pages. When it comes time to order the book, they have two options: A cheaper digital version or a more expensive print version. “Why pay for print when you can get the digital edition immediately at a lower price? The advantage of the physical bookstore — the immediate availability of inventory — is not at play here.”

Read more at GigaOm

Radio Ad Revs Flat, Digital Ads Rise

Radio advertising revenues were unchanged in the second quarter of 2013 compared to the year before, according to the latest figures from the Radio Advertising Bureau, which tallied total revenue at $4.66 billion. As in previous quarters, the main bright spot for radio was digital advertising, which saw a 16% year-over-year increase, to $222 million.

Read more here

Study finds more than a quarter of journalism grads wish they’d chosen another career

"About 28 percent of journalism grads wish they’d chosen another field, the annual survey of grads by the University of Georgia’s Grady College says." More at Poynter

The same study also showed "The job market for journalism and mass communication graduates showed signs of continued improvement in 2012 and 2013, suggesting that the worst in terms of the market is in the past."  Read more from the school here

‘The Daily Show’ on Jeff Bezos and the newspaper industry

John Oliver of “The Daily Show” explains how “there are now more people currently buying newspapers than people buying newspapers.”

Facebook: Here's How Your News Feed Works

The average user’s News Feed has around 1,500 possible stories filtered through per day, according to Lars Backstrom, engineering manager for Facebook’s News Feed ranking. But only 20% of them actually make your feed. So how does Facebook determine which 20% you see?

Scores are determined using a number of factors, such as the relationship you have with the user who posted it, the number of comments, the number of shares, and the number of likes that the story has accumulated.

A change in the ranking process now enables older stories (stories that may have been posted earlier in the day but the user never actually scrolled through) to join the “new” stories at the top of your feed.

Read more at ABC News

Study Finds Craigslist Took $5 Billion From Newspapers

A new study by two business school professors examined the issue and concluded that, indeed, Craigslist took a giant bite out of newspapers’ revenues — some $5 billion between the years 2000 and 2007. And that’s not even looking at the Times, the Wall Street Journal or USA Today, which the authors left out in order to have a more homogeneous sample.

Read more at Forbes

More Print News Subscribers Plan To Cancel Subs, Uptick In Mobile Consumption

The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute’s “2013 Q1 Research Report,” revealed that 12.7% of print subscribers plan to cancel their subscriptions in 2013.

On the positive side, the decline in print subscriptions is clearly correlated with increasing consumption of news via digital channels, with a special emphasis on mobile.

Read more at Media Post

British newspapers are becoming more American

Subscriptions online and in print are not enough to make up for print advertising losses. Newspaper advertising this year will be an estimated £2.1 billion ($3.2 billion), around half its 2005 level. Mr Murdoch’s Times loses money in spite of its paywall. Regional newspapers, more reliant on classifieds, are in worse shape. In January there were 1,054 regional titles, down around 18% since 2008.

Read more at The Economist

The Social Media Bubble Is Quietly Deflating

Social media companies drew only 2 percent of the venture capital headed to Internet-based enterprises last quarter" while "Big data and cloud companies" appear to be the hot plays now in Silicon Valley.

Read more at Business Week.

Streaming Audio, Video Surges In 2013

Online audio and video consumption surged in the first half of 2013, according to the latest figures from Nielsen SoundScan and Nielsen BDS, which tallied 50.9 billion audio and video streams in the first six months of the year, up 24% from 41 billion streams in the same period of 2012.

Read more at Media Post

Broadcast TV, Local Cable Ad Spend Up Double Digits

Broadcast TV advertising spending rocketed up by strong double-digit percentages in the second quarter. Standard Media Index says broadcast TV spending was up 16% in the second three months of 2013, and 10% through the first half of the year. By way of comparison, national cable TV advertising moved up more slowly in the second quarter, for a 6% gain.

Read more at Media Post

survey: 1/3 say First Amendment goes too far

One out of three Americans think the First Amendment “goes too far in the rights it guarantees.” That's the finding of an annual survey conducted by the First Amendment Center. More than a third couldn’t name any of its guarantees at all, and just four percent named the right to petition.

Read more here

Can Photojournalism Survive in the Instagram Era?

In his new book Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen, photographer Fred Ritchin tackles these developments and more as he explores what the digital revolution means for his trade.

It’s not a competition, but a question of synergies among all media, particularly on a digital platform. Multimedia is not more media, but the employment of various kinds of media (and hybrid media) for what they each offer to advance the narrative.

Read more at Mother Jones

Pay-TV execs open up to portable devices

If television chained entertainment-junkies to the couch, online video has now released their shackles. Faster broadband, the rise of mobile phones and tablet devices, and services like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube that stream shows to people anywhere with an internet connection have freed viewers to watch programmes wherever they wish.

Pay-television executives have also chosen to take part in this liberation movement, by offering their subscribers “TV everywhere”. Their companies give their customers an access code that lets them watch channels streamed live—or individual shows on demand—on their mobile devices, much as they can on Netflix or Hulu.

So far TV everywhere’s rollout has been slow.

Even so, new competitors are trying to grab the remote control. This week the Wall Street Journal said Google (which owns YouTube) was seeking deals with television companies to set up its own internet-streaming service. Intel is expected to launch a similar service later this year. Netflix, Amazon and other online distributors will plough a combined $750m this year into making their own exclusive shows, to differentiate themselves from each other and from cable channels.

Read more at The Economist

Newsroom staffing stagnates: TV staff size up but number of newsrooms down

The total TV staffing was virtually unchanged from a year ago -- down just 48 to a total local TV news staff of 27,605. Overall, there are now 717 TV stations originating local news ... running that news on those stations and another 235 stations ... for a total of 952 stations airing local news. That's down eight stations originating news from last year's 725, and they're running news on seven fewer additional stations than last year. Most of the stations that stopped originating local news are involved in some form of consolidation.

In contrast, the latest numbers from the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) found that newspaper newsroom staff fell 6.4% from a year ago. That's approaching three times the previous year's drop of 2.4%. That takes the total daily newspaper news staff down from last year's record low of 40,600 to a new record low of 38,000, spread among nearly 1,400 newspapers (twice the number of local TV newsrooms). The average U.S. daily newspaper now has 27.5 news staffers; the average local TV news staff is 38.5.

Read more here

Simple tests can overstate the impact of search-engine advertising

A rise in sales after an ad campaign does not automatically mean that the ads worked... (but) Far from being an industry where cause and effect remain murky, online advertising may yet become one area where the dismal science can predict how to get costs down and profits up.

Read more at the Economist

How One of Google’s Best Customers Could Steal Away Search

Shopping is key to Google’s fortunes, Jordan writes in a commentary just posted over at Fortune. And search is central to what Amazon does:

Amazon is a vertical search engine focused on helping users find products. The overwhelmingly dominant way to find things on their site is the search box. Users enter a keyword phrase and are presented with results that match his or her query. The order of the search results is determined by algorithms that seek to optimize relevance and monetization. Sound familiar?

The big difference between shopping on the two, Jordan says, is that the Amazon user experience is better, to say nothing of price, selection and shipping. “Buying on Google takes chunks of an hour, not an Amazon minute,” he says.

Read more at Wired

NSA Google Search Tips to Become Your Own Spy Agency

There’s so much data available on the internet that even government cyberspies need a little help now and then to sift through it all. So to assist them, the National Security Agency produced a book to help its spies uncover intelligence hiding on the web.

Read more at Wired

How to turn an iPhone into a professional video camera

The Telegraph used an iPhone to film, edit and upload instant video reviews from Glastonbury festival. Chris Stone reviews the accessories he used to do it.

Read the story here

it’s possible to automatically identify fake images on Twitter

A recent paper presented by researchers from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, IBM Research Labs and the University of Maryland found that it was possible to identify tweets containing fake Sandy images with up to 97 percent accuracy.

“Hence, in cases of crisis, people often retweet and propagate tweets that they find in Twitter search or trending topics, irrespective of whether they follow the user or not,” the researchers write. This dynamic of out-of-graph retweets helps things spread rapidly, and it also illustrates how during breaking news events, social search can become more important than one’s social graph.

Another related piece of data in the paper is that fake images did not begin to spread rapidly until roughly 12 hours after they were first introduced on Twitter. The researchers note that “the sudden spike in their propagation via retweets happened only because of a few users.” So a fake will lay dormant until someone with the ability to amplify it comes along and retweets it. That’s what the fakers rely on, in fact.

Read more at Poynter

Teens Care About Online Privacy—Just Not the Same Way You Do

The data suggest that teens care less about data privacy and more about more socially oriented forms of privacy, those designed to protect the integrity of a community.

But there is evidence in Pew’s latest data set that suggests the privacy paradox could be fading, primarily with regard to reputation management. Pew notes that more than half of online teens (57 percent) say they have decided not to post something online because they were concerned it would reflect badly on them in the future, and other teen social media users are more likely than other teens who do not use social media to refrain from sharing content due to reputational concerns (61 percent vs. 39 percent). While this isn’t the same as having personal information used to target ads, it indicates an increasing awareness among teens online that their privacy concerns may need to expand to encompass how their online actions will resonate beyond the confines of the strange social ecosystem of childhood.

Read more here

TV Is Americans' Main Source of News

Television is the main place Americans say they turn to for news about current events (55%), leading the Internet, at 21%. Nine percent say newspapers or other print publications are their main news source, followed by radio, at 6%.

Read more at Gallup

Mobile Boosts Email

Email open rates rose to 31% in the first quarter -- representing an 18.6% increase year-over-year -- which analysts are attributing to the mobile boom.

“We expect to continue to see increased open rates as more consumers … manage their inbox on-the-go via mobile phones and tablets,” said Judy Loschen, vice president of digital analytics at Epsilon.

Read more here

Local TV Stations Snapped Up In Buying Sprees

The Chicago-based Tribune Company, newly out of bankruptcy, is trying to sell off its newspaper holdings. Yet even as the company withdraws from print media, it's making a big push into local television, following the lead of other major media players.

Local broadcast news delivers audiences which absolutely dwarf CNN, HLN, ESPN Sports Center, the Weather Channel and Fox News combined. It is a service that people want.

Read more here

Salaries decline in local TV newsrooms

For the first time in four years, local TV news salaries have taken a dive. The latest RTDNA/Hofstra University survey says pay was down on average by almost 2% in 2012. If you factor in the rate of inflation, real wages were down by about 4%.

Just two years ago, TV salaries jumped by more than 7%... Median salaries in almost every job category not only went down last year, they have failed to keep up with inflation over the past ten years.

Who made more? News writers and news assistants, says researcher Bob Papper, but only because the relative few who were hired got nice jumps in pay. The reverse is true in some other job categories.

In fairness, the median salaries of some positions fell because more of them were hired (like executive producers and meteorologists), and new hires tended to be staff expansions filled with lower paid, less experienced people.

Read more here

Forget New Media: Why TV Stations Are Back in Vogue

The bigger factor driving new interest in broadcasters — such as Tribune Co.'s TRBAA +5.45% $2.73 billion deal, announced today, to buy Local TV Holdings LLC’s 19 TV stations — are the fees paid by cable and satellite operators for the right to air local TV station signals.

Tribune’s publishing operations, including web sites related to its newspapers, still account for nearly two thirds of total revenues, according to recent financial disclosures from the company. But the bottom line contribution is a different story.Operating profit from publishing was just $88.8 million in 2012, compared with $366.47 million for broadcasting. In other words, publishing’s operating profit margin was 4.4% while broadcasting’s was 32%.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Radio, Newspaper Revenues Dip

Overall, advertising revenue was basically flat -- with a 0.1% decline from the first quarter of 2012 to the first quarter of 2013, to $30.2 billion, per Kantar Media. Radio advertising declined 1.7% in the first quarter of the year -- reflecting both the absence of political ad spending and weakness in local advertising, long the medium’s mainstay.

Newspaper ad revenues fell 4% in the first quarter, with a 9.2% drop in national newspapers and a 3.3% drop in local newspapers. Elsewhere in the print world, magazines eked out a modest 0.6% increase.

Read more here

13 Utterly Disappointing Facts About Books

1. In a 2012 survey, almost a fifth of children said they would be “embarrassed” if a friend saw them with a book…

2. …and 54% of those questioned said they preferred watching TV to reading.

Read more at Buzz Feed

Social media in smaller markets

Before 2008, we were still mired in the outdated philosophy of pushing the newspaper’s content online around midnight, with few exceptions for major breaking news. There was a lot of concern about providing up-to-date information because of its potential effect on print subscriptions. Today, we are a digital-first publication, and the print edition serves as a sort of best-of compilation from the past 24 hours.

We are already used to wearing multiple hats in our newsroom — reporters who also have copy desk shifts or take the photos for their stories, for instance. No matter what the role is, I think the most important asset is to be a good journalist. That isn’t meant to diminish the value of social media skills. But a good journalist with bad skills is more valuable than a gadfly without reporting experience.

Read more here

The Breaking News Network thinks it can fix hyperlocal journalism with lots and lots of Twitter feeds

Unlike a traditional news organization with a front page news site, BNN aggregates relevant local news from blogs and city officials and curates them through individual Twitter feeds with accompanying Rebelmouse pages for over 350 cities – metropolises and small towns included.

Read more here

Nonprofit news sites are growing, but the search for a reliable business model continues

A new study from Pew finds that digital nonprofit news organizations are finding ways to diversify their funding, but most still rely on grants from foundations to survive.

Even as the number of nonprofit news outlets continues to grow, many organizations are still struggling to find a model for long-term success.

A new study from the Pew Research Center found that tending to the business of running a news nonprofit is among the chief concerns from journalists inside those organizations. More than half of the nonprofits surveyed by Pew said business activities like advertising, fundraising, and marketing represented their greatest staffing need.

Read more at Nieman Labs

FB: Social graphv vs Interest graph

Facebook is changing. Surely you've noticed. Your best friends are getting buried beneath memes; your mom is getting pushed aside by image spam. Your social graph is becoming secondary to your interest graph. Worried about competitors like Tumblr and Twitter, and urgently in need of new revenue flow following its rocky IPO, the biggest social network in the world is drifting away from its social core. Say hello to the new Facebook. You won't find many people here. But you will find a lot of trash.

Read more at the Daily Dot

newspaper circulation rises in the east and falls in the west

THE World Press Trends report collects masses of data about newspaper circulation and revenues in over 70 countries. The report makes for particularly gloomy reading if you happen to be employed by a newspaper in America or western Europe.

Since 2008 circulation in America has fallen by 15% to 41m while advertising revenue has plummeted by 42%, accounting for three-quarters of the global decline in advertising revenue in the same period. In Europe, circulation and advertising revenue have both fallen by a quarter. And revenues from digital sources such as websites, apps and so on have not made up the shortfall. Digital advertising accounts for just 11% of the total revenue for American newspapers. Looking further east, though, things look brighter. Circulation in Asia has risen by 10%, offsetting much of the decline elsewhere. With 114.5m daily newspapers, China has surpassed India to become the world's biggest newspaper market.

Read more at The Economist

Paywalls or No Paywalls, Newspaper Revenue Declines Seen Through 2017

Despite the promise of online paywalls and gains in digital readers, U.S. newspapers' total revenue will continue to decline through at least 2017, a new report said. Total U.S. newspaper revenue is projected to slip at a combined annual growth rate of 2.9% between 2013 and 2017, as circulation trends improve but advertising falls at a compound annual rate 4.2%, according to the latest annual Global Entertainment and Media Outlook from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

As more people go to newspaper websites, digital advertising is expected to increase through 2017, growing at a compound annual rate of 9.7% between 2013 and 2017, the report said. But the gains won’t be enough to offset the 7.8% compound annual decline in print ads.

Read more here

The workforce in the cloud

Elance.com and oDesk.com (are) the two busiest among several newish online marketplaces for work, or “talent exchanges”. Last year the value of this sort of online work topped $1 billion for the first time; it will double to $2 billion in 2014, and reach $5 billion by 2018, forecasts Staffing Industry Analysts, a “contingent work” consultant.
 
There are other differences in the business models of the market leaders. oDesk simply takes a cut of all completed jobs; Elance also charges freelancers optional fees for extra services. Both have been trying to improve the quality of the reputation-rating system, and to ensure that work is being done by the person who accepted it rather than passed on to someone potentially less competent (“Still the biggest risk”).

Read more at The Eoncomist

Teaching old microphones new tricks

With the addition of suitable software, microphones can detect more than mere audio signals. They can act as versatile sensors, capable of tuning into signals from inside the body, assessing the social environment and even tracking people’s posture and gestures. Researchers have reimagined microphones as multi-talented collectors of information. And because they are built into smartphones that can be taken anywhere, and can acquire new abilities simply by downloading an app, they are being put to a range of unusual and beneficial uses.

Read more at the Economist

Amateur journalists create jobs for professional ones

Far from shunning “shaky footage”, audiences think users’ videos more intimate and authentic than broadcasters’ slick shots, says Claire Wardle of Storyful, a firm that spots and verifies user-generated content. “If they don’t show it, people will go to YouTube to see it.” Journalists covering big news stories are getting better at scouring social networks for sources. And thrusting news firms have tried to outdo their competitors by building systems that encourage readers to submit material to them directly.

Investigative journalists are making better use of amateur sleuths by requesting documents, testimonials and a spare hand. Every journalist needs help shovelling for dirt.

Read more at The Economist

Technology forecasting

Scorn the latest advances and you risk being left behind, as when Sony kept investing in flat-screen versions of cathode-ray televisions in the 1990s while Samsung piled into liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), and eventually replaced Sony as market leader. Embrace new ideas too early, though, and you may be left with egg on your face, as when General Motors spent more than $1 billion developing hydrogen fuel cells a decade ago, only to see them overtaken by lithium-ion batteries as the preferred power source for electric and hybrid vehicles.

To determine when to proceed with a new technology many managers and engineers employ popular heuristics, some of which are seen as “laws”. The best known is Moore’s law.

In reality, however, such laws are unreliable because progress is rarely smooth. So Ashish Sood of the Goizueta School of Business at Emory University, Atlanta, and his colleagues have come up with their own law, which is explicitly based on the tendency of technology to progress in stops and starts. As the number of competitors in a new field increases, both the size of the steps and the length of the wait for the next step can change.

Their “step and wait” (SAW) model, recently published in Marketing Science, notes that advances in performance are often followed by a waiting period before the next step forward.

Read more at The Economist

A plan to assess people’s personal characteristics from their Twitter-streams

Modern psychology recognises five dimensions of personality: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience. Previous research has shown that people’s scores on these traits can, indeed, predict what they purchase. Extroverts are more likely to respond to an advert for a mobile phone that promises excitement than one that promises convenience or security. They also prefer Coca-Cola to Pepsi and Maybelline cosmetics to Max Factor. Agreeable people, though, tend to prefer Pepsi, and those open to experience prefer Max Factor. People are, of course, unlikely to want to take personality tests so that marketing departments around the world can intrude even more on their lives than happens already. But Dr Haber thinks he can get around that—at least for users of Twitter. He and his team have developed software that takes streams of “tweets” from this social medium and searches them for words that indicate a tweeter’s personality, values and needs.

For a study published in 2010 by Tal Yarkoni of the University of Colorado, Boulder, Dr Yarkoni recruited a group of bloggers and correlated the frequencies of certain words and categories of word that they used in their blogs with their personality traits, as established by questionnaire.

Some of the relations he found were commonsensical. Extroversion correlated with “bar”, “restaurant” and “crowd”. Neuroticism correlated with “awful”, “lazy” and “depressing”. But there were also unforeseen patterns. Trust (an important component of agreeableness), for example, correlated with “summer”, and co-operativeness (another element of agreeableness) with “unusual”.

Inspired by Dr Yarkoni’s findings, Dr Eben Haber and his team are conducting research of their own, matching word use with two sets of traits not directly related to personality. These are people’s values (things they deem to be good, beneficial and important, such as loyalty, accuracy and self-enhancement) and their needs (things they feel they cannot live without, such as excitement, control or acceptance).

In a test of the new system, Dr Haber analysed three months’ worth of data from 90m users of Twitter. His software was able to parse someone’s presumptive personality reasonably well from just 50 tweets, and very well indeed from 200.

Read more at The Economist

Video games Battle of the boxes

VIDEO games are big money-spinners. According to DFC Intelligence, a market-research firm, the industry was worth almost $80 billion in 2012 (combining software, gaming revenue and devices), or roughly the same as the film industry’s takings. Although gaming on smartphones, tablets and social-networking sites is growing fast, dedicated games consoles still dominate the business.

Read more at the Economist

How Teens Are Really Using Facebook: It's a 'Social Burden,' Pew Study Finds

The Facebook generation is fed up with Facebook. That's according to a report released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. Pew's findings suggest teens' enthusiasm for Facebook is waning, lending credence to concerns, raised by the company's investors and others that the social network may be losing a crucial demographic that has long fueled its success.

Facebook has become a "social burden" for teens, write the authors of the Pew report. "While Facebook is still deeply integrated in teens’ everyday lives, it is sometimes seen as a utility and an obligation rather than an exciting new platform that teens can claim as their own."

Teen's aren't abandoning Facebook -- deactivating their accounts would mean missing out on the crucial social intrigues that transpire online -- and 94 percent of teenage social media users still have profiles on the site, Pew's report notes. But they're simultaneously migrating to Twitter and Instagram, which teens say offer a parent-free place where they can better express themselves. Facebook, teens say, has been overrun by parents, fuels unnecessary social "drama" and gives a mouthpiece to annoying oversharers who drone on about inane events in their lives.

Read more at Huff Post

Video Games: suffering industry

Sales figures are murky, but most estimates put annual revenues (for video games) at between $60 billion and $70 billion.

According to NPD, a firm of analysts, sales of consoles and other hardware fell by a fifth in America last year. Sales of the games themselves are doing no better. Both Sony and Microsoft, which makes the Xbox, a rival line of consoles, have reported falling income from their games divisions.

Games designed for smartphones and tablets are booming. In 2012 the ten top-grossing apps for Apple’s iPhone smartphone were all games. Many mobile games are free; those that are not sell for a handful of dollars compared with $60 for a big-budget console title.

Read more here

Newspaper, Magazine Ad Fortunes Continue To Decline

The release of fourth-quarter figures for newspaper advertising and first-quarter figures for magazine ad pages earlier this month made it clear that the long decline of print advertising is going to continue -- and possibly even accelerate -- in coming years.

Print advertising has suffered a precipitous 60% drop over just seven years, with 27 straight quarters of year-over-year declines. This is the seventh straight quarter of year-over-year declines for magazines, wiping out the short-lived recovery enjoyed by the medium in 2010. Magazine ad pages tumbled from a total of 243,305 in 2005 to 150,699 in 2012, for a 38% decline over the last seven years.

Read more here

A tale of two Tinseltowns

“The business model within film is broken,” says Amir Malin of Qualia Capital, a private-equity firm. Between 2007 and 2011, pre-tax profits of the five studios controlled by large media conglomerates (Disney, Universal, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros) fell by around 40%, says Benjamin Swinburne of Morgan Stanley. He reckons the studios account for less than 10% of their parent companies’ profits today, and by 2020 their share will decline to only around 5%. That is because the “big six” studios (the other is Sony Pictures, owned by the eponymous electronics maker) are growing more slowly than TV.

Film and TV are very different businesses, though studios like Warner Bros and Fox do both. TV is relatively stable and currently lucrative. In contrast, film revenues are volatile. In 2011 American cinemas sold 1.28 billion tickets, the smallest number since 1995. Last year, ticket sales rose back to 1.36 billion and box-office revenues to a record $10.8 billion, thanks to blockbusters like “The Avengers”. But film-going in America is not a growth business, especially now that people have so many media to distract them at home. The share of Americans who attend a cinema at least once a month declined from 30% in 2000 to 10% in 2011.

One boss of a film-production company calls the international box office “the lifeboat on the Titanic”. Box-office revenues outside America are growing two and a half times as fast as they are domestically.

Read more here

How to Buy Friends and Influence People on Facebook

Whoever said you can’t buy friends was dead wrong. A search for “Twitter followers” reveals dozens of outfits dedicated to making insecure weirdos (and marketers) with cash to burn look more popular than they are. To game the system, these companies create fake users and even pay real account holders for following and liking. As a result, the social media giants must constantly tweak their algorithms to spot frauds; recent upgrades to Facebook’s auto-detection system resulted in accounts losing thousands of likes. Here’s our guide to the not-so-underground friend market.

Facebook

Price of popularity: On Socialyup.com you can buy 500 likes for $30 or 20,000 for $699.

Spot the frauds: Watch for accounts with lots of likes but very little discernible user activity. A page with tens of thousands of fans but only a few comments and nobody in the “Talking About This” column is a prime suspect. One study says 97 percent of fake profiles identify themselves as female (while just 40 percent of real users do).

Pinterest

Price of popularity: Pinfol delivers 100 followers for $15 or 5,000 for $95.

Spot the frauds: Scroll through a user’s followers list and keep an eye out for a high proportion of accounts with no bio or photo.

Twitter

Price of popularity: FanMeNow’s packages start at $10 for 1,000 followers. $1,750 will score you a million.

Spot the frauds: Promotional tweets and the default “egg” avatar are hallmarks of phony accounts. Fake Follower Check is a free web tool that measures a user’s followers against typical characteristics of spam accounts.

YouTube

Price of popularity: 500views.com delivers 30,000 views for $150. For $3,100, make your video “viral” with a million views.

Spot the frauds: Beware of generic comments. One music clip we saw racked up tens of thousands of views in weeks, but the only comments were variations on “This video is great!”

Read more here

Thanks to new digital tools, marketing is no longer voodoo

Give and take has “radically changed the relationship between our brands and the consumer”, says Patrice Bula, Nestlé’s marketing chief. “Today we have really entered the age of conversation.” This helps explain why marketers are feeling both potent and panicky. Instead of just lobbing messages out into the void, they must now act as customers’ “ambassadors”, says David Edelman of McKinsey, a consultancy. And that is tricky. Already 70% of big American firms employ a “chief marketing technologist.”

Read more here

On YouTube, Video Makes the Radio Star

Since YouTube’s inception in 2005, the site’s been known primarily as a bottomless Big Gulp brimming with webcam confessionals, cute-mammal footage, and assorted other Web junk. Over time it’s also become a musical kingmaker—a place where fledgling and unfamiliar talent can break through to massive audiences.

A decade ago the record industry’s gears clicked along more or less as they always had: Labels signed up promising acts discovered by A&R scouts, paid those acts advances against future music sales, and hawked that music through a sprawling network of radio programmers and retailers. Today, with album sales continuing to plummet—in 2004, 666.7 million albums were sold; by 2012 that number was down more than 50 percent, to 316 million—labels and artists depend more than ever on touring and merchandise for revenue. Songs are ads meant to help sell tickets and T-shirts, and YouTube is beginning to rival radio when it comes to breaking those tracks.

Read more here

Ethics Flags For New Media

Launching his namesake company's news division in the 1990s, Michael Bloomberg largely rejected long-held rules of the journalism trade that insist on keeping thick firewalls between reporters and the profit-making workings of their companies.

Companies like Bloomberg are reinventing the news business. And it raises key questions for people who watch the media, most notably this one: As the news business gets reconfigured around advances in technology, what does that mean for the old rules and the people who follow them?

"Many more journalism companies will face the type of competing values that the journalists at Bloomberg faced because, as the economic model for journalism changes, more companies, if they're successful, are going to look like Bloomberg," said Kelly McBride, who teaches journalism ethics at The Poynter Institute.

Read more here

Media Balks at Band-Aid Shield Law

49 states plus the District of Columbia have some form of shield law giving journalists a degree of confidentiality similar to that which prevents priests, attorneys, and therapists from testifying in court. But the law has failed to gain traction at the federal level, partially due to indifference outside the media industry, and partially due to concerns that the law would hinder criminal and national security investigations.

Read more here.

Video: Changes in Advertising

Radio Dips, But Station, Digital Revs Rise

Clear Channel said total revenues slipped 1% from $1.36 billion in the first quarter of 2012 to $1.34 billion in the first quarter of 2013, due to declines in its radio and international outdoor business. These losses were offset somewhat by increases in its Americas outdoor division.

Read more here

Facebook Ad Revs Skyrocket 43%, Mobile Grows To 30%

Facebook is looking more than ever like the mobile company CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared it had become last year. The social network's mobile business rose to 30% of its advertising sales in the first quarter from almost nothing a year ago.

Why Facebook is focusing so keenly on mobile is no mystery. Facebook said its number of monthly active mobile users hit 751 million as of the end of March, up 54% from a year ago, and up 10% from 680 million in the fourth quarter. Monthly active users on Facebook overall reached 1.1 billion, up 23% from a year ago, while daily active users rose 26% to 665 million in the quarter.

Read more here

Twenty Years Ago Today the World Wide Web Went Public

Twenty years ago today, something happened that changed the digital world forever: CERN published a statement that made the technology behind the World Wide Web available to use, by anybody, on a royalty free basis.

Read more at Gizmodo

Print v Digital Reading

How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read? How reading on screens differs from reading on paper is relevant not just to the youngest among us, but to just about everyone who reads—to anyone who routinely switches between working long hours in front of a computer at the office and leisurely reading paper magazines and books at home; to people who have embraced e-readers for their convenience and portability, but admit that for some reason they still prefer reading on paper; and to those who have already vowed to forgo tree pulp entirely. As digital texts and technologies become more prevalent, we gain new and more mobile ways of reading—but are we still reading as attentively and thoroughly? How do our brains respond differently to onscreen text than to words on paper? Should we be worried about dividing our attention between pixels and ink or is the validity of such concerns paper-thin?

Even so, evidence from laboratory experiments, polls and consumer reports indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.

At least a few studies suggest that by limiting the way people navigate texts, screens impair comprehension.

More at Scientific American here

YouTube Wins Copyright Battle With Viacom

A federal judge has cleared YouTube of liability for infringing copyright by allegedly hosting tens of thousands of clips of content owned by Viacom. U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton ruled that Google's YouTube was protected by the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which broadly give sites immunity when users upload copyrighted material, as long as the sites remove the content upon request.

The ruling marks the second time that Stanton dismissed Viacom's case, which the company filed in 2007.

A Viacom spokesperson said the company intends to appeal the dismissal.

Read more here

AP makes its money from broadcasters

The Associated Press’ president and CEO says U.S. newspapers comprise only about 20% of its current revenue (and) broadcasters now provided the bulk of the organization’s revenue at about 43%.

http://www.netnewscheck.com/article/25661/ap-head-alliance-with-papers-is-beyond-biz

Ad revenue uptick for print mags in 1st Q

Print magazines saw a 0.5% lift in advertising revenue in the first quarter, to $4.13 billion from $4.11 billion in the first quarter of 2012, according to the latest report from the Publishers Information Bureau (PIB). Ad pages declined 4.8% to 31,137 in the first quarter from 32,708 a year earlier. It was the first gain in almost two years.

More here

Google Turns to Big Data to Unmask Human Traffickers

Despite all their manpower, law enforcement, anti-trafficking task forces, and policymakers know surprisingly little about the illegal cross-border flow of humans forced into the sex trade or into slave labor or cut open to have their organs extracted. Google (GOOG) believes Big Data can turn the tables on these crime gangs.
The search giant announced on April 9 that it will award a $3 million grant, part of its Global Impact Award program run through its Google Giving philanthropic arm, to a trio of anti-trafficking organizations.

Crunching data like this, and being able to match it with similar data across borders from other trafficking emergency hotlines, could build a clearer, more timely picture of where the human-trafficking-related crime is originating and how law enforcement and victims rights groups can intervene.

Read more at Business Week

Pandora Hits 200 Million Users

Pandora has announced hitting the 200 million user mark in the U.S. The online radio service streams 200 million songs before 10 a.m. every day.

Read more here.

Newspaper Ad Revs Drop Again

Newspaper advertising revenues have been dropping steadily for some years now, and the end of 2012 brought no respite for publishers. For the full year, total ad revenues -- including niche publications, direct marketing and nondaily publication advertising -- fell 6.5% from $27.1 billion in 2011 to $25.3 billion in 2012. Focusing on the combined Sunday and daily ad revenues, including both print and online, total revenues slipped 6.8% from $23.9 billion to $22.3 billion. The latter figure is just 45% of peak newspaper revenues of $49.4 billion in 2005, equaling a 55% decline in seven years.

Read more here

Magazine Ad Pages Slip

Print advertising is dwindling at consumer magazines. The Publishers Information Bureau released figures showing total magazine ad pages fell 4.9% from 33,673 in the first quarter of 2012 to 32,023 in the first quarter of 2013. Of 213 titles tracked by the PIB, 107 (50%) experienced ad page declines in the first quarter of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012.

Read more here.

How paywalls are evolving

It’s often easier to persuade people to subscribe to sports content than to entertainment content, even as it’s easier to sell ads against entertainment content than it is against sports content. So it does make sense to keep entertainment free, and put some kind of paywall around sports.

What’s impossible to calculate, of course, is the long-term opportunity cost of driving away people who want to read your content but aren’t willing to pay...the act of putting up a paywall is the act of “essentially harvesting revenue from a loyal long-term audience” — people who have been reading the publication for years, and have turned it into a habit they don’t want to give up. That’s fine, as a short-term means of maximizing revenues. But it’s dangerous in terms of getting new loyal readers. Which is one reason why online media startups almost never have paywalls: they want as many people as possible to discover them.

My expectation, then, is that newspaper paywalls will become both increasingly sophisticated and increasingly expensive over time — but that paywalls are not going to migrate very quickly out of the newspaper world and onto the rest of the internet. In a dying industry, the sensible thing to do is to maximize your revenues before you die. Paywalls might well make money for newspapers. But that doesn’t mean that newspapers aren’t dying. Quite the opposite.

Read more at Reuters

EC says corporate information can be spread on Twitter, Facebook

The Securities and Exchange Commission says companies can use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to disseminate key information just as they already do on corporate websites. But, the agency said, companies must make it clear that they plan to make that information available on social media outlets so that investors know where to look for it.

Read more at the LA Times.

Is The Company Behind Rodman's Korea Visit The Future Of Media?

What has become the core of the Vice brand is a kind of gritty, on-the-ground reporting from some of the roughest parts of the world.With Vice on track to expand to more countries and launch a news channel for young people, it may have inadvertently built the future of media.

Read (or listen) to more at NPR

Signs of promise and peril for American news organisations

Nearly a third of them say they have abandoned a news source because they thought the quality of its information was declining. Weather, traffic and sport now account for around 40% of local television newscasts. The average length of a story keeps falling. Only 20% of local TV stories exceed a minute, and half take less than 30 seconds.

A more pernicious trend is the growing number of public-relations workers. In 1980 PR flaks and journalists prowled in around equal numbers; in 2008 the ratio of PR folk to journalists was nearly four to one.

The bulk of the $37.3 billion spent on digital advertising in 2012 went to five firms: Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL.

Read more in the Economist

Why data without a soul is meaningless

The problem with data is that the way it is used today, it lacks empathy and emotion. Data is used like a blunt instrument, a scythe trying to cut and tailor a cashmere sweater.

The idea of combining data, emotion and empathy as part of a narrative is something every company — old, new, young and mature — has to internalize. If they don’t, they will find themselves on the wrong side of history.

“Data needs stories, but stories also need data. Data, when its put up in front of you as a number, it gets stripped of the context of where the data came from, the biases inherent in it, and the assumptions of the models that created it.”

The symbiotic relationship between data and storytelling is going to be one of the more prevalent themes for the next the few years, starting perhaps inside some apps and in the news media.

Read more at Gigaomo

Evernote's Cult Grows

That’s a lot of expectations for an experience that boils down to three columns in a browser window. You type, or clip or upload a new “note” (an image, a recording, or a Web page) into the right-hand column; store it in a “notebook” listed on the left-hand side; and browse or search in the middle. The promise is that Evernote saves your ideas, documents your meetings, archives articles, reminds you what your kid wants for Christmas, and coughs up the business card of Plaid Jacket Guy from that conference in Scottsdale. In addition to segregating such material into notebooks, users can organize it with tags, but don’t have to. Evernote’s search function, with optical character recognition that even picks up words within pictures, is impressively accurate and speedy. The effectiveness of this function is crucial, because the willingness to dump work and personal material in one place is central to Evernote’s worldview.

Evernote says it has 50 million users around the world (a third in the U.S.) and is adding 100,000 a day. Operating on a “freemium” model, the company makes money primarily from the sliver of that user base that pays $45 a year, or $5 a month, for a souped-up version with more storage capacity. It has been profitable, and though it’s investing heavily now, it expects to be profitable again soon. But with $251 million in venture backing and a valuation estimated at $1 billion, Evernote has greater ambitions. Chief Executive Officer Phil Libin talks about reaching a billion users; others at the company freely throw around the phrase “the Evernote lifestyle.”

Read more at Business Week

This Is the Scariest Statistic About the Newspaper Business Today

In 2012, newspapers lost $16 in print ads for every $1 earned in digital ads. And it's getting worse, according to a new report by Pew. In 2011, the ratio was just 10-to-1. Since 2003, print ads have fallen from $45 billion to $19 billion. Online ads have only grown from $1.2 to $3.3 billion. Stop and think about that gap. The total ten-year increase in digital advertising isn't even enough to overcome the average single-year decline in print ads since 2003.

Read more from The Atlantic

the Publishing Company That Beat the Internet

With the advent of the Internet, the primary sources of revenue—circulation and advertising—have eroded, while the costs of printing magazines—ink, paper, and distribution—continue to rise.

(But) Meredith, the demure Iowa-based publisher of upbeat women’s service magazines (including Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Traditional Home, has profited from a few key strategies. They are experts at repurposing their content across multiple platforms (magazines, books, websites, mobile devices, tablets, etc.) and aggressively look beyond advertising and circulation for revenue. In print, they stay as far away from the news as possible. They are particularly successful at licensing their magazine titles’ names to major national businesses selling branded products; they also run their own marketing agency.

Advertising remains the company’s lifeblood. In 2012 ad sales accounted for $769.8 million of Meredith’s $1.37 billion of revenue. Of that, 64 percent came from the company’s publishing division. The rest came from ad sales at Meredith’s 13 regional TV stations.

Read more at Business Week

Mobile Users Check for Updates 14 Times a Day

Facebook mobile users check their smartphones for updates an average of 14 times a day, according to a survey by the social networking site and IDC on their mobile users. Facebook is the third-most used application on mobile phone devices, right after email (78 percent) and web browsing (73 percent).

At least 89 percent of 18-24 year olds surveyed check their smartphones within 15 minutes of waking up and 62 percent check their smartphones as soon as they wake up.

Read more here.

Columbia’s J school is overrated

Journalism school, especially Columbia's vaunted program, is often anti-market in outlook. Much of what the market wants, journalism training doesn't give it.

The disgrace is not just that the school takes students' or their parents' money to train them for a livelihood that it reasonably can predict will not exist. But it is also an intellectual failure: The information marketplace is going through a historic transformation, involving form, distribution, business basis and cognitive effect, and yet Columbia has just hired a practitioner to lead it with little or no career experience in any of these epochal changes.

Read more at USA Today.

The problem with online freelance journalism

The fact is that freelancing only really works in a medium where there’s a lot of clear distribution of labor: where writers write, and editors edit, and art directors art direct, and so on. Most websites don’t work like that, and are therefore difficult places to incorporate freelance content. The result is that it’s pretty much impossible to make a decent living on freelance digital-journalism income alone: I certainly don’t know of anybody who manages it. There’s still real money in magazine features, and there are a handful of websites which pay as much as $1,000 or $1,500 per article. But in general it’s much, much easier to get a job paying $60,000 a year working for a website than it is to cobble together $60,000 a year working freelance for a variety of different websites.

The lesson here, then, is not that digital journalism doesn’t pay. It does pay, and often it pays better than print journalism. Rather, the lesson is that if you want to earn money in digital journalism, you’re probably going to have to get a full-time job somewhere.

Digital journalism isn’t really about writing, any more — not in the manner that freelance print journalists understand it, anyway. Instead, it’s more about reading, and aggregating, and working in teams; doing all the work that used to happen in old print-magazine offices, but doing it on a vastly compressed timescale. There are exceptions to this rule, of course — websites which still pay freelance writers decent sums. But in general, it’s fair to say that the web is not a freelancer-friendly place. Just be careful about extrapolating: there are lots of very good digital-journalism jobs out there, no matter how badly some freelancers get treated.

Read more at Reuters

what happens in a single Internet minute

Fortunately, Intel has broken down what happens in an Internet minute into an easy-to-digest infographic. Every minute, 639,800GB of global IP data is transferred.  In a single minute of Internet time, 204 million e-mails are sent.  Twitter processes 100,000 new tweets. An Internet minute is filled with 30 hours of videos uploaded and 1.3 million video views. There are still 6 million Facebook views and 277,000 logins every minute.

Read more here

Journalism Cutbacks Are Driving Consumers Away

Nearly one-third of consumers surveyed by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism said they have abandoned a news outlet because it no longer gave them what they had counted on, either with fewer or less complete stories. Television news viewership is down. Newsroom employment at newspapers is down 30 percent since a peak in 2000 and has gone below 40,000 people for the first time since 1978.

Government coverage on local television news has been cut in half since 2005, the study said. Sports, weather and traffic now account for 40 percent of the content on these broadcasts; yet that's just the sort of information readily available elsewhere. That's a recipe for future erosion, Mitchell said. Forty-two percent of adults under age 30 counted themselves as regular local news viewers in 2006; last year that was down to 28 percent, the study found.

Cable news is increasingly cable talk, although it's difficult to conclude whether that is because of financial considerations or the sense among executives of what viewers want. Over the last five years, CNN has sharply cut back on produced story packages and live event coverage, the study found.

Read more here

Local TV News, Losing Viewers, Seeks Bigger Mobile Identity

TV stations have added more local news programming than ever while at the same time losing viewership, according to the Pew Research Center. Pew reported a slight uptick in viewership of network affiliates' newscasts in 2011. A year later all viewership gains were lost -- and then some. Last year, viewership of key late local newscasts slipped 7% to around 25 million; early evening newscasst dropped by around the same amount to 22 million viewers.

Read more here

Good News Beats Bad on Social Networks

By scanning people’s brains and tracking their e-mails and online posts, neuroscientists and psychologists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories.

“The ‘if it bleeds’ rule works for mass media that just want you to tune in,” says Jonah Berger, a social psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They want your eyeballs and don’t care how you’re feeling. But when you share a story with your friends and peers, you care a lot more how they react. You don’t want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer.”

“You’d expect people to be most enthusiastic and opinionated and successful in spreading ideas that they themselves are excited about,” says Dr. Falk. “But our research suggests that’s not the whole story. Thinking about what appeals to others may be even more important.”

Read more at the New York Times

The Book Is Dead, Long Live the Book

Book revenues have been crumbling for the last two years, a development that will only accelerate, and brick-and-mortar bookstores have been steadily losing ground for the last five years. Long derided by publishing houses, e-books, though still a minority phenomenon in Germany, are experiencing tremendous growth. Today, about 11 percent of Germans are reading digital books on devices like the Kindle and the iPad, up from only 4 percent two years ago. In the United States, e-books already make up more than 15 percent of volume in the bookselling industry, mainly because they are more affordable. All of this indicates that margins will continue to shrink, as the book business becomes increasingly hectic, nervous and profit-driven.

People who read e-books aren't actually reading alone. Software uses millions of pieces of anonymous data to monitor how readers actually behave. Almost everything can be documented: how fast people read, which text they highlight and which pages they stop reading. The reader has become transparent. Could software be influencing the work of the editor soon? Is it conceivable that books will be rewritten based on readers' reactions, so as to achieve a higher read-through rate?

Read more at ABC News

How To Make $10 Million On YouTube

In January, the same month that Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla's YouTube channel Smosh passed Ray William Johnson's to become the most popular channel on YouTube, Forbes estimated the brand brought in $10 million in revenue the previous year.

"YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world by itself, and that is the way that we look at it," said Barry Blumberg, president of Smosh (and EVP of Smosh's parent company, Alloy Digital). "It does generate significant revenues for our business, but it is one aspect of our business, and we use it to drive to other aspects of our business and to expose our content to the largest possible audience."

Today, the Smosh channel counts 8.2 million subscribers (Johnson trails with 7.7 million subscribers) and an average of 73 million views per month.

Read more at BuzzFeed

Southwest Airlines plan for social media crises

"We're busier when there's nothing going on because we are constantly preparing and altering our contingency plans to address things that could happen."

With Wi-Fi now available on Southwest planes, social media users are reporting crises before the official Southwest dispatch channel can. For instance, when a hole popped open in the fuselage of a plane going from Phoenix to Sacramento, Calif., the first tweet about it was online within nine minutes. Dispatch didn't report it until about 20 minutes later.Luckily, Southwest's social media team monitors social channels incessantly. The airline is even building a command station it's planning to dub "The Listening Post." That's how Southwest was able to pull together a blog post about the situation—the plane made an emergency landing in Yuma, Ariz., within two hours of the emergency.





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Outdoor Revs Hit Nearly $7 Billion In 2012

Out-of-home advertising revenue increased 4.2% from $6.43 billion in 2011 to $6.7 billion in 2012, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association.

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Facebook's Graph Search May Be Key to More Ad Sales

When Facebook (FB) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Graph Search on Jan. 15, he hailed his company’s latest innovation as a great leap forward for search. Facebook members who want to know their friends’ preferences before making decisions on restaurants, vacations, career choices, and maybe even life partners, can look for, say, “single friends in San Francisco who like sushi,” and be rewarded with meaningful results. Zuckerberg thinks he can offer his customers the grand prize of advertising: perfect microtargeting.

Read more at Business Week

Music sales post small rise in 2012, first since '99

The music business broke a 12-year losing streak in 2012, posting a small but symbolic 0.3 percent rise in trade revenues to $16.5 billion, figures from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) showed on Tuesday. The slight increase will come as a relief to record label bosses who have watched the value of sales plummet from a peak of $28.6 billion in 1999, as illegal downloads and a reluctance to embrace the digital age hit revenues hard.

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Wearing the Internet

Google Glass is no longer a rumor, said Tim Parker in Forbes.com. “It’s real.” The company unveiled a prototype of its Internet-equipped eyeglasses last week, announcing that it would give a selected bunch of “bold, creative individuals” the chance to purchase the first version this year for $1,500. The futuristic spectacles have a tiny screen located in the top right-hand corner of the frame, where Web data can be projected in front of the user’s eyeball. Using voice-activated technology, you can do a Google search, call up GPS directions, video chat with your friends, and even record what you’re seeing with a tiny mounted camera—all without fumbling for a cellphone. Users (will) be able to record or take pictures of people without their knowledge or consent.

Read more at The Week

What most schools don't teach

A video about coding.

Spain's economic victim: journalism

The Spanish media has been ravaged by the country's recession, and not just economically. The crisis has also sparked serious challenges to its credibility. Thousands of jobs have been lost and dozens of outlets have been shut down, denying newsrooms of some of its most veteran and talented professionals. Only 53 percent of Spaniards say journalists are honest, compared to 51 percent for lawyers, 80 percent for police, 88 percent for teachers, and more than 90 percent for health professionals. Bankers and members of parliament came in at 12 percent and 11 percent respectively. Between 2008 and 2012, nearly 10,000 journalists lost their jobs, almost half of them in 2012, and 73 outlets shut down.

Read more at the Christian Science Monitor

Journalism Schools Try Out Drones

AP style, interviewing skills, fact checking, and … drone flying lessons? At least two journalism schools are experimenting with using unmanned aircraft as news-gathering tools.



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Internet Addiction Study

New research suggesting that so-called "Internet addiction" is associated with increased depression and even drug-like withdrawal symptoms. "Over the past decade, since the term became widely debated in the medical literature, 'Internet addiction' has become regarded as a novel [psychological disorder] that may well impact on a large number of individuals," write the researchers.The upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), often called the bible of psychiatry, will include Internet use gaming disorder as a condition worthy of further research. Read more here

Honda's shoestring Pinterest campaign attracts millions

What would you do if someone told you they would pay for you to do anything from one of your Pinterest boards? Chances are you’d be pretty excited. Honda made such a proposal to five influential pinners for its Pintermission campaign, which earned the carmaker first place in the Best Use of Pinterest category in PR Daily’s Digital PR & Social Media Awards.

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New Service to Let You Tweet When You’re Dead

The service will also allow an executor to be chosen to decide, after you’re gone, whether to keep your LivesOn Twitter feed alive — or pull the plug. Bedwood said this service will only work if you use it when you are alive.

“We aren’t as some people thought, bringing people back from the dead and then just posting the tweets,” he said. “We need living people to make this work as they have to help train and grow their LivesOn account.”

Questions about who owns your social media and Internet accounts after you pass away have swirled for years.

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Nielsen Agrees to Expand Definition of TV Viewing

The Nielsen Co. is expanding its definition of television and will introduce a comprehensive plan to capture all video viewing including broadband and Xbox and iPads, several sources tell The Hollywood Reporter. The networks for years have complained that total viewing of their shows isn't being captured by traditional ratings measurements. This is a move to correct that.

Read more at the Hollywood Reader

Women’s bylines

The Women’s Media Center announced the release of its 2013 Status of Women in the U.S. Media report Friday; it finds that the news media “remains staggeringly limited to a single demographic.” Pure online sites, the report says, “have fallen into the same rut as legacy media. Male bylines outnumbered female bylines at four of six sites reviewed.”

Read ore at Poynter

How a landmark Supreme Court ruling has changed student journalism

“When Hazelwood was first decided back in 1988 there was this long period where everybody in the legal and journalism community proceeded under the assumption that it was a case about children,” said LoMonte. “That was a safe assumption for a while, but it’s proving not to be any longer. The federal courts increasingly are looking to Hazelwood as providing the governing First Amendment legal standard for anyone at all who is a student, no matter how old, no matter how mature, no matter the level of education.” For example, in 2011, a federal district court cited Hazelwood to support a decision by Auburn University at Montgomery to remove a 51-year-old graduate student from its nursing program. The student argued she had been unlawfully expelled for speaking out about perceived problems with the program’s disciplinary policies.

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Chip May Allow Smartphones to See Through Objects

Ali Hajimiri, a professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, has created a chip capable of producing terahertz waves—radiation that can penetrate materials such as plastic and wood without the side effects associated with X-rays. When connected with a computer or mobile device, the 0.1 inch-wide silicon chip could help doctors locate skin cancer noninvasively and speed up passenger scans at airport security lines.

So-called T-rays have been used mostly in experiments in medical and dental imaging. Typically, the rays are created with bulky, expensive machines, which “see” using a single large beam that can image only a narrow area. Hajimiri, working with postdoctoral researcher Kaushik Sengupta, got thousands of tiny transistors to operate in concert, producing terahertz waves from a smaller package.

Installed in a smartphone, the chip could be used to quickly scan packages at a post office for security threats or to find art hidden behind the paint on the walls of historic buildings. Unlike X-rays, which have such high energy they can change the chemistry of objects they enter, T-rays are relatively harmless, Hajimiri says. The chip’s functionality comes with a price, however. If people can see through walls, McGregor warns, “there’s going to be a whole bunch of red flags thrown up by people around privacy issues.” If the device goes into mass production, he adds, it could cost as little as a dollar.

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Bringing Apps to PCs and MACs

BlueStacks App Player software can run Android apps designed for a mobile phone on most computers, allowing players to experience the game on a larger display. Once installed on a PC or Mac, the software lets users operate games and other apps with their mouse, touch pad or microphone.

With Apple and Google apps both running on Windows, the best platform will win, he says. Apple, Google and Microsoft declined to comment. Many more apps are available for mobile devices than for desktops and laptops. Apple's App Store contains more than 800,000 mobile apps, and Google Play offers more than 700,000.

As of last month, the Apple Mac App Store had about 14,000 apps, while Microsoft had about 43,000 for Windows PCs, according to app tracker Distimo. "For PC makers, increasingly, the latest, greatest and most desirable experiences aren't available on their platforms," says John Jackson, an analyst at IDC.

In the future, the software might even let an Android tablet or phone run an iPad app, he says. "Any computer - a tablet, a phablet (a smartphone with a screen of 5 inches or more), a desktop - could use BlueStacks," says Manju Hegde, a corporate vice president at AMD.

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Who's using social media?

Social networking giant Facebook is used by two-thirds of adults who are online. “Women are more likely than men to be Facebook users, and Facebook use is especially common among younger adults.”

Pew says 16% of Internet users are on Twitter — that’s double from November 2010. People 18 to 29 are the most likely to use Twitter, and urban-dwellers are significantly more likely than both suburban and rural residents to use the service.

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EveryBlock.com shuts down

Hyper local news and social media site EveryBlock.com has shut down, the company said Thursday. The company was founded in 2007 by Naperville native Adrian Holovaty and acquired by MSNBC.com in 2009. NBC News acquired MSNBC.com last year. NBC News Chief Digital Officer Vivian Schiller said EveryBlock's financial losses "were considerable," although she declined to offer specific financial results.

Hyper local sites in general have surged in popularity in recent years... AOL's Patch has had a rough time, with one investor estimating last year that the national collection of hyperlocal sites, including dozens in Illinois, lost $147 million in 2011.

Read more at the Chicago Tribune

Small business takes on big data

A group of startups are helping smaller businesses find cost-effective ways to use their data to serve customers and improve their bottom line. Recently, Jetpac, a free iPad app that turns your friends' photos into a customized travel magazine, wanted a way to find its users' best images, said founder and chief technology officer Pete Warden. But instead of saddling its team with the project, Jetpac wanted to hire data experts to help. So they sponsored a contest on Kaggle, a platform for data science competitions. Within three weeks, the competition's top three teams had more than 85 percent accuracy in finding the best photos, and Jetpac had a solution to its photo quality problem.

While Kaggle mostly works with larger companies that have accumulated more data, it's the smaller businesses that often don't need - or can't afford - a full-time data scientist, said Kaggle founder and CEO Anthony Goldbloom. While some small businesses might balk at the expense of data - and hiring an in-house data scientist is certainly costly - business owners said the price of online data tools was worthwhile.

Read more at Reuters