Data Journalism at the Guardian

Data journalism has been around as long as there’s been data - certainly at least since Florance Nightingale's famous graphics and report into the conditions faced by British soldiers of 1858.

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The Foxification of News

The idea that journalists should be impartial in reporting news is a relatively recent one. With the professionalisation of journalism in the early 20th century came a more detached style of reporting. In effect, a deal was struck between advertisers, publishers and journalists, says New York University’s Jay Rosen. Journalists agreed not to alienate anyone so that advertisers could aim their messages at everyone.

One way forward, suggests Mr Rosen, is to abandon the ideology of viewlessness and accept that journalists have a range of views; to be open about them while holding the reporters to a basic standard of accuracy, fairness and intellectual honesty; and to use transparency, rather than objectivity, as the new foundation on which to build trust with the audience. He cites the memorable phrase coined by David Weinberger, a technology commentator, that “transparency is the new objectivity”.

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10 Notable Moments in Student Journalism

Who says traditional journalism is dead? These students are making strides in the field of journalism before they’ve even started their careers. From breaking news to becoming "Internet famous," student journalists are making a difference. Read on to learn about ten notable moments in student journalism history, many of them within the past few years.

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Google Effects on Memory

When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

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TV station Admits to Airing Staged Video

A Rhode Island TV station aired phoney footage of a local golf tournament.

Watch it here.

McClatchy Ad Revenues Tumble 9%

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.

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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.

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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

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.

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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

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

Radio: More Fragmentation Ahead

Alan Burns says that radio can expect more fragmentation to come, mainly due to broadband streaming in cars. There are no signs that music streaming services like Pandora are eroding radio usage. On the other hand, there's less love for radio among younger listeners, and while wireless broadband in cars isn't going to kill radio, it will lower usage somewhat. It will also generate more fragmentation, since broadband will bring more non-local stations into cars.

"It's important to note why these women choose radio over non-radio streams in their cars, and the big reasons are that radio provides energy, excitement, and local information," Burns stated.

Additionally, the Burns study shows that there is significant resistance to paying for Internet music streams.

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Reinventing the newspaper

News providers throughout the rich world are urgently casting around for new models. They are starting to charge for content on the web and mobile devices, as well as pursuing non-traditional sources of revenue such as wine clubs or dating services. Some are being supported by philanthropy. Nobody yet knows which, if any, of these models will work, but it is clear that revenue from online advertising alone will not be enough to cover the costs of running a traditional news organisation.

Read more at The Economist

American newspapers are in trouble, but in emerging markets the news industry is roaring ahead

The internet-driven fall in classified-ad revenue is only one of the reasons for the decline of newspapers in America, which started decades ago. The advent of television news, and then cable television, lured readers and advertisers away.

Newspapers in western Europe are having to manage long-term decline rather than short-term pain.

In Japan, home to the world’s three biggest-selling daily newspapers (the Yomiuri Shimbun alone has a circulation of more than 10m), circulation has held up well, in part because over 94% of newspapers are sold by subscription. But there is trouble on the horizon. Young Japanese do not share their elders’ enthusiasm for newsprint, and advertising revenues are dropping as the population ages.

There is certainly no sign of a news crisis in India, now the world’s fastest-growing newspaper market. Television news is also booming: of more than 500 satellite channels that have been launched in India in the past 20 years. China is another market where news media are growing rapidly.

Read more at The Economist

Back to the coffee house

Everything changed in 1833 when the first mass-audience newspaper, the New York Sun, pioneered the use of advertising to reduce the cost of news, thus giving advertisers access to a wider audience. At the time of the launch America’s bestselling paper sold just 4,500 copies a day; the Sun, with its steam press, soon reached 15,000. The penny press, followed by radio and television, turned news from a two-way conversation into a one-way broadcast, with a relatively small number of firms controlling the media.

Now, the news industry is returning to something closer to the coffee house. The internet is making news more participatory, social, diverse and partisan, reviving the discursive ethos of the era before mass media. That will have profound effects on society and politics.

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Phone Hacking on Long List of Journalism Scandals

There's a shameful history of reportorial misdeeds of which the defunct News of the World and other News International properties are now a part. The mushrooming scandal in Britain involves accusations of bribery and Murdoch's newspapers illegally obtaining confidential information about crime victims and even former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Many previous episodes involving reporters and editors were relatively isolated incidents, with one or two people deviating from accepted professional codes. "Here we have a pattern of scandalous behavior."

Fake news reports reach back even to America's Revolutionary War, when a Philadelphia newspaper reported in 1776 about a ragtag contingent of American colonists beating experienced British forces in battle. It turned out the American force was much bigger than reported, and the British soldiers far less experienced.

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Apple's got its eye on mobile games

"We are 12 to 24 months away from being able to disrupt the living room with experiences that you might be playing on an iPad version four, but projecting … to a TV in your living room," he predicts. It'll be "every bit as good" as the experience of playing a high-end console game today, he adds.

With more than 200 million devices running Apple's mobile operating system — and 100,000 games available — Apple has transformed the traditional mobile-game marketplace. Spending on mobile games is expected to account for 15% of all spending on game software this year, rising to 20% in 2015, research firm Gartner predicts.

IHS/Screen Digest expects the sale of games in Apple's App Store to approach $2 billion worldwide in 2011, up about 75% from 2010. The closest mobile-games rival, Android Market, is forecast at $170 million for 2011, the firm says.

To be sure, console games played on systems such as Microsoft's Xbox 360 remain the dominant force in video games, accounting for about 40% of the projected $74 billion to be spent globally on games in 2011, Gartner says.

Hit video games still sell very well. First-person shooter game Call of Duty: Black Ops has earned Activision Blizzard more than $1 billion in sales since its November release. But sales of console games have plateaued in recent years, with mobile and online games supplying most of the industry growth.

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Data Visualization: Journalism's Voyage West

Stanford has used data from the Library of Congress to illustrate the spread of all kinds of newspapers across the U.S. from 1690 to 2011.

Check it out here

U.S. Cable Network Ad Spending Forecast to Exceed Broadcast Nets for First Time

U.S. advertising spending on cable networks will for the first time trump spending on broadcast networks this year, according to the latest forecast from media buyer ZenithOptimedia. For 2012, Zenith expects broadcast spending to drop 1 percent to $17.2 billion despite the return of the Olympics to NBC amid a projected increase in online and cable viewing for the games in London, compared with an estimated 9 percent gain to $19.6 billion for cable. 


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Microsoft Strikes Search Deal With China's Baidu

Microsoft has inked an agreement to provide its Bing technology to China's leading search engine operator. Google pulled back its official search presence in China last year after a dispute with authorities over Web censorship. Still, it's estimated that Google accounts for as much as 20% of Chinese searches as many Internet users in the People's Republic continue to access Google through proxy servers and other means.

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Watching Cable TV Online

Cable TV executives are constantly talking about "TV Everywhere" - shows and movies available anywhere at any time. With varying degrees of success, the biggest cable operators have tried to develop TV Everywhere offerings on their own. Cable systems typically let subscribers access reruns and movies via websites or mobile apps, but they don't offer first-run shows or live broadcasts such as football games outside the home. And content providers aren't eager to share potential mobile revenues with the cable companies.

Read more at Business Week

Linkedin #2 Social Network

Professional social network Linkedin surpassed Myspace in terms of traffic to become the No. 2 most visited social networking site in the U.S. in June. LinkedIn, which has seen a resurgence of traffic after its IPO in May, reached an all-time high of 33.9 million unique visitors in June compared to Myspace, which saw 33.5 million unique visitors (that’s down from 34.9 million in May). Hopefully Myspace’s new owners can recharge the troubled social network.

Twitter posted record U.S. traffic, with June as the first month the site saw over 30 million unique visitors. Facebook also reached an all-time high in terms of U.S. traffic in June, according to newly released comScore data.

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Data is Shaping the Future of Journalism

MIT’s recent Civic Media Conference and the latest batch of Knight News Challenge winners made one reality crystal clear: as a new era of technology-fueled transparency, innovation and open government dawns, it won’t depend on any single CIO or federal program. It will be driven by a distributed community of media, nonprofits, academics and civic advocates focused on better outcomes, more informed communities and the new news, whatever form it is delivered in.

The themes that unite this class of Knight News Challenge winners were data journalism and platforms for civic connections. Newsrooms, the traditional hosts for information gathering and dissemination, are now part of a flattened environment for news, where news breaks first on social networks, is curated by a combination of professionals and amateurs, and then analyzed and synthesized into contextualized journalism.

As we grapple with the consumption challenges presented by this deluge of data, new publishing platforms are also empowering us to gather, refine, analyze and share data ourselves, turning it into information. In this future of media, as Mathew Ingram wrote at GigaOm, big data meets journalism, in the same way that startups see data as an innovation engine, or civic developers see data as the fuel for applications.

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How to Cope with Data Overload

“Information overload” is one of the biggest irritations in modern life. Commentators have coined a profusion of phrases to describe the anxiety and anomie caused by too much information: “data asphyxiation” (William van Winkle), “data smog” (David Shenk), “information fatigue syndrome” (David Lewis), “cognitive overload” (Eric Schmidt) and “time famine” (Leslie Perlow). Johann Hari, a British journalist, notes that there is a good reason why “wired” means both “connected to the internet” and “high, frantic, unable to concentrate”.

These worries are exaggerated. Stick-in-the-muds have always complained about new technologies: the Victorians fussed that the telegraph meant that “the businessman of the present day must be continually on the jump.” Yet clearly there is a problem. It is not merely the dizzying increase in the volume of information (the amount of data being stored doubles every 18 months). It is also the combination of omnipresence and fragmentation. Many professionals are welded to their smartphones.

They raise three big worries. First, information overload can make people feel anxious and powerless: scientists have discovered that multitaskers produce more stress hormones. Second, overload can reduce creativity. Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School has spent more than a decade studying the work habits of 238 people, collecting a total of 12,000 diary entries between them. She finds that focus and creativity are connected. People are more likely to be creative if they are allowed to focus on something for some time without interruptions. If constantly interrupted or forced to attend meetings, they are less likely to be creative. Third, overload can also make workers less productive. David Meyer, of the University of Michigan, has shown that people who complete certain tasks in parallel take much longer and make many more errors than people who complete the same tasks in sequence.

What can be done about information overload? One answer is technological: rely on the people who created the fog to invent filters that will clean it up. A second answer involves willpower. Ration your intake. Turn off your mobile phone and internet from time to time.

But such ruses are not enough. Smarter filters cannot stop people from obsessively checking their BlackBerrys. Some do so because it makes them feel important; others because they may be addicted to the “dopamine squirt” they get from receiving messages, as Edward Hallowell and John Ratey, two academics, have argued. And self-discipline can be counter-productive if your company doesn’t embrace it. Some bosses get shirty if their underlings are unreachable even for a few minutes.

Most companies are better at giving employees access to the information superhighway than at teaching them how to drive. This is starting to change. Management consultants have spotted an opportunity. Derek Dean and Caroline Webb of McKinsey urge businesses to embrace three principles to deal with data overload: find time to focus, filter out noise and forget about work when you can. Business leaders are chipping in. David Novak of Yum! Brands urges people to ask themselves whether what they are doing is constructive or a mere “activity”. John Doerr, a venture capitalist, urges people to focus on a narrow range of objectives and filter out everything else. Cristobal Conde of SunGard, an IT firm, preserves “thinking time” in his schedule when he cannot be disturbed. This might sound like common sense. But common sense is rare amid the cacophony of corporate life.

Read more at The Economist

Prime time for mobile devices same as TV

Here’s even more proof that mobile devices are television’s “second screen.” MediaMinds found that the peak time people use the mobile web and apps is 7-9 p.m. (graph below), overlapping with television’s prime time period.

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Arbitron: Radio Ups Reach

While advertising revenue is still down from a few years ago, broadcast radio's reach is bigger than ever, according to Arbitron's most recent RADAR report, which tracks the overall audience for national and network radio in the U.S.

Among other things, the Arbitron data shows that radio still reaches a sizable majority of Americans every week. Broadcast radio's total reach among U.S. adults ages 12 and up increased from 189,990,000 in June 2010 to 191,891,000 in June 2011, for an increase of 1% over this period. In proportional terms, radio's reach increased from 73.8% to 74% of the U.S. population 12+. Among U.S. adults ages 18+, radio's total reach increased 0.9% from 172,706,000 to 174,299,000; in proportional terms, reach in this cohort remained stable at 74.3%. Aadults ages 18-39 saw total reach increase from 103,336,000 to 103,841,000, resulting in a proportional increase from 76.5% to 77%. The number of adults ages 25-54 listening to radio in an average week increased from 97,489,000 to 97,992,000, or from 76.9% to 77.2% of this age cohort.

Despite this good news, the fact remains that broadcast radio revenues are still significantly down from just a few years ago. Due in part to the recession, total advertising revenues plummeted from $21.7 billion in 2006 to $17.3 billion in 2010, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau. That's a 20% decline in four years.

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Ten ways journalists can use Google+

Since Google+ (plus) was launched a week ago those who have managed to get invites to the latest social network have been testing out circles, streams and trying to work out how it fits alongside Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Here are 10 ways Google+ can be used for building contacts, news gathering and sharing:

4. To create and share in circles

One of the foundations of Google+ and how it differs from Facebook is the circles function. There are suggested circles such as ‘family’, ‘friends’ and ‘acquaintances’ but you can add your own. For example, you could have a ‘journalists’ circle, a ‘contacts’ circle and categorise others by a specialist topic or a geographic area you report on. You can then choose to share updates, photos, videos and documents with particular circles.

8. For carrying out and recording interviews

One option is recording the chat for your notes or for audio and video content for a news site or podcast. One way to record audio is download Audio Hijack Pro (Mac), select the Google Talk plugin (you may find you need your Gmail open to find this as an option) and record. A quick test has proved this provides podcast-quality audio that can be easily edited.

9. For collaborating on Google Docs by circle

This nifty feature which marries Google Docs and Google+ is really handy for those working on a big story or organising spreadsheets with work colleagues. For example, you can create a circle of your work colleagues, go to Google Docs, check the tick box to select the relevant document, go to share in the black Google bar along the top of your window, and share the document with your relevant circle.

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For Film Graduates, an Altered Job Picture

As home-entertainment revenue declined in the last five years, studios reduced spending on scripts from new writers, cut junior staff positions and severely curtailed deals with producers who once provided entry-level positions for film school graduates. Yet applications to university film, television and digital media programs surged in the last few years as students sought refuge from the weak economy in graduate schools and some colleges opened new programs.

“It’s becoming an increasingly flooded marketplace,” said Andrew Dahm, who in May graduated from the Peter Stark producing program at U.S.C. with a master’s degree and an expectation that he would work for two or three years as a low-paid assistant in lieu of the junior executive jobs that were once common.

By and large those established programs have kept enrollments steady. But an expanding number of new film and media programs at other colleges around the country helped feed what appears to be a bumper crop of graduates in the academic year that just ended.

Read more at the New York Times

Gannett Shutters Hyper-Local NJ Sites

After much talk about the future of news relying more on user-generated contributions, Gannett's early experiments in crowd-sourced local news content has fizzled. It shuttered the company's 17 "hyperlocal" news sites in New Jersey, which operated under the umbrella InJersey.com site. The local news sites were scuttled by layoffs among Gannett staffers, who were still contributing the lion's share of the content.

User-generated content rarely exceeded 10%.

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Twitter For Newsrooms!? Twitter *Is* A Newsroom

Earlier this morning Twitter released “Twitter for Newsrooms,” its primer on how to use Twitter to gather and report news in the 21st century. #TfN is Twitter’s official nudge to old school reporters, a heavy handed reminder to get with the program and embrace Twitter as media production and consumption device.

“Twitter for Newsrooms is a bit redundant for me because Twitter is my newsroom,” says Mediagazer founding editor Megan McCarthy. Indeed, I’ve heard many journalists compare watching the news cycle on Twitter to being in a physical newsroom when breaking news would come in on the wire.

Read more at Tech Crunch

Cassettes Return for an Encore

It looked like the end of the reel for cassettes. The last car to ship with a tape deck was the 2010 Lexus SC 430. Sony stopped making the Walkman last October. This can mean only one thing: Cassettes are about to be cool again.

Read more at Wired

Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics

For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time. Until now, no company has made it so easy to hack into a product as popular as the Kinect, the fastest-selling consumer-tech product of all time. The Kinect racked up 10 million sales in just four months.

Read more at Wired

High Court Strikes Down California Videogame Law

The Supreme Court struck down Monday a California law blocking minors from buying violent videogames, voting 7-2 that it violates the First Amendment. It was the latest ruling by the high court to take a broad view of free-speech rights.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Confidence in Newspapers, TV News Rises

Americans' confidence in newspapers and television news rebounded slightly in the past year, having been stuck at record lows since 2007 (according to a new Gallup poll). The 28% of Americans who express a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers and the 27% who say the same about television news still lag significantly behind the levels of trust seen through much of the 1990s and into 2003. Interestingly, considering the highly polarized nature of cable news, all ideological groups increased their trust in television news to about the same degree.

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The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace

At its December 2008 peak, Myspace attracted 75.9 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S., according to ComScore (SCOR). By May of this year that number had dropped to 34.8 million. Over the past two years, Myspace has lost, on average, more than a million U.S. users a month. Because Myspace makes nearly all its money from advertising, the exodus has a direct correlation to its revenue. In 2009 the site brought in $470 million in advertising dollars, according to EMarketer. In 2011, it's projected to generate $184 million.

Read more at Business Week

Google Becomes First to 1 Billion Users a Month

The internet analysis company ComScore released its numbers for May, in which Google became the first company to ever hit a combined 1 billion unique users across its websites in a month. The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft came in second with 905 million, unchanged in its position from last year. Facebook swelled 30% from 2010 compared to Google’s 8.4% growth, taking the bronze at 714 million. Yahoo! turned a strong fourth-place showing not far behind Facebook, at 689 million visits.

Read more here

SCOTUS Considers Ban on Violent Video Games

M-Commerce To Reach $6 Billion In 2011

According to a new Forrester forecast, retailers can expect just 2% of their online sales to come through mobile devices this year and only 7% by 2016. That translates into $6 billion in 2011, growing to $31 billion in five years. In short, m-commerce will see steep growth in the coming years, but will remain a small part of overall sales. (The figures don't include revenue from transactions done through tablets.)

The report also warns companies not to expect HTML5 to become a universal standard for mobile sites anytime soon. While more robust, the programming language will not render apps obsolete, since apps will still have capabilities not found in Web browsers.

Read more at Media Post

Small Local News Traffic

A new report commissioned by the FCC discovered a “surprisingly small audience for local news traffic.” How small? Less than one in five news pageviews goes to local news sources — that’s a combination of newspaper sites, local TV sites and large independent news sites in a given market — and the average user spends just 0.45% of total internet time consuming local news.

Now, the report is dicing Comscore data, which isn’t always gospel, but the numbers are consistent. It’s even worse for local news organizations that aren’t #1 or #2 in their markets — the study found the top news site, on average, registers 5 minutes/user per month. The second-place site sees 3 minutes/user. Third place, 2 minutes. Fourth, just .8 minutes.

For local TV that’s invested heavily in local news operations, this should be disturbing. With just a handful of exceptions, like KSL in Salt Lake, stations aren’t generating large-enough online audiences to make up a meaningful percentage of total revenue. To make matters worse, local weather and traffic — staples of TV coverage — are becoming ubiquitous, built into every device, every search engine and increasingly, every TV set and cable box.

What does all this mean? Mediaite’s Philip Bump takes a crack at it: “There are generally two things people care about: what everyone is talking about, and what’s happening to them. Local news is caught in the murky middle."

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BBC developing new iPhone app for field reporters

The BBC is developing an app that will allow its reporters in the field to file video, stills and audio directly into the BBC system from an iPhone or iPad. The software is due to be in use within around a month.

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Media Industry Revenue Up in 2010

The U.S. entertainment and media industry last year grew 3.1%, its first gain since 2007, as marketers returned to advertising online and on television, according to the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. The U.S. media sector, which includes movie studios, TV networks, radio stations, newspapers and the Internet, will grow 3.5 percent this year, New York-based PWC forecast today in its annual industry overview.

Online advertising and Web access, pay-TV subscriptions, billboards and movies will lead the industry to mid-single-digit percentage gains between 2012 to 2015. Spending on recorded music and newspapers will be lower in 2015 than in 2010. Digital products will account for 59 percent of worldwide growth in the media industry during the next five years, while they contribute about 25 percent now, PWC said. U.S. advertising spending climbed 5.4 percent in 2010 after declining 14 percent in 2009, PWC said. Online advertising will average 12 percent growth compounded annually.

Read more from Bloomberg

The recorded-music business learns to love its enemy

Theirs is still a deeply troubled business. Since 2000, when online file-sharing took off, global recorded-music sales have fallen from $26.9 billion a year to $15.9 billion, according to the IFPI, a trade group. Apple has helped to smash profitable albums into less profitable singles.

Digital outlets such as iTunes are not growing nearly fast enough to offset the decline in CD sales. Indeed, in many countries they are stuck in a niche. In Japan, 73% of spending on recorded music in 2010 was on CDs, DVDs and vinyl. Fewer than one-fifth of Britons bought digital music last year.

Apple’s iCloud is not just a storage locker for music. It will search devices for tracks purchased from the iTunes store, and automatically give customers the rights to download the music to any Apple device. Yet music companies do not expect Apple or any other technological behemoth to save them. Few believe recorded music is about to rebound.

Read more at The Economist

What Multitasking Consumers Mean for Marketers

Marketers need to gain a better understanding of multitasking behavior to effectively plan advertising. The term "multitasking" has its roots in the computer industry. It describes the way computers handle multiple tasks by sharing processor resources. Consumers choose some, but not all, of their media exposure; in particular, they may be subjected to "environmental" media content in public places such as restaurants and bars, retail settings, medical offices, etc.

Read more here

LinkedIn Most Valuable

Facebook remains the most frequently used social network, but LinkedIn has become the most valued, according to a recent study by ROI Research and sponsored by Performics. Twitter was next, followed by YouTube, and MySpace. Facebook remains the only social networking site that is declining in importance.

Read more here

U.S. Online Ad Spending To Hit $31 Billion In 2011

U.S online advertising revenue this year will surge 20% to $31.3 billion on the strength of robust display ad spending, according to the latest forecast from eMarketer. That's a jump from the market research firm's prior estimate from the end of 2010, projecting online ad sales would increase just 10% to $28.5 billion in 2011.

Last year, online video increased 40% to 1.4 billion, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Spending on ordinary banner ads is expected to continue growing in 2011 as well, rising from $6.2 billion to $7.6 billion. After rising just 4% in 2009, online display spending bounced back last year with a 24% gain to reach $9.9 billion, accounting for 38% of total online ad revenue. The eMarketer forecast predicts that growth level would be maintained through 2011.

The Internet will account for nearly 20% of all U.S. major media ad dollars spent this year, up from 17% in 2010. By 2015, online advertising is expected to make up nearly 28% of all media ad spending. By comparison, TV ad dollars will hover around 38% for the next five years.

Read more here

Texting Cools Off

Growth in the volume of text messaging is slowing sharply, just as new threats emerge to that lucrative source of wireless carrier profits. While U.S. cellphone users sent and received more than 1 trillion texts in the second half of 2010, according to CTIA, a wireless industry trade group, that was just an 8.7% increase from the prior six months. It was the slimmest gain since texting exploded last decade.

Text traffic will come under more pressure in the months ahead. This week, Apple Inc. showed off an application that will allow iPhone and iPad owners to bypass carriers and send text messages over the Internet to other people with Apple devices.

Read more at the WSJ

Internet Forecasting

Interest in internet forecasting was sparked by a paper published in 2009 by Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. He found that the peaks and troughs in the volume of Google searches for certain products, such as cars and holidays, preceded fluctuations in sales of those products. Other researchers have shown that searches for job-related terms are a good predictor of unemployment rates and that mentions of political candidates on Twitter correlate with electoral outcomes.

Johan Bollen of Indiana University Bloomington (and his team) examined all the data for the autumn and winter of 2008, they found that Twitter users’ collective mood swings coincided with national events. Happiness shot up around Thanksgiving, for example.

Dr Bollen’s algorithm, which he described in a paper published in February in the Journal of Computational Science, has been licensed to Derwent Capital Markets, a hedge fund based in London. Derwent will use it to help guide the investments made with a £25m ($41m) fund that the firm hopes to launch in the next few months. Other funds are rumoured to be using similar tricks already. WiseWindow, a marketing firm based in Irvine, California, uses social-media activity to forecast demand for products.

Read more at The Economist

Report: Major Shortage in Local Reporting

There is a shortage of in-depth local journalism needed to hold government agencies, schools and businesses accountable, the federal agency that regulates television broadcasters concludes in a new report. The dearth of reporting comes despite an abundance of news outlets in today's multimedia landscape, the report says.

The report says staffing levels at daily newspapers have fallen by more than 25 percent since 2001. "A shortage of reporting manifests itself in invisible ways: stories not written, scandals not exposed, government waste not discovered, health dangers not identified in time, local elections involving candidates about whom we know little," the report says.

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Paywalls are Still a Bad Idea

The metered approach can have benefits for papers that implement it, by boosting revenue and appealing to advertisers. But those positives can be more than outweighed by the negatives of a paywall, particularly for smaller newspapers — the main one being that a wall creates an opportunity for free competitors, of which there are a growing number.

The amount of inventory sold to advertisers varies widely. In the U.S. market, the “sell-trough” [sic] ratio is about 60 percent, but it can go as low as 30 percent on some markets. This means the media can sustain some loss in page views due to the implementation of the metered system without losing ad revenue.

I hear that the brass at the New York Times expect its paywall to be revenue neutral — the amount of money they expect to bring in from online subscriptions is pretty much equal to the amount of money they expect to lose from online advertising.

The biggest flaw from a business perspective, particularly for smaller newspapers, is that walling up your content is an invitation to free competitors — from AOL’s Patch.com and Huffington Post to Mainstreet Connect and Neighborhoodr and Topix.net — to come and take away your readers.

Newspapers like the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal can make paywalls work because their content is extremely focused and (arguably) more valuable than that produced by free competitors. The New York Times is hoping it falls into that category as well, although as a mass-market newspaper, that conclusion is more of a gamble. But if you are a small-town or even medium-sized metro paper, walling off your content could be a recipe for disaster, by giving your more nimble competitors exactly what they are looking for: readers eager for a free alternative.

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Analyzing the metered model

About half of the audience (for online media) is composed of casual users dropping by less than 3 times a month, or sent by search engines; 25% come more than 10 times a month.

News organization have implemented (paid) systems in different gradations. At the far end of the spectrum, we have the Times of London: no access to the site without first paying. That’s is the riskiest option. The site ends up losing 90% of its audience (and the related advertising revenue) but hopes to offset the loss by gathering enough online subscribers. Others choose to give some of the site for free and put the most valuable contents — sometimes the digital version of the print edition — behind a paywall. This doesn’t always make economical sense as many readers are happy enough with the free content part. The most successful paywall implementation has been the Wall Street Journal: it now has more than 1m paid subscribers, but it took 10 years to get there. The third option involves a metered system. The principle is simple: once you’ve seen a certain number of stories in a given period of time, you need to become a paid subscriber to keep viewing the site. Some newspapers have been quite successful at deploying such a metered system.

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Game consoles under attack

The dominance of games played with a console system and TV is under assault by new mobile and social gaming. A third of Americans have a smartphone capable of playing addictive games such as Angry Birds, according to Nielsen. Nearly 20% play social-network games such as CityVille and FarmVille, NPD Group says. The rapid adoption rate of casual games now outpaces traditional console games, and U.S. spending is expected to exceed $3 billion this year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Will stay-at-home console games be left in the dust? Not likely. For starters, console games still dominate, while mobile and social online games are a fringe of the $25 billion game industry. And this year, spending on console games is expected to grow an estimated 5% or more.

The average video game player is 37 years old; the average buyer of computer and video games is 41, according to Ipsos MediaCT research for the group. Women are 42% of gamers, up from 38% in 2007, while 29% of gamers are over the age of 50.

Read more at USA Today.

Kickstarter

Founded in 2009, Kickstarter is an online fundraising platform for creative projects. Musicians, designers, filmmakers, and other artists craft a short pitch, usually a video, post it on the site, and set a fundraising target and a time frame. Contributors are more like donors than investors, since they earn no return or equity, though they are promised rewards (a copy of the CD, dinner with the artist). If the project meets its goal, Kickstarter, a for-profit company, takes a 5 percent cut and the creator gets the rest. If it falls short, no money changes hands.

Kickstarter has emerged as a legitimate option for financing independent films. So far, the company has raised more than $21 million from nearly 240,000 backers for 2,443 films, according to co-founder Yancey Strickler. He says six films have crossed the $100,000 mark.

Read more at Business Week.

5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet

1) An unfinished e-book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it.
E-books don’t exist in your peripheral vision. They do not taunt you to finish what you started.

2) You can’t keep your books all in one place.
You can’t see all the e-books you own from various vendors, all in one place. The way we e-read is the reverse of how we read. To pick up our next physical book, we peruse bookshelves we’ve arranged and pick something out.

3) Notes in the margins help you think.
It’s not enough to be able to highlight something. A careful reader wants to argue with the author, or amplify a point, or jot down an insight inspired by something freshly read. And it has to be proximate to the original — a separate notebook is ridiculous.

4) E-books are positioned as disposable, but aren’t priced that way.
It’s just annoying to plunk down $13 for what amounts to a rental.

5) E-books can’t be used for interior design.
When in your literate life you did not garnish your environment with books as a means of wordlessly introducing yourself to people in your circle? It may be all about vanity, but books — how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don’t keep — say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.

Read more at Wired

Money? There's an app for that

Attempts to turn mobile phones into digital wallets gather pace. Square, a start-up... wants to undercut the credit-card processing fees charged to small businesses and to make it easy for them to accept digital payments.. Google was expected to unveil plans to test its own mobile-payment service.

Both geeks and moneymen know that persuading more Americans to use their phones as mobile wallets will not be easy. A survey by Javelin Strategy & Research published last year found that only 19% of Americans were interested in using some form of contactless payment. Those who think mobile wallets’ time has come point out that more and more tech firms are embracing Near-Field Communication (NFC), a wireless connectivity technology that allows phones with embedded NFC chips to make payments when “waved” near an in-store terminal.

Read more at The Economist

The data revolution

Last year people stored enough data to fill 60,000 Libraries of Congress. The world’s 4 billion mobile-phone users (12% of whom own smartphones) have turned themselves into data-streams. YouTube claims to receive 24 hours of video every minute. Manufacturers have embedded 30m sensors into their products, converting mute bits of metal into data-generating nodes in the internet of things. The number of smartphones is increasing by 20% a year and the number of sensors by 30%.

Companies that can harness big data will trample data-incompetents. Data equity, to coin a phrase, will become as important as brand equity. In the 1980s and 1990s retailers such as Walmart used their mastery of retailing data to launch the “big-box” revolution (huge out-of-town stores with ultra-low prices). Today’s big data will provide the raw material for further revolutions.

Read more at The Economist

Small Papers Lead the Way on Paywalls

The University of Missouri School of Journalism recently interviewed hundreds of daily newspaper publishers and found that 46 percent of papers with a circulation under 25,000 per week say they charge for at least some of their online content. By contrast, only a quarter (24 percent) of newspapers with a circulation of more than 25,000 charge for any content. If one of those is your hometown rag, don't get complacent just yet. A third (35 percent) of the papers that don’t currently charge say they have plans to do so, and another 50 percent “may begin charging at some point.” (Fifteen percent of those polled say that they had no plans to put up any sort of paywall.)

Read more at AdWeek.

New Business Model in Vogue at Condé Nast

From 2007 through 2009, Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker saw about $500 million in revenue disappear, a 30% decline, and posted a loss in 2009. In response, Condé Nast closed magazines, trimmed its famously large budgets and re-examined almost every tenet of its business. To pursue new areas of growth, Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications Inc., has set aside $500 million to invest in digital properties.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Content-Focused iPad Apps Value Form Over Function

A report released by the Nielsen Norman Group shows that many iPad apps are confusing users by being too subtle about the gestures needed to navigate them, and some are not sensitive enough to the accuracy limit of fingertips. The authors also found that many companies with perfectly functional websites are wasting their time making a less-functional iPad app.

Read more here.