Twitter Censors Messages

Twitter Inc., the microblogging service, gave itself extra flexibility to censor information in parts of the world that impose restrictions on self-expression. Effective yesterday, Twitter added the ability to censor tweets on a country-by-country basis, rather than globally, the San Francisco-based company said in a blog post.
 

The shift would let Twitter comply with strictures in one country without having to pull offending tweets from its entire audience. Previously, Twitter banned offensive content on a global basis, rather than for a specific nation. Still, the decision drew criticism from some users because the service has been used as an agent of social change around the world, including the Middle East.

Some Twitter users are calling for a boycott of the service tomorrow in protest of the decision. They’re using “#TwitterBlackout” as a hash tag -- a label that lets people easily find tweets on the same topic.

Reporters Without Borders, an organization that seeks to defend freedom of information, also said it was disturbed by Twitter’s decision.

Read more here

Analyst: Google Threat To Big Ad Agencies ‘Unwarranted’

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is a massive player in the digital advertising world, but given that this remains only a part of the overall ad market, the Internet giant will not soon pose a real threat to big ad agencies of the world like WPP, Interpublic and Omnicom, according to a report out today from Pivotal Research Group.

The reason for this, they write, is that digital media companies will want to retain their margins, which are “signficantly higher” than those that big agencies get for their services. Pivotal’s analysts also emphasize that agencies still continue to offer a greater degree of independence to brands when advising on how and where to spend ad dollars online.

Google, it seems is just a big fish in a still-small pond: according to ZenithOptimedia, in 2011 digital advertising made up just under 16 percent of total ad spend worldwide, or $73.8 billion. Google last week reported that it made $36.53 billion in advertising revenues, just under half of ZenithOptimedia’s estimated total.

Read more here

Mobile Usage Soars For Internet, Ad Forecast To Hit $2.6B

Tablets have become the consumer's fourth screen, especially among those with smartphones. Techies with smartphones continue to use tablets at a higher rate. Those in the United States -- at 17% -- are among the highest, followed by Japan at 11%, and the United Kingdom at 10%, according to Google. The data appears to fall into line with AdWords tools allowing marketers to add WiFi ad targeting. Germany had the biggest increase in smartphone owners using their device for daily Internet access, jumping from 39% to 49%. Japan had the highest percentage accessing the Internet daily on their smartphone, at 88%. A little more than two-thirds of smartphone users in the U.S. -- and more than half of smartphone users in the UK -- access the mobile Internet daily. Read more here

Print, Radio Revs Braced For 2012 Declines

2012 doesn’t hold much hope for some of the main traditional media categories, including newspapers, magazines and radio, judging by the latest advertising forecast from MagnaGlobal, which sees revenue losses for all three media. The declines come amid growing competition from online advertising, as well as continuing economic uncertainty. Total U.S. radio advertising revenues will decrease 0.8% in 2012, according to MagnaGlobal, which also predicts declines of 5.2% for magazines and 6% for newspapers. MagnaGlobal sees Internet media jumping 10.9%, due mostly to continued increases in paid search, online video, and burgeoning mobile advertising. Broadcast TV will grow 8.5% in 2012, largely on the strength of the Olympics and political ads. Outdoor media will experience more modest but sustained growth, with a 4% increase in 2012. Read more here

Why newspapers are closing the shutters on staff photographers

Newspaper photographers are in retreat. Staff jobs are vanishing as publishers look for new ways to cut costs. National papers have gradually been reducing numbers in recent years. Many titles have only a handful. In truth, what's happening to photographers is a precursor to what will happen on the writing side too - and that's way before we cease to publish on newsprint. Most view it as the onward march of the citizen journalist and, by implication, contend that that is A Bad Thing. Read more here

HD Radio Awareness Declines

HD radio is making plenty of progress -- in the wrong direction. That’s according to a new study from research outfit Mark Kassof & Co., which surveyed 670 radio listeners ages 18-64 by phone to determine their state of knowledge about this variety of digital radio. A medium once (and occasionally still) hailed as the future of terrestrial broadcast radio. According to Kassof, awareness of HD radio actually declined over the last few years. 67% of those surveyed said they had “heard of” HD radio in 2008, the proportion has declined to 54% today. Read more here

YouTube Users Watch 4 Billion Videos a Day, But Don’t Stick Around Long

YouTube streams 4 billion online videos each day, more than one for every other person on Earth and a 25% jump over eight months ago. The number of uploads on the platform is also staggering: about 60 hours of video is now added to the site every minute, compared to 48 hours a minute in May. As outlined in a New Yorker article last week, despite impressive stats such as the 4 billion figure, the average YouTuber spends 15 minutes each day viewing videos on the site, but the average American spends four or five hours watching TV every day. “If YouTube could get people to stay on the site longer, it could sell more advertising, and raise the rates it charges advertisers for each thousand views,” the article states, adding that U.S. advertisers still spend about $60 billion a year on TV commercials compared to only $3 billion for online video. Read more here

Tablet, E-Reader Owners Double Over Holidays

The share of U.S. adults who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% during the holiday season, fueled in part by the launch of less expensive devices like the Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet, according to a new study. “In the time we have been doing surveys about the adoption and use of digital technology, we have never seen growth quite like this,” noted Lee Rainie, director of Pew’s Internet & American Life Project. “These findings have major implications for every media company -- especially book publishers, everyone in a knowledge business, and key community institutions like libraries. They show how radically the tectonic plates of information creation and dissemination are shifting under our feet.” When it came to e-readers, women continue to be more avid buyers than men. Wealthier and better-educated people also are more like to have e-readers, but the gap between them and others isn’t as dramatic as with tablets. Read more here

Facebook rolls out 60 apps for Timeline

Thursday, (Facebook) will unleash more than 60 apps for Timeline. The aim is to give Facebook's 800 million members additional reasons to spend more time on the site, by sharing their experiences with others as they happen. Millions already use music, video and other apps designed for Timeline. But the prospect of hooking users on apps that show when they exercise, where they shop and what they listen to — as they do it — should have marketers and advertisers salivating, analysts say. Read more at USA Today

Scripps - TV up, Papers Down

Scripps told investors in Miami Tuesday that its television revenue will jump 50 percent in 2012, thanks in part to nine stations it recently acquired from McGraw Hill Broadcasting Co. Even without the new stations, television revenue is predicted to grow 15 percent. Newspaper revenue will continue to decline, however. Forecasted revenue for 2012 is expected to fall to $400 million in 2012. That would represent a slight decline from 2011, but a dip of more than $168 million from 2008 levels. Read more at the Business Courier

Tracking Cholera in Haiti

Social media and the Internet have become a vast source of information for health professionals, evidenced by a study published today in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene that shows how data mining was used to examine the spread of infectious disease. Read more here

Clear Channel Drops ‘Radio’ From Its Name

The largest player in the U.S. commercial radio market is dropping the word “radio” from its name. Clear Channel Radio is now Clear Channel Media and Entertainment, saying the change reflects evolution of its business. Read more here.

What's on tap for TVs

With high-definition televisions now in 87% of homes, TV makers have accomplished their mission of selling HDTV to consumers. Their new goal: to whet your appetite for bigger screens with even more impressive picture quality, as much as four to 16 times the resolution of your current HDTV. TV makers that have pushed 3-D television technology for the past two years "are finally focusing on that concept of bringing people television with better pictures. The Consumer Electronics Association forecasts an overall TV sales dip this year to $17.2 billion from $18.4 billion in 2011. And fewer consumers, 32%, intend to buy a TV, down from 35% last year, says consulting firm Accenture. DTC forecasts that TV sales will remain largely flat in 2012 and 2013 (with increases of 1% and 2% annually). What's coming:

Read more at USA Today

New Ladies’ Home Journal, Written Mostly by Readers

While women’s service magazines have long relied on readers to contribute content, from first-person accounts to recipes, Ladies’ Home Journal is taking that strategy to new lengths: beginning with the March issue, it will allow readers to produce the majority of its articles. The 128-year-old magazine, with an average paid circulation of 3.2 million, would be the first major mass-market magazine to draw on user-generated content for most of its pages. While most of the content will be user-generated, editors will continue to check facts in articles. Contributors will be paid the usual standard professional rates. And professional experts will also continue to provide advice, often alongside first-person accounts.

Read more at the New York Times.

Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users

To understand newspapers’ 15-year attachment to paywalls, you have to understand “Everyone must pay!” not just as an economic assertion, but as a cultural one. Though the journalists all knew readership would plummet if their paper dropped imported content like Dear Abby or the funny pages, they never really had to know just how few people were reading about the City Council or the water main break. Part of the appeal of paywalls, even in the face of their economic ineffectiveness, was preserving this sense that a coupon-clipper and a news junkie were both just customers, people whose motivations the paper could serve in general, without having to understand in particular. The article threshold has often been discussed as if it was simply a new method of getting readers to pay, to which the reply has to be “Yes, except for most of them.” Calling article thresholds a “leaky” or “porous” paywall understates the enormity of the change; the metaphor of a leak suggests a mostly intact container that lets out a minority of its contents, but a paper that shares even two pages a month frees a majority of users from any fee at all. By the time the threshold is at 20 pages (a number fast becoming customary) a paper has given up on even trying to charge between 85% and 95% of its readers, and it will only convince a minority of that minority to pay. Read more here

How People Watch TV Online And Off

Nielsen estimates that almost 145 million people watch video online in the U.S., compared to about 290 million who watch traditional TV. So the penetration of online video is already about half of the overall TV-watching population. Yet for all the video people watch on the web, it is still a tiny fraction of how much they watch on TV in terms of time spent. In a report put out yesterday on the State of the Media summarizing 2011 data, Nielsen estimates Americans spend an average of 32 hours and 47 minutes a week watching traditional TV. They only spend an average of 3 hours and 58 minutes a week on the Internet, and only 27 minutes a week watching video online. All those billions of videos watched online still only represent 1.4 percent of the time spent watching traditional TV. Read more here

Magazine Ad Demand Falters

After a tentative recovery following the economic downturn in 2009, consumer magazines are seeing ad pages fall again, raising the possibility of a long-term, secular decline in the medium similar to their print cousins in the newspaper business. Total ad pages fell 8% from 50,578 in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 46,508 in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to the Publishers Information Bureau, while print advertising revenues (based on official rate card figures) declined 4.9% from $6.02 billion to $5.73 billion. Read more here

Big Three Newscasts Are Changing the State of Play

Influenced by cable and the Internet, the nightly newscasts are shaking up conventions that stretch back 50 years, seeking to distinguish themselves by picking different stories and placing them in different orders. On any given night, one might lead with the Republican campaign, another with extreme weather and the third with an exclusive interview. “The three evening newscasts have become more different from one another than at any time I can remember,” said Bill Wheatley, who worked at NBC News for 30 years and now teaches at Columbia. The differences provide a stark illustration of the state of the news media — much more fragmented than ever, but also arguably more creative. Read more at the NY Times

Holiday gifts of e-readers challenge publishing world

The latest USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, based on sales data from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1, shows a remarkable burst of digital book sales after e-readers were unwrapped as gifts -- for 42 of the top 50 titles, the e-book editions were the most popular format. The previous high, in July, was 25 of the top 50. One in five U.S. adults are reading e-books on a variety of devices, from dedicated e-readers to tablets (like the Kindle Fire) that can be used to download movies, music, video games and more. Forrester Research estimates that Amazon has sold 5 million Kindle Fires, priced at $199 each, since the device was released Nov. 14. Archrival Barnes & Noble has sold an estimated 2 million Nook Tablets ($249), released Nov. 17. Both devices are designed, in part, to compete with Apple's iPad (the latest versions are priced from $500 to $830), which sold about 40 million units last year. But even as the sales of e-books doubled from 10% of the overall market to 20% in 2011, print books still account for about 80% of the market. Overall print sales dropped about 9% in 2011. Read more here

Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World’s Bandwidth

The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth. Arieso, a company in Newbury, England, that advises mobile operators in Europe, the United States and Africa, documented the statistical gap when it tracked 1.1 million customers of a European mobile operator during a 24-hour period in November. The gap between extreme users and the rest of the population is widening, according to Arieso. The Arieso survey found that 64 percent of extreme users were using a laptop, a third were using a smartphone and 3 percent had an iPad. Read more here.

How Google beat AP with Iowa caucus results

As GOP workers in Des Moines entered and verified each precinct’s results on a system set up by Google, the current totals were pushed to a map on Google’s elections page, to the home page of the Republican Party of Iowa, and to precinct and county-level tables accessible by anyone, including the AP. Google’s experiment showed how an innovative technology company can push in on the turf of a venerable news organization that prides itself on getting it first and getting it right. Read more here

Radio Still Growing

There are more radio stations today (14,952) then there were a few months ago. The number of AM stations, FM commercial stations, and FM educational stations all increased since the end of September, 2011. Read more here

New York Times, Washington Post, AP Found NewsRight

A project first developed by the Associated Press and initially named the News Licensing Group, NewsRight launched Thursday with 29 investors, including the AP, New York Times Company, Washington Post Company and numerous other major newspaper corporations.

This is not a program to halt aggregation practiced by the likes of the Huffington Post or many other news organizations. If effort is put in to rewrite the work, NewsRight will let you be (at least for now). Those that just “scrape” stories are the target.

Read more here

'NYT' Raises Newsstand Price, Shores Up Declining Revs

NYTCO is trying to shore up falling revenues and flagging profitability as it enters the new year. The rapid increase in the newsstand price is part of NYTCO’s push to offset steep declines in ad revenue by increasing circulation revenues -- a strategy which paid off for a few years, but now necessitates another price hike. The circulation revenue strategy is especially precarious given ongoing declines in overall newsstand sales; it is likely to be a short-term solution at best. NYTCO’s total ad revenues have declined from $2.05 billion in 2007 to $1.3 billion in 2010. Read more here

Lots of Newspaper Deals, But Not Much Hope

The last three months of 2011 brought a sudden flurry of deals in the newspaper industry, with a number of fair-sized metropolitan and regional dailies trading hands. But the increased pace of deal-making doesn’t reflect improved fundamentals for newspaper publishing, which is expected to suffer another round of losses in 2012. Some of the newspapers were profitable when they traded hands, according to owners and buyers -- but the spate of acquisitions in no way suggests an industry that is on the upswing -- or has even hit bottom. In this context, newspaper publishers are going to have to continue cutting their workforces to trim costs. Smaller newspapers generally continue to do better than their large metro daily counterparts. Read more here

All the World's a Game

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

Why video games will be an enduring success

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

The moral panic about video games is subsiding

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

Smartphones Are Changing Photography

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

Retail therapy

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

How Luther went viral

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

Information’s Deadly Price

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

Read more at the New York Times

2011: At least 106 journalists killed

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

Read more here

Newspapers have five years to live

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

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

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

Viewership Steady For Cable, Broadcast Nets

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

Read more here

Only 14% Use Online Devices For Rented Movies

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

Read more here

AP Stylebook’s New Tool Automatically Edits Your Writing

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

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

Read more here

Publishing in Latin America

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

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

Read more at The Economist

The serious business of fun

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

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

Read more at The Economist

Newspapers' Digital Audience Skews Younger, More Affluent

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

Read more here

Facebook Brand Pages

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

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

Read more here.

Modern Warfare 3's billion-dollar milestone

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

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

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

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

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

Read more here

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

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

Read more at Business Week

Marketers Struggle With Social Media

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

Read more here.

The trial of Stephen Glass

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

Read more here.

Work: Life without email

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

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

Read more at The Week

New Twitter formalizes news wire service function

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

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

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

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

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

Read more here

Drone journalism?

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

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

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

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

Read more at the Washington Post

Syria Bans iPhones to Prevent Citizen Journalism

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

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

Read more at the BBC

Forecasts for 2012 Ad Spending Revised Downward

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

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

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

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

Read more here

Two Giant Radio Groups Form Daily-Deal Alliance

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

Read more at the New York Times

10 Historical Events Affected by Social Media

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

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

Read more here

Newspaper Revs Dive In Q3

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

Read more here

the Future of Printed Books

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

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

Read more here

Why Kids Can’t Search

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

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

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

Read more at Wired

Supreme Court will hear disgraced journalist’s moral character case

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

Read more here

Video games hit higher level of U.S. education

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

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

Read more here

Fun at the FactFest

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

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

Read more at The Economist

Tool Reveals Which Celebs, Models Have Been Photoshopped

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

Read more here

Stephen Colbert on CNN's iReporters

Tablet Owners Define New Category of Shoppers

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

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

Read more at Mashable

Flash Robs

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

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

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

Read more at Wired

Redefining Public Relations in the Age of Social Media

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

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

Read more from the New York Times

Radio Revs Edge Up Again

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

Read more here

Social Media: Weak on Customer Loyalty

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

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

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

Read more here

What Happens When Journalism Is Everywhere?

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

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

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

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

Read more at Business Week

Drone Journalism Arrives

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

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

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

Read more at the New York Times

Local Social Media Ad Spending: 2.3 Billion In 2015

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

Read more here

How Mainstream Media Uses Twitter

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

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

Read more here

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

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

Yes, Facebook.

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

Read more at C-net

Cable's Future May Already Have Passed

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

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

Read more here

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

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

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

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

Read more here

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

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

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

Read more here

Mobile Tool to Authenticate Citizen-Media Reports

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

Adobe Halts Flash for Mobile Devices

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

Read more here

No Relationship Between Clicks And Sales

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

Read more here

News organizations can finally create Google+ pages

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

Read more here

Starbucks Augmented Reality for the Holidays

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

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

Google Ponders Pay-TV Business

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

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

Read more here

Deals Top Social Marketing Driver

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

Read more here

CIA tracks revolt by Tweet, Facebook

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

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

Read more from AP here

Angry Birds - Half a Billion Downloads

Facial Monitoring

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

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

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

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

Read more here

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

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

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

Read more here

Newspaper Circs Sink Again

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

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

Read more here

Why the social media editor job may be a transitional one

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

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

Read more here

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

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

Read more here

Pay Wall Won't Offset 'NYT' Print Declines

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

Read more here

Facebook Is Serious TV Rival

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

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

Tablets Used 90 Minutes Per Day on Average

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

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

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

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

Nielsen: Nearly Half Of Americans Are Watching Online Video

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

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

Read more here

Revenue Declines for Big Newspapers

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

Read more here

Twitter: 100 Million Monthly Active Users

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

Read more here

Profit and Ad Revenue Fall at Gannett

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

Read more here

A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work

Social media drive TV ratings

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

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

Read more here

Magazine Ad Pages Fall 5.6%

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

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

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

Read more here

Making sense of a torrent of tweets

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

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

Read more here

The Walmart of the web

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

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

Read more here