Suggestions from Doreen Marchionni (Pacific Lutheran University teacher and editor at The Seattle Times).
Reporters need to be on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Taking simple steps such as crowdsourcing story ideas or encouraging feedback increases a reporter’s credibility with a digital audience, Marchionni found in her research.
And, having a Twitter account that mixes appropriate personal messages along with work-related tweets can let the audience see the “person behind the news,” which also builds trust.
Provide online bio pages with photos and short biographical sketches.
Produce reporter-focused short videos. Video communicates to an audience that a reporter is a real person, not a “data spewing automaton." They need to put themselves out there in videos.
Look to columnists and the Sports Department for cues. Columnists, often take a conversational tone, use fact-based analysis and portray a strong public persona. She is not suggesting opinion-based reporting, but rather bringing more voice and perspective to typical news writing.
When a newsroom does engage with readers, and invites early participation in the newsgathering process, Marchionni says it is important to publicly note that interaction. “You must tell audiences that you did it.”
Read more at Poynter
Wednesday, March 16
Newspapers Still Falling
The modest recovery in ad spending over the course of 2010 did not benefit newspapers, which suffered yet another round of ad revenue declines in the fourth quarter of last year, according to the Newspaper Association of America.
Looking at the full year, total print ad revenues fell 8.2% from $24.8 billion in 2009 to $22.8 billion in 2010. This works out to a decline of 51.9% from $47.4 billion in 2005; meaning that newspapers lost over half their print revenues in just five years.
Online advertising is the sole beacon of hope for an increasingly desperate industry, but it still remains a relatively small part of the overall business.
Read more at Media Post
Looking at the full year, total print ad revenues fell 8.2% from $24.8 billion in 2009 to $22.8 billion in 2010. This works out to a decline of 51.9% from $47.4 billion in 2005; meaning that newspapers lost over half their print revenues in just five years.
Online advertising is the sole beacon of hope for an increasingly desperate industry, but it still remains a relatively small part of the overall business.
Read more at Media Post
Tuesday, March 15
Internet usage transforming news industry
The Project for Excellence in Journalism said Monday that local, network and cable television news, newspapers, radio and magazines all lost audience in 2010. But in its eight annual State of the News Media survey, the project says news consumption online increased 17 percent last year over the year before. The percentage of people who say they get news online at least three times a week surpassed newspapers for the first time.
Read more at Business Week
Read more at Business Week
The Media Industry: Now Hiring!
According to the Pew Project for Excellence director, Tom Rosenstiel. "(Social Media hires) come close in scale for the first time to the losses in print newspapers...”
Read more at Forbes
Read more at Forbes
Monday, March 14
You Won't Believe How Many Viewers Fox News Lost
In 2010, about 42 million different people watched CNN for at least an hour a month. That was more than Fox’s 41 million and MSNBC’s 37 million. The median prime-time viewership at the three channels together dropped 16% to an average of 3.2 million viewers. The prime-time audience at Fox fell 11% to a median viewership of 1.9 million. It lost 234,000 viewers.
Read more at Business Insider
Read more at Business Insider
1/2 Adults Get News Mobile
Nearly half of all American adults (47%) say they get at least some local news and information on their cell phone or tablet computer, according to a new study. But mobile applications are not yet playing a major part in that consumption -- only one in 10 use apps for local news and only 1% pay for those apps.
When it comes to the type of local content people are looking for, it's typically practical and real-time: 42% of mobile users get weather updates and 37% get material about restaurants or other local businesses on their phones or tablets. Fewer get news about local traffic and transportation, general news alerts or other local topics.
This research is part of a larger study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Read more here
When it comes to the type of local content people are looking for, it's typically practical and real-time: 42% of mobile users get weather updates and 37% get material about restaurants or other local businesses on their phones or tablets. Fewer get news about local traffic and transportation, general news alerts or other local topics.
This research is part of a larger study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Read more here
WSJ: 200K Tablet Subscribers
The country's leading business news publication has now sold 200,000 digital subscriptions to readers who own tablet-style devices, including the Apple iPad and Amazon Kindle. The WSJ charges mobile subscribers $3.99 a week for the digital edition. On an annual basis, this equals about $41.5 million in extra circulation revenues. (Theoretically, that's more profitable than print circ revenue, since the publisher saves costs on ink, paper, and fuel and labor for delivery.
Read more at Media Post
Non-Traditional TV Viewing Surges
Nearly one-third of urban media consumers watch TV on non-traditional platforms -- well over the average for the U.S.Larchmont, NY-based media researcher Horowitz Associates says 31% of city consumers watch TV content on computer/laptops, mobile devices or tablets, or streamed from the Internet to the TV through so-called "over the top" devices, such as Apple TV, Xbox or blu-ray DVD players.
Looking specifically at individual multicultural urban consumers, the new study says 41% of Asians watch TV content on alternative platforms at least weekly; 37% for Latinos; and 36% for blacks. This is versus 25% for whites. Just observing one alternative device -- computers/laptops -- 35% of Asians report watching TV on them weekly, compared to 22% for Latinos; 17%, blacks; and 15% for whites. Weekly mobile TV viewing is highest among blacks and Latino consumers -- 14% -- compared to whites, at 7%, and Asians, at 5%.
Read more at Media Post
Looking specifically at individual multicultural urban consumers, the new study says 41% of Asians watch TV content on alternative platforms at least weekly; 37% for Latinos; and 36% for blacks. This is versus 25% for whites. Just observing one alternative device -- computers/laptops -- 35% of Asians report watching TV on them weekly, compared to 22% for Latinos; 17%, blacks; and 15% for whites. Weekly mobile TV viewing is highest among blacks and Latino consumers -- 14% -- compared to whites, at 7%, and Asians, at 5%.
Read more at Media Post
Gains for NPR Are Clouded
The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism will issue its annual State of the Media report on Monday, and you will be unsurprised to learn that journalism remains in broad retreat.
News is still on the march: for the first time ever, more people consumed their news on the Web than with newspapers. That’s great if you’re building an app, but not so great if you’re one of the legacy media companies struggling for relevance. In terms of audience, television networks slipped 3.4 percent, newspapers were down 5 percent, radio fell 6 percent and magazines were down almost 9 percent.
Amid all that creative destruction, there was a one large traditional news organization that added audience, reporters and revenue. That unlikely juggernaut was NPR. According to the State of the Media report, NPR’s overall audience grew 3 percent in 2010, to 27.2 million weekly listeners, up 58 percent overall since 2000. In the last year, its Web site, npr.org, drew an average of 15.7 million unique monthly visitors, up more than five million visitors.
Read more at the New York Times
News is still on the march: for the first time ever, more people consumed their news on the Web than with newspapers. That’s great if you’re building an app, but not so great if you’re one of the legacy media companies struggling for relevance. In terms of audience, television networks slipped 3.4 percent, newspapers were down 5 percent, radio fell 6 percent and magazines were down almost 9 percent.
Amid all that creative destruction, there was a one large traditional news organization that added audience, reporters and revenue. That unlikely juggernaut was NPR. According to the State of the Media report, NPR’s overall audience grew 3 percent in 2010, to 27.2 million weekly listeners, up 58 percent overall since 2000. In the last year, its Web site, npr.org, drew an average of 15.7 million unique monthly visitors, up more than five million visitors.
Read more at the New York Times
Monday, March 7
Will 'TiVos for Reading' Save Old Media?
Circulation numbers for print publications are generally down, and the monthly audiences at websites such as the gossip blog Gawker are broadly up. But don't write the obituary for long-attention-span journalism quite yet. Go to instapaper.com and download the plug-in for your Web browser. Then install the accompanying Instapaper application to your iPhone, iPad, Kindle, or (soon) Android device. The next time the boss steps away and your midafternoon Web excavation unearths a well researched, brilliantly written article—such as the feature stories in this magazine, if we may be so bold—click "read later" in the browser toolbar. The service acts like a TiVo (TIVO) for words. It will save the story to your e-reader or your tablet so it can be read later. Marco Arment charges $5 for a premium version of the app that lets users store up to 250 articles and share them with other users.
Instapaper, which has more than a million users and is growing rapidly, has competition. The biggest is Read It Later, with more than 3 million users. Longreads, a site that shares recommendations for in-depth articles, has a lively Twitter feed with more than 15,000 followers.
Nate Weiner, the 26-year-old Web designer in San Francisco who created Read It Later, thinks these services hold promise for old-school journalism. Most of his users read saved stories between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. If they're on mobile devices, reading time spikes during the commuting hours and again from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.
There may be one snag for traditional publishers. Services such as Instapaper and Read It Later let users view their saved stories in an uncluttered format stripped of the ads and other marginalia of the Web browser. That could cost media companies some advertising revenue.
Read more at Business Week
Instapaper, which has more than a million users and is growing rapidly, has competition. The biggest is Read It Later, with more than 3 million users. Longreads, a site that shares recommendations for in-depth articles, has a lively Twitter feed with more than 15,000 followers.
Nate Weiner, the 26-year-old Web designer in San Francisco who created Read It Later, thinks these services hold promise for old-school journalism. Most of his users read saved stories between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. If they're on mobile devices, reading time spikes during the commuting hours and again from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.
There may be one snag for traditional publishers. Services such as Instapaper and Read It Later let users view their saved stories in an uncluttered format stripped of the ads and other marginalia of the Web browser. That could cost media companies some advertising revenue.
Read more at Business Week
Public media puts millions into investigative work
NPR, PBS and local public broadcast stations around the country are hiring more journalists and pumping millions of dollars into investigative news to make up for what they see as a lack of deep-digging coverage by their for-profit counterparts. Public radio and TV stations have seen the need for reporting that holds government and business accountable increase as newspapers and TV networks cut their staffs and cable television stations have filled their schedules with more opinion journalism.
In the past three years, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has invested more than $90 million in federal funds on new journalism initiatives. That includes a $10 million local journalism initiative that is paying for the creation of five regional centers that will help local PBS and NPR stations cover news that affects wider geographic areas. Also, a $6 million grant from the group expanded the PBS investigative series "Frontline" from a seasonal series with a summer break to a year-round program.
Meanwhile, NPR has started an investigative reporting unit supported by philanthropic funds – including $3.2 million donated in the last year.
Read more here.
In the past three years, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has invested more than $90 million in federal funds on new journalism initiatives. That includes a $10 million local journalism initiative that is paying for the creation of five regional centers that will help local PBS and NPR stations cover news that affects wider geographic areas. Also, a $6 million grant from the group expanded the PBS investigative series "Frontline" from a seasonal series with a summer break to a year-round program.
Meanwhile, NPR has started an investigative reporting unit supported by philanthropic funds – including $3.2 million donated in the last year.
Read more here.
What's the Difference Between Curation and Journalism?
They're both perfectly valid and useful activities but they perform different roles: curation compiles and collates; journalism adds a layer of narrative, context and analysis.
However, I don't want to get into a semantic debate about definitions, rather to argue that this discussion missed a bigger point: that journalism, be it social media, citizen or mainstream, is changing as a result of social media.
On Friday, 'mainstream' media made a bad mistake when it ran images of fighting in the Libyan town of Zawiyah - Reuters picked up the video from social media, which claimed/believed it was legitimate 'today' footage. Other news organisations then picked up the material and rebroadcast it until they discovered it was from fighting in exactly the same location but from the previous week.
Was that a failure of mainstream media or social media? It was certainly a failure of journalism - and that's the point: the differing strands of journalism and/or media are converging.
'Old media' journalists are being forced to engage with the rumour, gossip, facts and factoids being circulated in places like Twitter and Facebook; to look at them and work out whether they are 'true' or not before running with them.
Read more at the BBC
However, I don't want to get into a semantic debate about definitions, rather to argue that this discussion missed a bigger point: that journalism, be it social media, citizen or mainstream, is changing as a result of social media.
On Friday, 'mainstream' media made a bad mistake when it ran images of fighting in the Libyan town of Zawiyah - Reuters picked up the video from social media, which claimed/believed it was legitimate 'today' footage. Other news organisations then picked up the material and rebroadcast it until they discovered it was from fighting in exactly the same location but from the previous week.
Was that a failure of mainstream media or social media? It was certainly a failure of journalism - and that's the point: the differing strands of journalism and/or media are converging.
'Old media' journalists are being forced to engage with the rumour, gossip, facts and factoids being circulated in places like Twitter and Facebook; to look at them and work out whether they are 'true' or not before running with them.
Read more at the BBC
Using Phones, but Not to Talk or Surf
The average smartphone owner spends 667 minutes a month using apps. That is more time spent with apps than spent talking on a smartphone or using it to browse the Web.
Read more at the New York Times
Read more at the New York Times
Tuesday, March 1
Display Ad Revs
Companies will spend more than one in five U.S. ad dollars this year to purchase display ads in Facebook, displacing Yahoo for the first time as the No. 1 revenue generating site. David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst, estimates display ad revenue for the social network will rise 80.9% to $2.19 billion this year. Although Bing is gaining revenue, Google's share is still rising as the combined revenue at Microsoft and Yahoo continue to fall," he says.
Read more here
Read more here
Game on, here, there and everywhere
The popularity of games on Facebook and other social-networking sites coupled with the proliferation of games on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices is powering a mini-explosion in the video game industry.
More people are playing video games on more platforms than ever, even as hardware sales of traditional game consoles such as the Nintendo Wii — not to mention the games for many of those systems — have declined from $21.4 billion in 2008 to $18.7 billion in 2010.
"The business model is changing," says Ray Muzyka, co-founder of game developer BioWare.
Video games are played by as many as two-thirds of Americans, says The NPD group, a market researcher. As many as half of U.S. homes have a console video game system. Meanwhile, one in five Americans age 6 and up have played games on social networks such as Facebook, according to NPD. Then there are the 21 million-plus Americans who research firm ComScore says play video games on smartphones.
Read more at USA Today
More people are playing video games on more platforms than ever, even as hardware sales of traditional game consoles such as the Nintendo Wii — not to mention the games for many of those systems — have declined from $21.4 billion in 2008 to $18.7 billion in 2010.
"The business model is changing," says Ray Muzyka, co-founder of game developer BioWare.
Video games are played by as many as two-thirds of Americans, says The NPD group, a market researcher. As many as half of U.S. homes have a console video game system. Meanwhile, one in five Americans age 6 and up have played games on social networks such as Facebook, according to NPD. Then there are the 21 million-plus Americans who research firm ComScore says play video games on smartphones.
Read more at USA Today
Monday, February 28
How to Get Started with Usenet
Usenet is a wonderful service for finding and downloading digital media, giving you speed and reliability you won't find with other file-sharing options.
Usenet was originally designed as a bulletin-board service, and so there's a ton of text content available on Usenet, but once binary newsgroups made their way into Usenet, it quickly became a popular place to find any sort of files that interest you. A site called Newzbin started indexing the binaries available on Usenet and creating the NZB file format. When you download an NZB, you're simply downloading a file that points to files available on Usenet. Applications supporting the NZB format can use them to make downloading Usenet binaries a piece of cake.
There are two controversial issues attached to writing about Usenet: 1) the first rule of Usenet is that you don't talk about Usenet, and 2) it's commonly used to download copyrighted material.
Unlike most file-sharing services nowadays, Usenet is not peer-to-peer. While in rare cases you might get some poor level of access through your Internet service provider, you're going to want to pay for Usenet access that will actually prove useful. Currently I use Newshosting, several more (and potentially better) choices exist, such as GigaNews and Astraweb.
Read more here
Usenet was originally designed as a bulletin-board service, and so there's a ton of text content available on Usenet, but once binary newsgroups made their way into Usenet, it quickly became a popular place to find any sort of files that interest you. A site called Newzbin started indexing the binaries available on Usenet and creating the NZB file format. When you download an NZB, you're simply downloading a file that points to files available on Usenet. Applications supporting the NZB format can use them to make downloading Usenet binaries a piece of cake.
There are two controversial issues attached to writing about Usenet: 1) the first rule of Usenet is that you don't talk about Usenet, and 2) it's commonly used to download copyrighted material.
Unlike most file-sharing services nowadays, Usenet is not peer-to-peer. While in rare cases you might get some poor level of access through your Internet service provider, you're going to want to pay for Usenet access that will actually prove useful. Currently I use Newshosting, several more (and potentially better) choices exist, such as GigaNews and Astraweb.
Read more here
Double-Digit Growth Ahead For Online Retail
Research firm Forrester estimates that both US and European online retail (representing 17 Western European nations) will grow at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate from 2010 to 2015, reaching $279 billion and €134 billion, respectively, in 2015.
Read more here
Read more here
Sunday, February 27
DAR.fm
Michael Robertson is a longtime provocateur of the music business. A decade ago, the music labels successfully sued his landmark startup, Mp3.com, over a feature that gave users a digital copy of any song they could prove they owned on CD. In 2007, Robertson walked into another nest of litigation with Mp3Tunes.com, which allows consumers to upload their songs into cloud-based digital music lockers and then stream their tracks to any smartphone or computer.
Now the San Diego entrepreneur is lobbing another sonic grenade. Robertson is taking the wraps off his newest startup, DAR.fm—short for digital audio recorder—that he planned to launch on Feb. 23. It'll be a centralized Web-based TiVo (TIVO) for radio. Users can go to DAR.fm to search through the programming schedules of about 600 music and talk-radio stations around the country and schedule the site to record up to four hours of any broadcast. The recordings, complete with ads and DJ chatter that users can fast-forward through, are then deposited into a user's password-protected account that can be accessed from any PC, smartphone, or Internet-connected radio. "Radio is dying because it's inconvenient and limiting," says Robertson. "The content is not interactive, and it's available on only a limited number of devices."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_10/b4218035568306.htm
Now the San Diego entrepreneur is lobbing another sonic grenade. Robertson is taking the wraps off his newest startup, DAR.fm—short for digital audio recorder—that he planned to launch on Feb. 23. It'll be a centralized Web-based TiVo (TIVO) for radio. Users can go to DAR.fm to search through the programming schedules of about 600 music and talk-radio stations around the country and schedule the site to record up to four hours of any broadcast. The recordings, complete with ads and DJ chatter that users can fast-forward through, are then deposited into a user's password-protected account that can be accessed from any PC, smartphone, or Internet-connected radio. "Radio is dying because it's inconvenient and limiting," says Robertson. "The content is not interactive, and it's available on only a limited number of devices."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_10/b4218035568306.htm
The Leaky Corporation
The WikiLeaks threat and the persistent leaking of other supposedly confidential corporate information have brought an important issue to the fore. Companies are creating an ever-growing pile of digital information, from product designs to employees’ e-mails. Keeping tabs on it all is increasingly hard, not only because there is so much of it but also because of the ease of storing and sending it. Much of this information would do little damage if it seeped into the outside world; some of it, indeed, might well do some good. But some could also be valuable to competitors—or simply embarrassing—and needs to be protected. Companies therefore have to decide what they should try to keep to themselves and how best to secure it.
Firms are increasingly investing in “systems of engagement”.
“Technology can’t solve the problem, just lower the probability of accidents,” explains John Stewart, the chief security officer of Cisco, a maker of networking equipment.
Read more at The Economist
Firms are increasingly investing in “systems of engagement”.
“Technology can’t solve the problem, just lower the probability of accidents,” explains John Stewart, the chief security officer of Cisco, a maker of networking equipment.
Read more at The Economist
Wednesday, February 23
The Weatherman
Technology and the recession are threatening the cultural hegemony—and job security—of the TV weathercaster
The economy and the Internet are conspiring to diminish the position. The National Weather Assn., an organization of professional meteorologists, has seen a downturn in membership renewals over the past few years, from approximately 3,000 in 2006 to about 2,700 in 2010, according to NWA Executive Director Stephen W. Harned. Says Harned: "Anywhere from a third to half of people who graduate with degrees in meteorology this year won't be able to find a job."
The average annual salary of a weatherman, according to the Radio Television Digital News Assn., is $62,300. And they don't come to work with their own interactive maps. "We grew revenue by 56 percent last year," says Paul Douglas, co-founded WeatherNation, which he describes as an "outsourcing weather company" expects to turn a profit in 2011 and expand his staff of eight full-time anchors. Douglas is positioning his business to cash in on what he sees as the future of the industry: personalized weather. Soon, he claims, people will want weather information "tailored for our GPS locations, lifestyles, calendars, anticipating our needs in advance"—all without ever turning on the TV.
Read more at Business Week
The economy and the Internet are conspiring to diminish the position. The National Weather Assn., an organization of professional meteorologists, has seen a downturn in membership renewals over the past few years, from approximately 3,000 in 2006 to about 2,700 in 2010, according to NWA Executive Director Stephen W. Harned. Says Harned: "Anywhere from a third to half of people who graduate with degrees in meteorology this year won't be able to find a job."
The average annual salary of a weatherman, according to the Radio Television Digital News Assn., is $62,300. And they don't come to work with their own interactive maps. "We grew revenue by 56 percent last year," says Paul Douglas, co-founded WeatherNation, which he describes as an "outsourcing weather company" expects to turn a profit in 2011 and expand his staff of eight full-time anchors. Douglas is positioning his business to cash in on what he sees as the future of the industry: personalized weather. Soon, he claims, people will want weather information "tailored for our GPS locations, lifestyles, calendars, anticipating our needs in advance"—all without ever turning on the TV.
Read more at Business Week
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