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