New Associated Press guidelines: Keep it brief

The world’s largest independent news organization, the Associated Press, for one, has told its journalists to cut the fat — and keep their stories between 300 and 500 words, a length in which this story (301 words) would easily fit.

Read more at the Washington Post

A prize for his work on the economics of news and opinion

Newspapers’ woes are not due entirely to readers’ defection to free alternatives online. Time spent reading newspapers did indeed fall by half between 1980 and 2012, but most of the drop came before 2000, while the web was in its infancy. From 2008 to 2012, as time spent on the web as a whole soared, time spent reading newspapers fell much more slowly.

Read more at The Economist

Media firms are making big bets on online video, still an untested medium

Some firms are making online videos simply because the advertising rates they can get are so good... Engaging, original shows can also help websites persuade visitors to stick around longer, so they can be shown other ads. Some firms are not motivated by ad revenues: Microsoft is making videos to distribute through its Xbox, to help sell the games console. Netflix, which made “House of Cards”, a political drama, is simply after subscribers and has no ads.

However, spending on TV spots is continuing to rise, despite the growth of internet-based advertising. Many media groups have sold packages of advertising space, combining spots on TV and on the internet. Television still attracts a broader audience than online video, and advertisers feel they understand it better. It is print that is losing ad spending to online video, says David Hallerman of eMarketer.

Many people are watching on small mobile-phone and tablet screens, on which some types of advertisement do not come across so well. Audience measurement for internet videos is not as widely agreed on as it is in TV. Hits remain elusive too.

Read more in The Economist

How Diverse Are Your Social Networks?

Now we know the most racially diverse social network in the U.S.: congratulations, Instagram. The data was revealed in a Wall Street Journal story about Twitter touting its diversity to lure advertisers. Twitter has gone so far as to hire a "multicultural strategist" in November to lead "its effort to target black, Hispanic and Asian-American users."

Read more at Mashable

The dawn of the Chrome Age

Derided as a long shot when it launched in 2008, the Chrome browser boasts a speed and simplicity that have attracted hundreds of millions: Today it has nearly twice as many users as Microsoft's once seemingly unbeatable Internet Explorer (IE), whose market share has shriveled from about 68% to 25%, according to StatCounter... Google has pushed its web-centric vision further with the Chrome operating system.

Now Google is extending Chrome technology into new areas, including mobile devices, television, and the Internet of things. After releasing a Chrome browser for iPhones and Android devices, Google introduced Chromecast, a gizmo that resembles a thumb drive (it's called a "dongle"), which attaches to a television set and allows it to play, or "cast," anything that's happening on your desktop or mobile browser. With millions sold, the $35 device has given Google a firm toehold in the living room, where it is battling other providers of streaming-media devices like Apple, Amazon (which just announced its Fire TV player), and Roku.

Read more at Fortune

Crowd-funding is improving journalism in China

Even though state-run media (in China) are not as bland as they once were, principled journalists still struggle to find a home for their work. Since the arrival of the internet the government has engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with emerging media, allowing some new platforms to flourish yet standing ready to pounce on those that become too popular... For journalists aiming for integrity, the intersection of technology and the market presents new ways to survive.

Read more at the Economist

Buying social bot friends

Retweets. Likes. Favorites. Comments. Upvotes. Page views. You name it; they’re for sale.. These imaginary citizens of the Internet have surprising power, making celebrities, wannabe celebrities and companies seem more popular than they really are, swaying public opinion about culture and products and, in some instances, influencing political agendas.

Read more at the New York Times

US newspaper industry revenue fell 2.6 pct in 2013

U.S. newspaper industry revenue fell last year, as increases in circulation revenue weren’t high enough to make up for shrinking demand for print advertising, an industry trade group said Friday.

Read more from the Associated Press here

Scalia criticizes historic Supreme Court ruling on freedom of the press

This spring marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in New York Times vs. Sullivan, its most important pronouncement on the freedom of the press, but the ruling has not won the acceptance of Justice Antonin Scalia.

“It was wrong,” he said Thursday evening at the National Press Club in a joint appearance with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “I think the Framers would have been appalled. … It was revising the Constitution.”

Read more in the LA Times

Local News, Off College Presses

Journalism schools and student-run newspapers across the country are operating a variety of programs that are not just teaching students to be journalists, but embedding them in the media industry and allowing them to produce content.

Read more in the New York Times

Are Touchscreens Melting Your Kid’s Brain?

The American Academy of Pediatrics is unequivocal: If your kid is under 2, no screens. For older kids, two hours a day, max. But the AAP doesn’t differentiate between activities; education apps, base-jumping videos, first-person shooters, ebooks, Sesame Street, and The Shining are all thrown into the same bucket. It’s all just screen time.

Trouble is, they’re not all the same.

Read the article at Wired

Drones often make news. They have started gathering it, too

In the past few months drones shot the most revealing footage of the protests that toppled Viktor Yanukovych, its corrupt president. They have also offered a bird’s-eye view of civil conflict in Thailand, Venezuela and elsewhere. They let journalists capture scenes that previously would have put their lives in danger, and made it harder for governments to lie.

Drones are helping journalists overcome logistical hurdles, too. They have recently been used to cover fires raging in the Australian bush, and floods in southern England. “[Drones] give you a unique, airborne perspective that you can’t get any other way,” says Thomas Hannen of the BBC’s Global Video Unit. Their relative cheapness (basic models cost a few hundred dollars; fancier ones a few thousand) means that shots that once required a helicopter or a complicated set-up of gantries and wires are now achievable on a tight budget. And their usefulness will only grow as cameras get better and batteries last longer.

Read more at the Economist

The Front Page 2.0

There will always be a demand for high-quality news—enough demand to support two or three national newspapers, on papyrus scrolls if necessary. And the truth is that if only two or three newspapers survive, in national or global competition, that will still be more competition than we have now, with our collection of one-paper-town monopolies. A second truth is that most newspapers aren’t very good and wouldn’t be missed by anybody who could get The New York Times or USA Today and some bloggy source of local news.

Read more of Michael Kinsley's piece in Vanity Fair.

Profanity in Newspapers

CAN a newspaper cuss? Jesse Sheidlower has written in the New York Times calling for an end to that newspaper’s total refusal to print swear words.

Read more at The Economist

Why local TV runs the same news stories

In terms of dollar value, more than 75 percent of the nearly 300 full-power local TV stations purchased last year were acquired by just three media giants. The largest, Sinclair Broadcasting, will reach almost 40 percent of the population if its latest purchases are approved by federal regulators. Media conglomerates such as Sinclair have bought up multiple news stations in the same regions—in nearly half of America's 210 television markets, one company owns or manages at least two local stations, and a lot of these stations now run very similar or even completely identical newscasts, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.

REad more here

Can streaming slow the music industry’s long decline?

A report on March 18th by IFPI, a record-industry group (finds) music labels’ worldwide revenues fell by 4% last year to $15 billion, a reversal of 2012’s slight rise. But much of the fall was due to Japanese consumers finally giving up on CDs, as much as the rest of the world had already done. A closer look shows that streaming services are starting to bring the business back into profit in countries that have suffered steady declines, such as Italy.

Streaming now has around 28m paying subscribers, and several times as many who use free versions. Last year subscription-based versions like Spotify had combined revenues of more than $1 billion, up more than 50% from 2012. That figure does not include online-radio firms, which last year had revenues of $590m in America alone, a rise of 28% from the year before. In America, the largest music market, 21% of the industry’s 2013 revenues came from streaming, whose growth more than offset declines in CD sales.

Even so, only 4-5% of music consumers in America and Britain have so far signed up for subscription streaming, says Mark Mulligan of MIDiA Consulting.

Read more at the Economist

Companies Turn to Social-Media Coaches Consultants to Avoid Online Flubs

The need for social-media crisis management has spawned a cottage industry that has firms like HootSuite Media Inc., SocialOomph.com, and Weber Shandwick offering monitoring software and services to deal effectively with online critics, react to events of interest to their markets and provide a positive glow to their brands.

Read more (or watch video) at the Wall Street Journal

These are the world's finest (fake) news sources

Wherever there's news, there's fake news. That's why it shouldn't surprise you to hear that The Onion — and your very own GlobalPost — are far from the only websites turning international crises into LOLs. There are dozens of satire sites out there, rewriting current affairs, making the cynical snigger and duping the global gullible.

Read more here

Pew: Online news organizations have created 5,000 jobs

The center's annual State of the News Media report, released on Wednesday, includes a first-of-its-kind tally of jobs at 30 big websites, like Buzzfeed and The Huffington Post, and 438 smaller startups.

Read more from Money Magazine

Professor: 90% of News Stories to be Written by Computers by 2030

Professor of Computer Science Dr. Kristian Hammond predicts that by 2030, 90 per cent of all news stories will be written not by human reporters but by computer algorithms. Hammond, co-founded of Narrative Science, helped develop a program with reporter and programmer Ken Schwencke that relies on a fusion of statistics and journalistic clichés to write simple news stories.

This is how the L.A. Times was able to publish an article about last week’s earthquake just 3 minutes after it happened, because the whole story was artificially generated by Schwencke’s computer algorithm.

Read more here