For Film Graduates, an Altered Job Picture

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

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

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

Read more at the New York Times

Gannett Shutters Hyper-Local NJ Sites

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

User-generated content rarely exceeded 10%.

Read more here

Twitter For Newsrooms!? Twitter *Is* A Newsroom

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

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

Read more at Tech Crunch

Cassettes Return for an Encore

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

Read more at Wired

Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics

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

Read more at Wired

High Court Strikes Down California Videogame Law

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

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Confidence in Newspapers, TV News Rises

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

Read more here

The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace

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

Read more at Business Week

Google Becomes First to 1 Billion Users a Month

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

Read more here

SCOTUS Considers Ban on Violent Video Games

M-Commerce To Reach $6 Billion In 2011

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

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

Read more at Media Post

Small Local News Traffic

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

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

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

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

Read more here

BBC developing new iPhone app for field reporters

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

Read more here

Media Industry Revenue Up in 2010

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

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

Read more from Bloomberg

The recorded-music business learns to love its enemy

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

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

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

Read more at The Economist

What Multitasking Consumers Mean for Marketers

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

Read more here

LinkedIn Most Valuable

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

Read more here

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

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

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

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

Read more here

Texting Cools Off

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

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

Read more at the WSJ

Internet Forecasting

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

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

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

Read more at The Economist

Report: Major Shortage in Local Reporting

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

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

Read more here

Paywalls are Still a Bad Idea

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

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

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

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

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

Read more here

Analyzing the metered model

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

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

Read more here

Game consoles under attack

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

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

Read more at USA Today.

Kickstarter

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

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

Read more at Business Week.

5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet

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

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

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

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

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

Read more at Wired

Money? There's an app for that

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

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

Read more at The Economist

The data revolution

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

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

Read more at The Economist

Small Papers Lead the Way on Paywalls

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

Read more at AdWeek.

New Business Model in Vogue at Condé Nast

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

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Content-Focused iPad Apps Value Form Over Function

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

Read more here.

DePaul stocks video games for research

DePaul University is one of a growing number of university libraries housing video game collections for student research into game design, the school said. Other universities with collections include Illinois, Stanford and Michigan.

Read more here.

Amazon's Kindle E-Books Outselling Paper Books

Amazon (says) its customers are now purchasing more Kindle books than print books.

Read more at PC Mag

Google Abandons Master-plan to Archive the World's Newspapers

Google told partners in its News Archive project that it would cease accepting, scanning, and indexing microfilm and other archival material from newspapers, and was instead focusing its energies on "newer projects that help the industry, such as Google One Pass, a platform that enables publishers to sell content and subscriptions directly from their own sites."

The five-year-old News Archive project was Google's attempt to do for old newspapers what Google Books has been attempting to do for the world's libraries.

Read more here.

Flacks vastly outnumber hacks these days

Reporters were shocked, shocked to hear that a big PR agency, had tried to persuade newspaper writers and a blogger to scribble nasty things about Google’s record on privacy, while concealing that its growing rival, Facebook, was paying for this lobbying.

The incident shows how the upheaval in the news business is working for, and against, the PR firms. Newspapers and other old media are losing influence—and thus becoming less worth lobbying. But job cuts and online obligations mean journalists are also more desperate for copy, making them a softer touch. Research by Jamil Jonna of the University of Oregon (originally for a book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism”, but since updated) found that as newsrooms have been slimmed and PR agencies have grown fatter, for each American journalist there are now, on average, six flacks hassling him to run crummy stories

Read more at The Economist.

The Rise of Infographics

Brands are also making serious investments in infographics and data visualization as a part of their marketing and communications strategy. At the nexus of journalism, analysis and design, infographics are undoubtedly relevant.

Shane Snow, Visual.ly: "Visualization is a great storytelling medium and is also strong in driving digital traffic. The wonderful thing is that there are a million ways to tell a story with visualizations."



Read more here

'Real world' apps get new meaning

That virtual yellow first-down line superimposed on an actual football field is one of the more visible examples of a technology that is still not well known. But augmented reality is quickly emerging from obscurity and could soon dramatically reshape how we shop, learn, play and discover what is around us.

In simple terms, augmented reality is a visual layer of information — tied to your location — that appears on top of whatever reality you're seeing.

Imagine:

•Pointing your phone at a famous landmark and almost instantly receiving relevant historic or current information about your surroundings.

•Fixing a paper jam in a copy machine by pointing a device at the copier and, directed by the virtual arrows that appear, pressing in sequence the right buttons and levers.

•Visualizing what you'll look like in a wedding dress without trying it on.

Read more at USA Today

How Drudge Has Stayed on Top

The Drudge Report is now more powerful in driving news than the half-billion folks on Facebook. With no video, no search optimization, no slide shows, and a design that is right out of mid-’90s manual on HTML, The Drudge Report provides 7 percent of the inbound referrals to the top news sites in the country. With stable traffic of about 12 million to 14 million unique visitors every month no matter what kind of news is breaking and in the last 14 years, there have been no big redesigns, no big rollout of new features and no staffing up to provide original content. The initial site, designed to load quickly in the age of dial-up modems, remains relatively untouched.

“The genius of Drudge is the simplicity of the layout,” said Matt Labash, a writer for The Weekly Standard. “Everyone else who tries to knock him off complicates that. There’s no tabs. There’s no jumps. There’s hardly any clutter.."Andrew Breitbart, the founder of several conservative Web sites said “He does not rig search optimization, he does not care about the next big Web innovation, he just has the best nose for news there is."

Read more at the New York Times

TiVo's Slo-Mo Trip Toward Profitability

Despite its strong brand recognition, TiVo has struggled to turn a profit. The deficit was nothing new: In 10 of the past 11 years, the Alviso (Calif.)-based company has racked up losses. TiVo's customer base has dwindled, from a high of 4.4 million users in 2007 to just over 2 million in January 2011. Part of the problem is that while lots of people say they TiVo their favorite TV shows, in reality, many use the cheaper digital video recorders (DVR) provided by their cable or satellite operator. "

Read more at Business Week

TV: Is it still ‘a vast wasteland’?

Fifty years ago this week, Newton Minow delivered one of the “most electrifying speeches ever given by a bureaucrat,” said Aaron Barnhart in The Kansas City Star. The newly named head of the Federal Communications Commission boldly told a convention of the National Association of Broadcasters that the television shows they’d produced were “vast wasteland”. The medium has certainly evolved since 1961, but is it any better?

Yes, it is, said Newton Minow in the Chicago Tribune. There’s still plenty of junk on TV, but the medium is now “far vaster than we could have imagined in 1961,” and much of what’s now available has “far exceeded my most ambitious dreams.”

Read more at The Week

Mad Men are watching you

Real-time bidding allows marketers to buy known audiences. The winner serves the advertisement, often customising it—so you may see more ads for convertible cars on a sunny day. The whole process generally takes some 150 milliseconds, or less than half the blink of an eye.

Real-time bidding makes it easy to aim ads at susceptible eyeballs. Firms such as John Lewis (a British department store), Zappos (an online shoe-seller) and Lenovo (a computer-maker) know that you have visited their websites because they dropped digital markers onto your computer. They then outbid others to reach you again. This is called “retargeting”.

Read more at The Economist

5 Major Life Lessons Journalism Taught Me

1. Prepare for a first date like you prepare for a big interview.

Dress nicely, but not nicer than they usually do. Begin by asking a question you know they’d love to answer, whether it’s important to you or not. Don’t be first to fill an awkward silence. Do your research in advance, but never let it show. Put your cell phone on vibrate and don’t look at it until you’re in the bathroom. If they insist on splitting the bill, insist on paying the tip – and let them see you do so generously. Always end with, “If I have any more questions, can I call you?”

Read the rest here.

What the Microsoft-Skype Deal Means

In a record acquisition for the company, Microsoft announced it’s buying Skype for $8.5 billion. Explains the release: Skype will support Microsoft devices like Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a wide array of Windows devices. There’s every reason to believe that Skype’s relationship with Facebook will expand.

For news organizations that increasingly use Skype for live interviews, the acquisition could be good news. Skype is still reeling a bit from its December outage, and Microsoft could beef up Skype’s dependability. For TV, that’s critical.

Read more here

Facebook now ‘critical’ to online news traffic, says Pew study

In the most recent sign that Facebook is encroaching on Google's heels, the 2011 study from Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that the social network is becoming an important traffic mover in the world of online news.

Google may still hold the top spot as the primary traffic driver to news websites, but according to a new study from Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, social networking giant Facebook is emerging as a “critical player” in the Internet mechanisms that push readers to news stories.

“Google and Facebook are increasingly set up as competitors (for) sorting through the material on the Web,” said Pew in the report. “If searching for news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing news may be among the most important of the next.”

While this may sound impressive, Facebook currently remains well behind the top three traffic drivers, which include Google, the Drudge Report and Yahoo. Despite positive numbers from Facebook’s corner, the study shows that Twitter is a terrible traffic driver: “Twitter appears at this point to play a relatively small role in sharing of links to news sources,

Read more here

For Journalists, a Call to Rethink Their Online Models

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY has surveyed the state of digital journalism, and it has concluded that journalists must rethink their relationships — and their audiences’ relationships — with advertisers. That does not mean yielding editorial control to sponsors, but it might mean coming up with alternatives to impression-based pricing, creating higher-value content for the Web by tapping into page view data, and helping to ensure that Web ads have value on their own.

Read more at the New York Times

Random acts of Journalism

There are countless people out there who use social media as part of their daily lives, and every so often some of them find themselves in the right place at the right time - or the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on the situation. Given that they're already using social media to document their lives and the world around them, it's natural for them to capture a news event they're witnessing firsthand.

People find themselves caught in the middle of a newsworthy situation, and they try to capture it. While they're conducting random acts of journalism, we should try to guide them, as best we can, to be the best journalists they can be. Even if it's fleeting.

Read more here

Online Reps in the Dirt

Forrester, a research outfit, reckons that the global market for cloud services could grow from $41 billion last year to $241 billion by 2020. One reason for this is that the savings that can be won by shifting computing to the cloud remain compelling; another is that Amazon-style snafus have been rare.

Read more at The Economist

Break-ins and Breakdowns

Sony admitted this week that hackers had stolen personal information, possibly including credit-card details, of many of the 77m-plus users of its online-gaming and entertainment networks. Amazon, an American online retailer and provider of “cloud computing” services, has suffered a lengthy breakdown at one of the giant server farms whose storage and processing facilities it rents to other companies.

The two lapses, though unconnected and different in nature, have raised the question of whether customers can really trust the basic idea behind the cloud—that you can buy computing services from the internet, just like gas or water from a utility.

Read more at The Economist

Turning to Social Networks for News

Just as CNN once challenged newspapers and evening newscasts with a constant stream of images from the Persian Gulf war, Twitter and Facebook have become early warning systems for breaking news — albeit not always reliable ones.

Read more at the New York Times

Newspaper Circs Slip

Daily circulation at most American newspapers declined again between the six-month period ending March 2010 and the six-month period ending March 2011, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. A MediaPost analysis of 80 of the largest newspapers in the U.S. showed total daily circulation declining 2.6% from 19 million in 2010 to 18.5 million in 2011.

The number of newspapers posting gains in total circulation -- even including digital editions and branded editions under new ABC rules -- remained small, and the overall picture remained one of decline. The new ABC figures seem unlikely to do much for print ad revenues, which have declined precipitously over the last couple of years. According to the Newspaper Association of America, total print ad revenues have fallen 52% from $47.8 billion in 2005 to $22.8 billion in 2010.

Read more here

Billboard Boom

MagnaGlobal, a media researcher, predicts that worldwide spending on out-of-home advertising will expand by 8.3% in 2011 to about $26.4 billion, faster growth than that seen for other non-internet forms of advertising (see chart). Spending on digital billboards and posters is expected to double in the next five years, to $5.2 billion.

Then there is “gladvertising” and “sadvertising”, a rather sinister-sounding idea in which billboards with embedded cameras, linked to face-tracking software, detect the mood of each consumer who passes by, and change the advertising on display to suit it.

Read more at The Economist

Trouble @Twitter

Just two years ago Twitter was the hottest thing on the web. But in the past year U.S. traffic at Twitter.com, the site users visit to read and broadcast 140-character messages, has leveled off. Nearly half the people who have Twitter accounts are no longer active on the network, according to an ExactTarget report from January 2011.

Just how popular is Twitter? Tracking its growth is complicated in part because many people tweet via dashboards such as TweetDeck (making it hard for Twitter to aggregate the mass viewership that many advertisers covet). The company says it has more than 200 million registered accounts (Facebook has 600 million subscribers), but users are allowed multiple accounts. The company also trumpets that the service had 155 million tweets daily by the end of the first quarter, a jump of 41% over the prior quarter, but many tweets -- news headlines, for example -- are often churned out by computers, not humans visiting Twitter.com. One key measurement of Twitter's popularity, Twitter.com's traffic, indicates a disturbing trend: ComScore shows that growth of U.S. visitors to the site has leveled off more than a year after its massive spike upward in 2009.

Read more at Fortune Magazine.

Google's Video Chat Service

Google has launched its own video chat service for Android smartphones to compete with the Facetime application on the iPhone. And unlike the Apple software, the video chat update to Google Talk works over 3G as well as WiFi networks. It uses the front-mounted cameras on high-end Android handsets.

Read more here

Smartphone User Study

This video presents key findings from "The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Consumers," a study from Google and conducted by Ipsos OTX, an independent market research firm.

Just Add Audio

According to NPR’s internal usage data covering January 1 through mid-April, users who request audio — maybe a station stream, a national newscast, or NPR Music content — view twice as many pages as those who only read the apps’ content. Kinsey Wilson, NPR’s general manager of digital media (says) “We made a conscious decision to position our (written) news coverage prominently in our mobile applications because we wanted people to think of us as a comprehensive and up to the minute source of news, not simply a source of radio listening.”

Read more here.

Measuring and Improving Accuracy in Journalism

Professional journalism is supposed to be “factual,” “accurate,” or just plain true. Is it? The last big study of mainstream reporting accuracy found errors (defined below) in 59% of 4,800 stories across 14 metro newspapers. This level of inaccuracy — where about one in every two articles contains an error — has persisted for as long as news accuracy has been studied, over seven decades now.

Read more here (a post by Jonathan Stray ( interactive technology editor for the Associated Press)

Facebook Investors Look for Exits

A group of Facebook shareholders is seeking to offload $1 billion worth of shares on the secondary market, a sale that would value the company at more than $70 billion, according to five sources with direct knowledge of the situation. It would represent one of the largest transactions of Facebook shares to date and points to a growing wariness among early-stage investors and employees who fear Facebook's growth cannot keep pace with its market valuation.

Facebook, the world's No. 1 Internet social network, earned $355 million in net income in the first nine months of 2010 on revenue of $1.2 billion.

Read more here

Big Newspaper Chains Still Hurting

Newspapers are suffering continuing declines in the first quarter, scuttling any hopes that the medium might enjoy a comeback. While industry-wide figures aren't yet available, first quarter results from major publishers, including the New York Times Co., Gannett, and McClatchy, give little reason for optimism.

Read more at Media Daily News

Facial Recognition App

Google Debuts New Online Magazine

Google has quietly launched its own full-length online magazine, a quarterly publication whose aim is to create a “breathing space in a busy world.” The first edition of Think Quarterly, based out of the U.K., is a 68-page dive into the world of data and its impact on business.

Google says that Think Quarterly is designed as useful information for its business customers... "anyone who’s interested can visit the companion website at www.thinkquarterly.co.uk.”

Read more at Mashable

Facebook trying to 'friend' journalists

Facebook is hiring someone to build relationships with reporters and news organizations. The new hire also will help organize journalism-focused events, the first of which will take place this month at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, California. He will be responsible for advocating for the use of Facebook as a reporting and promotional tool. He will also maintain the recently launched Journalists on Facebook page.

Read more at CNN

RIP Flip Video Camera

The popular Flip video camera is no more, with Cisco announcing Tuesday it “will exit aspects of its consumer businesses,” which includes shutting down the Flip.

It looks like the Flip was simply an intermediary product. Much like the netbook, which has been largely usurped by lower-cost full laptops and tablets like the iPad, the Flip was simply a product that disrupted markets before moving aside for a true successor.

Read more here

Most Americans Opposed to Banning Any Books

A new Harris Poll shows that a majority of Americans think no books should be banned completely (56%) while fewer than one in five say there are books which should be banned (18%); a quarter are not at all sure (26%).

Read more here

Ad Spending to Rise

U.S. advertising spending is expected to increase 2.5% to $155.2 billion in 2011 as marketers in the financial, retail and automotive sectors open up their wallets following the recession. But it will take several years before spending reaches pre-recession levels, according to new forecasts from Publicis Groupe SA's ZenithOptimedia.

Global ad spending, meanwhile, is now forecast to increase 4.2% to $470.8 billion.

ZenithOptimedia said it expects the largest ad spending increases in the U.S. to flow to the Internet, which is expected to register a 13% rise; cable television, with an expected increase of 10%; and cinema, which is expected to register a 6% increase. Ad spending is projected to drop 8.5% in newspapers, 1% in consumer magazines and 4% for business publications, it said.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

iPhone for Radio Reports

As cell phones became smaller, and laptops more prevalent, radio reporters could finally produce studio-quality reports in the field, and email them to the newsroom. But that involved schlepping, booting, connecting, dubbing, and a lot of waiting. Now, with the Apple iPhone 4 and several apps, I can produce intricate audio and video reports, broadcast live, take and edit photos, write web content and distribute it through social media from a single device.

With the VC Audio Pro app from VeriCorder, I can quickly pull cuts, edit and assemble audio wraps, and adjust volumes on a three-track screen similar to the popular Adobe Audition used in many newsrooms. These days I also carry an iPad to take notes, while my iPhone is on a podium during a news conference. Before that, I liked the Apple Wireless Keyboard, which paired easily with the phone.

So is it worth it? A year in, iPhone-only reporting isn't perfect. While audio editing works great, with the phone's built-in microphone I'd estimate the sound quality of my field reports is 92% as good as when I use bulky broadcast equipment. Getting better audio for my video is a real challenge.

Read more at PBS

Digital Revolution in Africa

The arrival of three submarine cables to Africa in the past year has quadrupled data speeds and cut prices by 90%. Since mobile-phone coverage is far better than fixed-line availability, the result has been that the cellphone is swiftly becoming Africa’s computer of choice. By some counts there are already 84m mobiles in Africa with at least rudimentary internet connectivity. A $90 smartphone made by China’s Huawei and running Google’s Android operating system sold out in several African countries in less than a month.

For those who want to sell entertainment, however, the future is written on tablets. Here, Samsung has stolen an early lead with its Tab. Though it now costs around $500 in Africa, Erik Hersman, a tech expert in Nairobi, expects its price to fall by half in the coming year. Apple so far shows few signs of bringing the iPad within reach of most Africans. Wholesale buyers in Africa think the market will take off once tablets drop below $200.

Read more at The Economist

A World no Longer Dominated by the PC

Among the trends (PC makers) are grappling with is the growing popularity of tablet computers, smartphones and other devices that let consumers work and surf the web on the move. An even more important trend sweeping the industry is the growth of cloud computing. This lets companies store and process vast amounts of data in huge warehouses of servers run by third parties. The data can then be accessed over the internet whenever and wherever needed. The emergence of the cloud is also partly responsible for a third trend, “verticalisation”. This is the increasing tendency of makers of IT hardware, operating systems and applications to move into each other’s area of business, This has created a free-for-all, with software firms swallowing up hardware firms and vice versa.

The PC is not dead, but its importance henceforth is going to be significantly diminished.

Read more at the Economist

Terrestrial Radio

Arbitron (ARB) and Edison Research released their The Infinite Dial: 2011 study. The end report shows that in face of competition from satellite radio, social media and other new media, terrestrial radio lives on.

First, the good news. While the percentage of people 12 years of age and older who listen to local AM/FM radio dropped from 96 percent in 2001, to 93 percent in 2011, the medium still holds sway with large numbers of the people advertisers covet. For instance, 77 percent of the 12+ population that is employed either full-time or part-time (24 percent of the general 12 + population) listens to radio stations on a regular radio while at work. Another 21 percent listen to streams of local AM/FM stations on a computer in the workplace. While the median age of "heavy" radio users is 41, that's 7 years younger than the median age of "heavy" television users. Forty percent of terrestrial radio's listenership falls in the 25-54 year old sweet spot for advertisers.

On the downside, 53 percent of 12- to 34-year olds look to the Internet to find out about new music. Only 39 percent of people in that demographic go to radio first. Forty-two percent of individuals who are 35 years of age and older turn to radio first, while just 19 percent go to the Internet. It's no surprise that radio skews older. And, for most forms of talk programming, it likely tends even higher.

One of the "implications" the study authors list from the report, which I agree with but am not married to, is that Radio is relevant and resilient.

Read more here

Facebook steps up efforts to Work with Journalists

On its media page, Facebook publishes success stories of how media organizations are using its platform... And now, Facebook is rolling out a similar page, but targeted to journalists.

Today we’re launching a new “Journalists on Facebook” Page to serve as an ongoing resource for the growing number of reporters using Facebook to find sources, interact with readers, and advance stories. The Page will provide journalists with best practices for integrating the latest Facebook products with their work and connecting with the Facebook audience of more than 500 million people.

Osofsky says they’re also creating a “Facebook Journalism Meetup” program, hosting “hands-on workshops on how to use Facebook as a reporting tool.”

Unkind Unwind

The once lucrative home-entertainment market is ailing. A steep decline in DVD sales has more than cancelled out growth in high-definition Blu-ray discs and electronic downloads. In developed countries, particularly America (by far the biggest home-entertainment market), people have switched from buying to borrowing. Since 2007 the number of films rented in America has grown by 10% even as spending on home entertainment has steadily declined.

All the big studios apart from Disney (once again going its own way) will start offering electronic copies of films that conform to a single format later this year. Buy a film, either as a download or as a Blu-ray disc that comes with digital rights, and a token will be stored in your account. In theory, you should then be able to play the film on television through your existing set-top box, download it to your laptop and your smartphone, and perhaps burn an extra copy to a DVD. Buying a film should begin to seem more appealing than renting it or downloading it illegally.

Read more at The Economist

Video Nasty

People are rapidly discovering new ways of watching films at home that pose a grave threat to the most profitable part of the film business. In America, by far the biggest home-entertainment market, spending on videotapes and discs has dropped by 29% since 2004... The big reason is the rise of cheap, convenient rental outfits like Redbox, which runs kiosks, and Netflix, which streams some films and sends others through the post.

Like music, newspapers and books before it, the film business has been disrupted by innovative, fast-moving distributors whose products have caught on with the public. Tinseltown’s attempts so far to see off the threat have fallen flat, partly because the studios have failed to co-ordinate their efforts.

Led by Sony, a consortium of studios, technology firms and retailers are working on a new way of distributing digital copies of films. The idea is that consumers will be able to buy the rights to films stored “in the cloud” and stream them to any device.

Read more at The Economist

Building Trust and Credibility with an Online Audience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who You Calling a Data Hog?

Wireless data is a finite resource. Data moves from a tower to a cell phone over electromagnetic spectrum, which carriers buy at auction from the federal government. Each carrier has a limited amount of spectrum, yet that limited amount renews itself, moment after moment. Think of electricity: The power plant runs all the time, but on hot days everyone turns on an air conditioner, straining the plant's capacity. Utilities are experimenting with smart meters that encourage customers to move their power use off-peak.

Wireless carriers, responding to a similar challenge, have chosen not to treat data like a commodity. Rather, they've carved off 5 percent of their heaviest users and stigmatized them. This is a business choice, not a natural economic consequence. Imagine that a power company, to prevent blackouts, has informed its customers that its heaviest users will be penalized with unpredictable brownouts two months running. Why do wireless customers tolerate this from carriers?

Some people do use a lot of data. This month, Cisco Systems (CSCO) reported that the top 1 percent of wireless data customers account for 20 percent of traffic.

Read more at Business Week

Google Donates $2.7 Million

Google has awarded $2.7 million to the International Press Institute to foster innovation in journalism. The Institute will use the grant for its IPI News Innovation Contest, which will fund both non-profit and for-profit projects related to the development of digital news platforms, new business models for journalism and training in digital reporting throughout Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

At the time, Google awarded $2 million to the Knight Foundation in the U.S. and pledged to spend the remaining $3 million in international news efforts.

Read more at Mashable

Russia On Warpath Against Google

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's deputy blamed Google Inc in an interview published on Tuesday for stirring up trouble in the revolution that ousted Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak. Google executive, Wael Ghonim, became an unlikely hero of the uprising in Egypt which led to Mubarak's deposition.

In contrast to state television, Russia's Internet is remarkably free and the home to often scathing criticism of Putin, President Dmitry Medvedev and the entire Russian elite. Analysts say there are a group of hardliners close to Putin who would like to impose controls similar to China's.

Read more at Reuters

Interactive Game Doubles as an Educational Tool

Vanished, an online science-fiction interactive mystery event that starts April 4. Kids can sign up for the event, conducted by the Smithsonian and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at vanished.mit.edu. The mystery, which is unveiled during the course of the eight-week event, involves a fictitious environmental disaster. Each week, participants will get clues online that will allow them to come up with hypotheses about the cause that can be tested, debated and refined. Scientists will have videoconferences online, and participants can send them questions that will be answered in real time.

Read more at USA Today

TV Industry Taps Social Media

It’s as if people are gathered around the online water cooler — and the television executives are nervously hovering nearby, hoping viewers keep talking and, by extension, watching their shows. Debra Lee, the chief executive of BET, said “we can now tell when something’s a hit almost immediately — by seeing how many of the trending topics on Twitter belong to us.” It is clear that many people feel they have to watch some shows as they premiere in order to keep up with conversations online.

“We know people are multitasking while they’re watching TV,” said Albert Cheng, the executive vice president for digital media for the Disney/ABC Television Group, which oversees ABC. “The question is, how do we tap into that and create a whole different consumer experience?”

“The key discovery is that we’re not just driving digital growth, we’re driving analog growth,” said Lisa Hsia the executive vice president of Bravo’s digital media arm.

A recent study by Deloitte of 2,000 American consumers ages 14 to 75 found that 42 percent sometimes surfed the Web while watching TV, and 26 percent sometimes sent instant messages or texts.

Read more at the New York Times

A New Spot Market Makes Cloud Computing a Commodity

February 14th saw the launch of SpotCloud, the world’s first spot market for cloud computing. It works much like other spot markets. Firms with excess computing capacity, such as data centres, put it up for sale. Others, which have a short-term need for some number-crunching, can bid for it. Enomaly, the software firm behind SpotCloud, takes a cut of between 10% and 30%, depending on the size of the deal.

The service works with Google App Engine, another cloud-computing provider, which gives Enomaly access to a decentralised global system.

Read more at The Economist

Films Need Foreign Viewers

The true worth of a film is... decided by youngsters in countries such as Russia, China and Brazil. Hollywood has always been an international business, but it is becoming dramatically more so. In the past decade total box-office spending has risen by about one-third in North America while more than doubling elsewhere.

Three things are particularly important: a cinema boom in the emerging world, a concerted effort by the major studios to make films that might play well outside America and a global marketing push to make sure they do.

Growing fears of piracy have led studios to release films almost simultaneously in many countries; increasingly, the premiere takes place outside America. Big noisy spectacle travels best. As the market swings away from America, funny films are less likely to find financing or broad distribution anywhere.

Read more at the Economist.

Protest Tweets

Here is Google Maps/Twitter mashup that allows you to scan Middle East "protest tweets" from the Middle East, as they go live.

Are Female Reporters More Vulnerable?