Everything you need to know about the future of newspapers is in these two charts

The decline in print-advertising revenue — which has been in free-fall for years now — is not stopping, or even slowing down, any time soon. If anything, it is likely to accelerate.

Read more at Gigaom

The New York Times ponders the bold changes needed for the digital age

Every paper is rethinking its business strategy as readers keep abandoning print for digital, and in particular mobile, devices.

Other newspapers regard the Times as a farsighted digital pioneer. It now claims 760,000 digital subscribers, and in recent months it has completed a sleek online makeover and launched new mobile apps. So if the Times is anxious, they should be too. 

Read more at The Economist

Think Internet Data Mining Goes Too Far? Then You Won't Like This

These days, you can hop on the Internet and buy yourself a consumer-grade brain scanning device for just a few hundred dollars.

"By putting something on your head, you're actually providing an extra source of information," Bonaci says. The information leaking from your skull could be very revealing, she says. "The consequences of providing that signal without thinking about it are probably similar to the consequences of giving your DNA sample to some online database."

It sounds far-fetched, but.. the day may come when millions of people play online games while wearing BCIs. Whoever controls the game could play "20 Questions," measuring players' emotional responses to what they see.

"I could show political candidates and begin to understand your political orientation, and then sell that to pollsters."

Read more at NPR

Why we need infographics and how to make them great

Storytelling is extremely important with data visualization and infographics. If there’s no story, then who cares? It’s just raw data. The story is what will set you apart. If it’s memorable and entertaining, then people will remember it.

Read more at The Next Web

new ways to pay your bills

New services to make spending money easier are springing up all the time. They are not confined to the rich world: in Kenya roughly 60% of adults—about the same number as have a bank account—use a mobile-phone payment service called M-PESA (see chart 4) And increasingly they cater to business customers too: services that integrate electronic invoicing and payments into a firm’s procurement and accounting system, or that help manage and raise working capital, are becoming commonplace.

Not surprisingly, the titans of the internet have started to eye up the payments business. Google offers a virtual wallet; Amazon recently set up a service to allow its customers to transfer money; Facebook and Apple have expressed interest in the field. There is much speculation that the latest iPhone’s ability to read fingerprints may be heralding a world-changing payment service. Telecoms companies (such as Safaricom, the firm behind M-PESA) and bricks-and-mortar merchants (Starbucks) are also dabbling in the field.

In China McKinsey expects it to increase by 42% a year between 2012 and 2017. Brazil is already the world’s second-biggest market for card transactions after the United States, according to Capgemini, another consultancy.

Consultants like to speak of “purchasing journeys” in which settling the bill is only the final step. Other waystations include advertising, internet search, participation in loyalty schemes and so on. Innovators, the thinking goes, could afford to undercut market prices for payments in anticipation of greater rewards at some other stage in the journey.

Read more at the Economist

Google Changes Logo - very slightly

Without fanfare, Google has changed its logo for only the third time in a decade – by just two pixels... From the company which famously a/b tested which shade of blue to use in adverts – and made $200m in the process – you can be sure the decision wasn't made lightly.

Read more at The Guardian

What takes our time online

@wsj by way of Romenseko

New York Times Internal Report Painted Dire Digital Picture

The report also calls for a profound rethinking of the newsroom’s independence from the rest of the company, in order to involve editorial leaders more deeply in technological decisions.

“The very first step … should be a deliberate push to abandon our current metaphors of choice — ‘The Wall’ and ‘Church and State’ — which project an enduring need for division. Increased collaboration, done right, does not present any threat to our values of journalistic independence,” the report says.

Read more at Buzz Feed

The New York Times’ digital challenges, in 5 charts

Readership trends don’t favor the Times. Despite its dependence on print advertising, the paper is seeing its readers increasingly getting their news from the Internet. Half of all consumers went online for most of their news in 2013, while the percentage of those getting their news primarily from newspapers slid to under one-third. Despite that, the Times is stuck in a print-centric way of gathering and distributing the news.

Read more at Digiday

TED founder thinks big data needs a big makeover

The way Wurman sees it, that bulk collection of raw information has no value without a creative means of diagramming, mapping and comparing it all in a way that gives it meaning. "[You] have to have it in a form that you can understand. They're leaving that step out," he said. It's that approach to the organization of data that has directly informed the creation of Wurman's high-tech information-mapping project, Urban Observatory.

Read more at Engadget

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

Tracking Social Media Trends

BuzzSumo offers a dashboard showing hot social media topics from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. You get a few free searches each day or unlimited if you sign up for an account with an email address. A paid BuzzSumo Pro service is in the works.

Read more at Cnet.

New Pew study shows the value of direct web traffic

The study looked at three months of data from comScore and finds that readers that enter a news website directly spend about three times as long on that site as those that come via a search engine or though social media such as Facebook.

According to the report, visitors to a news website tend to enter that site the same way every time – in other words, if a visitor tends to find a site through search, this is the way they will regularly enter that site.

Read more here

Google and Viacom end YouTube lawsuit

Google and Viacom announced on Tuesday morning that they have resolved a long-running legal dispute over unauthorized TV show clips posted during the early days of YouTube.

The case, which began in 2007 when Viacom demanded $1 billion from Google, has been seen as a landmark test of copyright law’s so-called “safe harbor” rules, which can protect website owners from copyright infringement committed by their users.

Google has won a series of major victories in the case, including last April when a court threw out the case for a second time on the grounds that Google did not have “red flag” knowledge of the infringing shows. The judge had initially dismissed the case in 2010 but an appeals court partially reinstated it, leading to the second dismissal in April.

Read more at Gigaom

The problem with data journalism

The recent boom in “data-driven” journalism projects is exciting. It can elevate our knowledge, enliven statistics, and make us all more numerate. But I worry that data give commentary a false sense of authority since data analysis is inherently prone to bias. The author’s priors, what he believes or wants to be true before looking at the data, often taint results that might appear pure and scientific. Even data-backed journalism is opinion journalism. So as we embark on this new wave of journalism, we should be aware of what we are getting and what we should trust... Data analysis is more of an art than a science.

Read more at Quartz

Can you tell a human poet from a computer?

How good are you at telling the difference between words written by a human and words written by a computer? Maybe after taking the Bot or Not test, you'll understand how research publishers Springer and IEEE managed to miss gibberish papers.

Read more at CNET

5 lessons from Buzzfeed @ Harvard

BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith spoke to fellows, students, and a few curious onlookers at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center.. five takeaways from the discussion:

headlines sure look a lot like tweets these days... For optimal social growth, publishers must entice users to share their content..competition for the best (reporters) is getting tougher as both traditional and newly-monetized internet media compete for top talent.

LinkedIn opens its publishing platform to its members, raising lots of questions

LinkedIn (says it) is opening its "publishing platform" to all its 277 million members, beginning with a test group of 25,000. The move essentially means providing a juiced-up blogging tool to LinkedIn users, but with a twist. Adding the ability to post long-form professional information, he says, "helps to ensure someone can stand out and look better in their career." LinkedIn's "publishing platform" looks more and more like a media property.

Don't be surprised if LinkedIn's next moves include hiring real journalists to complement its amateur-writer contributors. Another natural extension of the LinkedIn "media" offering would be hosting live events around its Influencers.

Read more at Fortune

CNN’s transformation says a lot about what is working today in television

Last year median prime-time ratings for Fox News, CNN and MSNBC declined by between 6% and 24%. The picture is not much brighter for business-news networks, such as CNBC. There is a “ceiling” to how many people are getting their news from television today, says Amy Mitchell of the Pew Research Centre’s Journalism Project. More people are turning to the internet. CNN's critics point to its weak ratings but it remains immensely profitable. Last year it made an estimated $340m on revenues of $1.1 billion, according to SNL Kagan, a research firm.

Read more at the Economist

New web domain names hit the market

Over 1,000 new generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) are set to join the 22 existing ones, such as .com and .org, and the 280 country-specific ones, such as .uk, that now grace the end of web addresses. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the non-profit organisation that manages the web’s address book, reckons this will boost competition and innovation. It will also increase the cost to businesses of protecting their brands.

Read more at the Economist

The first step to understanding big data is to define it

The first step to understanding big data is to define it. Many people think big data just means a lot of data. That’s only partially true. It is generally accepted that big data “refers to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage, and analyze.” Yet, at its core, big data is really about data analytics — sophisticated algorithms that are being applied to incomprehensibly large volumes of data. We create a staggering amount of data each day. For several years, computer scientists have been developing more and more powerful ways to harness the incredible volume of data for all sorts of purposes, such as marketing, medical research and business intelligence. They are figuring how to combine and review these immense data sets together. The result is that they are finding patterns in human conduct and nature that would have never been found without the ability to analyze these large data sets.

Read more here.

Facebook’s groundbreaking news app

Facebook is rolling out a new, stand-alone iPhone app called Paper. But it’s “much more than just a news-reading app—it’s a complete reimagining of Facebook itself.” Paper starts with the regular Facebook News Feed and “re-creates it as an immersive, horizontally scrolling set of screens.” The new app relies on touch gestures “to make every status update, photo, and news story appear full-screen.” By creating Paper as a stand-alone app rather than a new feature bolted onto the flagship, Facebook is embracing today’s trend “toward more, smaller apps.”

Read more at The Week

The Facebook Effect on the News

In the last twelve months, traffic from home pages has dropped significantly across many websites while social media's share of clicks has more than doubled, according to a 2013 review of the BuzzFeed Partner Network, a conglomeration of popular sites including BuzzFeed, the New York Times, and Thought Catalog.

Facebook, in particular, has opened the spigot, with its outbound links to publishers growing from 62 million to 161 million in 2013. Two years ago, Facebook and Google were equal powers in sending clicks to the BuzzFeed network's sites. Today Facebook sends 3.5X more traffic.

Facebook's News Feed, a homepage built by our friends and organized by our clicks and likes, isn't really a "news" feed. It's an entertainment portal for stories that remind us of our lives and offer something like an emotional popper. In fact, news readers self-identify as a minority on Facebook: Fewer than half ever read "news" on the site, according to a 2013 Pew study, and just 10 percent of them go to Facebook to get the news on purpose

Read more at the Atlantic

In 3.5 Years, Most Africans Will Have Smartphones

Worldwide, according to Gartner, smartphone sales exceeded feature phone sales in 2013, for the first time — but Africa remains a different story. Informa UK’s terrific Africa Telecoms Outlook (PDF) projects 334 million African smartphone connections in 2017, maybe 30% of the continent’s population. IDC is more pessimistic yet; it figures smartphones are currently 18% of the African mobile phone market, but they expect their number to “merely” double in volume by 2017. The available data seems to indicate that the penetration rate feature phones shot from 6% to 40% of the African market over a five-year period, and I still see no reason to believe that smartphones will do worse, and many to believe that they will move faster.

Read more at Tech Crunch

Hyper-Local Search

As the world grows increasingly mobile in its computing — and advertisers grow increasingly demanding about how they target prospects — the giants of the net are intent on tailing people around town. Google captures location through its Android phones and various mobile apps, while Facebook includes a Foursquare-like service within its ubiquitous social network. With this deal, Microsoft gets extensive access to Foursquare’s brand new tracking system.

Read more at Wired

The Movie-making Billionaires Club

Lionsgate has achieved a level of success no one predicted. American box-office figures for 2013 are now in, and they show that the second “Hunger Games” film helped Lionsgate to overtake Paramount and Fox. Other than the surviving six “majors”, all dating from the age of Gloria Swanson and Rudy Valentino, the young challenger, founded only 17 years ago in Canada, is the only studio to have grossed more than $1 billion in a year, as it did in 2012 and 2013.

Read more in the Economist

Testing, testing

A whole industry of services to help startups tweak their offerings has sprung up, too. Optimizely, itself a startup, automates something that has become a big part of what developers do today: A/B testing. In its simplest form, this means that some visitors to a webpage will see a basic “A” version, others a slightly tweaked “B” version. If a new red “Buy now” button produces more clicks than the old blue one, the site’s code can be changed there and then. Google is said to run so many such tests at the same time that few of its users see an “A” version.

To see how people actually use their products, startups can sign up with services such as usertesting.com. This pays people to try out new websites or smartphone apps and takes videos while they do so. Firms can tell the service exactly which user profile they want (specifying gender, age, income and so on), and get results within the hour.

Read more at the Economist

California says no to Stephen Glass

The California Supreme Court has ruled that disgraced journalist Stephen Glass is not welcome as a lawyer in the state.

The New York Times reports:
The 33-page ruling was stinging in its portrayal of Mr. Glass’s character, raising questions about his motives and sincerity despite the appearance of character witnesses who testified in his favor. The court said Mr. Glass had not been forthright in a previous application to the New York bar and had not acknowledged his shortcomings in that effort (he was informally notified in advance that his New York application would be rejected). Many of his efforts at rehabilitating himself, the court wrote, “seem to have been directed primarily at advancing his own well-being rather than returning something to the community.”

Read more at the New York Times

You’ll never believe how recommended stories are generated on otherwise serious news sites

Links, which appear on hundreds of news sites, including CNN and The Washington Post, (often at the bottom of news stories) are the work of a “news discovery” company called Taboola. The company acts as a middleman between a Web site, such as Politico, and other sites that want to attract Politico’s readers.

At regular intervals, Taboola’s computers feed new headlines and photos into the “Around the Web” sections from an inventory of articles, photo galleries and videos supplied by these third-party sites. Taboola’s main competitor, another Israeli start-up called Outbrain (both companies are now based in New York). Outbrain and Taboola say publishers can customize their offerings to screen out material they deem inappropriate.

The engines’ recommendations are based on algorithms shaped by a user’s Internet behavior and that of similar groups of people. Thanks to tracking software known as cookies, the companies’ computers can learn whether you like to read about sports or entertainment or prefer to watch videos instead of reading articles. They also do some educated guesswork based on broad categories. People in Washington, D.C., for example, might see more links to political stories than people in Washington state.

Read more at the Washington Post.

Pinterest Is More Popular Than Email for Sharing

According to a new study, Pinterest now one of the primary ways that people share stuff online. It even tops email. The company found that in the fourth quarter of 2013, Pinterest raced past email to become the third-most popular way to share online. It was topped only by Facebook and Twitter.

Read more at Wired

Instagram Fastest-Growing App Among Top 10 In 2013

Facebook was the No. 1 app overall in 2013, but its photo-sharing subsidiary Instagram was the fastest-growing app among the top 10...the growth in social media -- especially among teens -- is shifting to single-purpose or messaging apps, including Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Whisper and others.

Read more at Media Post

Many Americans don’t recognize top news anchor

In an online survey about Americans’ knowledge about the news conducted last summer, just 27% of the public could correctly identify Brian Williams, anchor of the top-rated NBC Nightly News.

Three decades ago, when far more Americans watched the nightly network news programs, nearly half (47%) could identify Dan Rather, who at the time anchored the top-rated CBS evening News.

Read more at the Pew Research Center

New rules and start-up firms will let people sell their personal data

In 2014 new regulations and start-ups will overturn the traditional approach to privacy. Individuals will be encouraged to place an economic value on their personal data—in effect creating a market for them.

A report by the World Economic Forum called personal data “a new asset class”. A study by the Boston Consulting Group said the market in Europe could be worth €1 trillion ($1.4 trillion) a year by 2020. But the gains to individuals may seem trifling. Most data points—such as age, sex or address—are worth less than a penny a piece per person.

Read more at The Economist

Fears that teenagers are deserting Facebook are overblown

There is no mass defection (from Facebook by teenagers) under way. Instead, teenagers are using different social networks for different things, says Lee Rainie of the Pew Research Centre’s Internet and American Life project. They post less intimate stuff to Facebook and more risqué material to networks not yet gatecrashed by their parents. Mr Miller’s research has also highlighted this habit. The danger for Facebook is that one of these newer places starts to attract parents.

Read more at The Economist

Should Tech Designers Go With Their Guts — Or the Data?

For many tech companies, design is no longer subjective. Instead, it’s all about the data. Analytics click and hum behind the scenes, measuring the effectiveness of even the tiniest design decisions. This constant data-stream plays an increasing role in determining what new products we will use and what forms they might take.

When it comes to the future of design and technology, the uncomfortable question we bump into is: do human design instincts even matter anymore?

In the design world, there’s always been a dichotomy between data and instinct. Design departments — think Mad Men – were once driven by the belief that some people are gifted with an innate design sense. They glorified gut “instinct” because it was extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of designs in progress; designers had to wait until a product shipped to learn if their ideas were any good. But today’s digital products — think Facebook and Google — glorify “data” instead; it’s now possible to measure each design element among hundreds of variations until the perfect outcome is selected.

From my perspective working with over 80 product teams, data is important … but there’s no replacement for design instincts built on a foundation of experiences that include failures. As engineering and design become ever closer collaborators, the biggest challenge is to make decisions through a careful balance between data and instinct.

Read more at Wired

FB still #1

Some 73% of online adults now use a social networking site of some kind. Facebook is the dominant social networking platform in the number of users, but a striking number of users are now diversifying onto other platforms. Some 42% of online adults now use multiple social networking sites. In addition, Instagram users are nearly as likely as Facebook users to check in to the site on a daily basis. These are among the key findings on social networking site usage and adoption from a new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project.

Read more at the Pew Research Center

The Limits of Videogame Storytelling Reveal Themselves in The Novelist

In the PC/Mac game The Novelist, you play a very nosy ghost living in a house the Kaplan family rented for the summer.

Videogames might one day be a great way of telling a story like The Novelist, but before that can happen interactive storytelling in videogames must be more interesting... The truth is videogames are not yet as good as novels or films when it comes to telling stories. The Novelist crashes headlong into that reality by throwing the full weight of a story upon the best storytelling tools games currently have to offer. It doesn’t work, but it reveals something about the medium, and for that reason The Novelist is important.

Read more at Wired

The internet is changing television habits

In 2014 online video will become a more influential cultural force, changing conversations, communities and what people watch. Several factors will speed up television’s move to the internet. Faster broadband will make it easier to watch videos delivered online without having to wait ages for them to load. People will buy more internet-enabled “smart” television sets, bringing websites once accessible mainly from laptops and tablets to bigger screens. In 2014 firms such as Sony and Intel will launch “over the top” services, which deliver television programmes over the internet. Apple’s long-awaited television offering may come to fruition. In 2014 some of the world’s biggest creators of programmes, including Disney, will start to make exclusive programmes for new platforms.

Read more at The Economist

Better times for the music industry

Streaming is still a small part of the music business globally, but will bolster it in the years ahead. Like a popular rocker who burns out, only to try to stage a comeback a decade later, the sickly music industry will probably never regain its previous vigour. But even modest growth is welcome news for the industry... It will become more common for bands and managers to use data about where fans are listening to them in order to decide where to tour.

Read more at The Economist

Here's Why Instagram's Demographics Are So Attractive To Brands

Before buying Instagram ads, advertisers need to understand who is on the social network. Over 90% of the 150 million people on Instagram are under the age of 35.. Though it's owned by Facebook, Instagram is a mobile app with distinct demographics.

Instagram is largely made up of urban, youthful demographics, with a significant skew towards women.

Instagram also leans toward urban users; 17% of U.S. adult residents who live in urban areas use Instagram, compared to only 11% in suburban and rural areas.

Instagram is about quality not quantity. Instagram accounts for 7% of daily photo uploads among the top four photo-sharing platforms (544 million daily uploads total). So it's not as much of a heavyweight, in volume terms, as some might believe.

Read more at Business Insider

A New Map Reveals the Geography of American TV News

Georgetown scholar Kalev Leetaru tracked all the locations mentioned on U.S. television news between June 2009 and October 2013, then plotted them on a world map.

Read more in the Atlantic

Ubiquitous cameras

It is getting ever easier to record anything, or everything, that you see. This opens fascinating possibilities—and alarming ones.

Thanks to digital technology the world is replete with cheap and highly capable cameras. ABI, a research firm, reckons there were a billion built into the mobile phones and tablets shipped in 2012 (many boast more than one). Adding a run-of-the-mill digital camera to a phone, or pretty much anything else, costs about $10. Narrative, a Swedish company that has raised $500,000 through Kickstarter, is marketing a clip-on life-logger the size of a coin.

Read more at The Economist

The Chinese Stream

Around the world online video is becoming a bigger and more sophisticated business, but nowhere is that truer than in China. The country has the largest number of online-video viewers: around 450m, or nearly 80% of the internet-connected population. Their numbers will rise to around 700m by 2016, according to iResearch, which tracks the industry. In America and Europe, online video has yet to supplant broadcast- and pay-TV, but in China it seems rapidly to have done so.

Read more at The Economist

Local TV gets wave of runaway consolidation

So far this year, 223 local TV stations have changed hands. This is the biggest wave of media consolidation ever — and it's all happening in small and mid-level markets, involving companies most people have never heard of. Leading this wave is Hunt Valley-based Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair alone is behind seven deals this year, including a $985-million deal to buy nine stations from Allbritton Communications. But it's not alone; other media companies are also racing to gobble up stations.

Read more in the Baltimore Sun

5 indicators of nonprofit news sustainability

One of the major nonprofit news funders, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, released a report Tuesday that deeply examines the vital signs of 18 well-established nonprofit news outlets.The report’s findings include some positive trends, with 14 of the 18 outlets showing a surplus in 2012. But some challenges remain, particularly when it comes to the level of investment these nonprofits are making in technology and business development.

Read more at Pew

The media has a message ...

Two forces, working in grudging symbiosis, control the media: content producers and content distributors. If information travels along a highway, then the distributors own the road, and the providers make the stuff that rides on it. Neither has value without the other. But control both the road and its travelers, and a company might master its own destiny.

Read more at Fortune

Texting in Class

A new study has found that more than 90 percent of students admit to using their devices for non-class activities during class times. Less than 8 percent said that they never do so. Texting in class is a source of constant frustration to professors, but about 30 percent of students reported that their instructors did not have a policy on the subject. (Of course there is a chance some of those students didn't read the syllabus.) Given how attached students are to their devices, it is perhaps not surprising that only 9 percent favor a ban on having them in classrooms. However, 54 percent said that they thought it reasonable to have a policy.

Read more at Inside Higher Ed

Media bosses hope mobile devices will help, rather than hurt, television

Around three-quarters of American internet users regularly fiddle with a mobile device while watching the gogglebox. Media executives are abuzz working out how to turn this distraction into profitable transactions. Viewers who are multitasking with other devices tend to tune in for longer, because they are commenting on the shows online or interacting with extra content through the networks’ apps.

Read more at the Economist

The Role of News on Facebook

Facebook exposes some people to news who otherwise might not get it. While only 38% of heavy news followers who get news on Facebook say the site is an important way they get news, that figure rises to 47% among those who follow the news less often.

The most popular topic is entertainment news, which 73% of Facebook news consumers get regularly on the site. Close behind is news about events in one’s own community (65%). National politics and government rank fourth, reaching 55% of these consumers regularly, just behind sports, which reaches 57% regularly. Still, Facebook has yet to become a platform for learning about news events as they happen. Just 28% of Facebook news consumers have ever turned there for breaking news.

Read more at the Pew Center

Twitter Is Selling Access to Your Tweets for Millions

Twitter’s data mining initiative has similarities with LinkedIn’s Recruiter program, which charges businesses as much as $8,000 per log-in to access the site’s full database of 238 million resumes. While LinkedIn manages Recruiter internally and generates massive revenue from it, Twitter has chosen a more hands-off approach that provides a small but straightforward revenue stream while leaving the major infrastructure costs to third parties.

Read more at TIME.

Internet ad revenues hit historic high

Internet ad revenues surged to a landmark $20.1 billion, according to a just-released IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report prepared by the New Media Group of PwC US. This is an 18% increase over last year’s first-half ad revenues of $17 billion.

Read more here

Media Map

An interactive media map by state here.

Half Of Online Americans Listen To Internet Radio

For the first time, more than half (53%) of online Americans are listening to Internet radio, according to new data released this week by Edison Research. Some 27% are listening to streaming audio from live radio stations, both local and outside, while 18% are listening to on-demand services, which involve paying a subscription for access to music libraries. Time spent listening to online radio is clearly increasing, with 67% of Internet radio listeners saying they are listening to the medium more than they were a year ago, and 32% saying they are listening “a lot” more.

Read more at Media Post

How ‘Cord Never’ Generation Poses Sales Drag for Pay TV

A generation of technology-savvy, budget-conscious consumers who are taking advantage of the availability of high-speed Internet connections and the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, lower-cost TVs and other gadgets that make it easy to consume downloadable shows in a snap.

The shift in viewing habits is putting pressure on cable, satellite and phone companies by pinching subscriber numbers, which may have a knock-on effect on revenue growth. The impact on the $80 billion pay-TV industry is already being felt, with 2013 on pace to be the first year ever that total U.S. pay-TV subscriptions will decline, falling to 100.8 million from 100.9 million last year, according to researcher IHS.

Read more at Bloomberg

Court: Facebook ‘Like’ Is Protected By the First Amendment

“Liking” something on Facebook is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday, reviving a closely watched case over the extent to which the Constitution shields what we do online. In doing so, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a former deputy sheriff in Hampton, Va., who said he was sacked for “liking” the Facebook page of a man running against his boss for city sheriff.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Google may kiss 'cookies' goodbye

Google is developing an anonymous identifier for advertising, or AdID, that would replace third-party cookies as the way advertisers track people's Internet browsing activity for marketing purposes, according to a person familiar with the plan.

Read more at USA Today

Video games improve cognitive ability in the elderly

The improvement in multi-tasking was so great that the amount of cognitive effort required by the oldies after their training was no more than if they were in their 20s and playing the game for the first time. Furthermore, the changes seemed to last for some time. After a six-month break from playing, the older participants were still nimble-minded.

Read more at the Economist

Internet users whinge about passwords but are none too keen on the alternatives

Some of the new ideas involve biometric data—in theory unique to each user. Apple may have a fingerprint reader in its latest iPhone, which is due to go on sale later this month. On September 3rd Bionym, a Canadian firm, launched Nymi, a bracelet which detects the wearer’s heartbeat. The Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology in Tokyo has developed a chair which detects—with 99% accuracy—the unique shape of a user’s bottom.

One answer is to supplement passwords (and gadgets) with something else.. A British start-up called PixelPin asks users to select some objects, in a preset order, from an image they have uploaded. Barclays, a bank, sets multiple-choice questions which require detailed knowledge of the customers’ past life and times.

Read more at the Economist

A Quest to Save AM Before It’s Lost in the Static

In 1978.. half of all radio listening was on the AM dial. By 2011 AM listenership had fallen to 15 percent, or an average of 3.1 million people, according to a survey by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a private investment firm. While the number of FM listeners has declined, too, they still averaged 18 million in 2011.

Although five of the top 10 radio stations in the country, as measured by advertising dollars, are AM — among them WCBS in New York and KFI in Los Angeles — the wealth drops rapidly after that.

Read more at the New York Times

How the News Got Less Mean

Researchers are discovering that people want to create positive images of themselves online by sharing upbeat stories. And with more people turning to Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s happening in the world, news stories may need to cheer up in order to court an audience. If social is the future of media, then optimistic stories might be media’s future.

Read more here

Media companies get cash from digital sources is at last repairing some of the damage

According to eMarketer, a research firm, this year Americans will spend more time online or using computerised media than watching television. “All-access” services, such as Netflix (for film and TV) or Spotify (for music), which give unlimited content on mobile devices for a monthly fee, are prompting people to spend more on digital products.

After years of wreaking havoc, the internet is helping media companies to grow. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), a professional-services firm, reckons that revenues for online media and entertainment will increase by around 13% a year for the next five years.

The most obvious change in the past few years is the decline of “physical” products, such as CDs, DVDs and print newspapers. In 2008 nearly nine-tenths of consumer cash went on them; by 2017 it will be a little over half, with digital grabbing the rest.

Read more at The Economist

Gaps between how journalism educators and journalists view j-schools

More than 80 percent of educators say a journalism degree is extremely important when it comes to learning news gathering skills, compared to 25 percent of media professionals. One in five media professionals finds a degree in the discipline is not at all important or only slightly important in learning news gathering (according to a new Poynter study).

Read more at Inside Higher Ed

3 takes on why bookstores are dead

Management consultant Joseph Esposito writes, “With bookstores collapsing everywhere, the print business collapses along with it.” As bookstores close, Esposito argues, readers have fewer places to discover print books. Instead, he says, they learn about titles online — through Twitter, Goodreads, or Amazon pages. When it comes time to order the book, they have two options: A cheaper digital version or a more expensive print version. “Why pay for print when you can get the digital edition immediately at a lower price? The advantage of the physical bookstore — the immediate availability of inventory — is not at play here.”

Read more at GigaOm

Radio Ad Revs Flat, Digital Ads Rise

Radio advertising revenues were unchanged in the second quarter of 2013 compared to the year before, according to the latest figures from the Radio Advertising Bureau, which tallied total revenue at $4.66 billion. As in previous quarters, the main bright spot for radio was digital advertising, which saw a 16% year-over-year increase, to $222 million.

Read more here

Study finds more than a quarter of journalism grads wish they’d chosen another career

"About 28 percent of journalism grads wish they’d chosen another field, the annual survey of grads by the University of Georgia’s Grady College says." More at Poynter

The same study also showed "The job market for journalism and mass communication graduates showed signs of continued improvement in 2012 and 2013, suggesting that the worst in terms of the market is in the past."  Read more from the school here

‘The Daily Show’ on Jeff Bezos and the newspaper industry

John Oliver of “The Daily Show” explains how “there are now more people currently buying newspapers than people buying newspapers.”

Facebook: Here's How Your News Feed Works

The average user’s News Feed has around 1,500 possible stories filtered through per day, according to Lars Backstrom, engineering manager for Facebook’s News Feed ranking. But only 20% of them actually make your feed. So how does Facebook determine which 20% you see?

Scores are determined using a number of factors, such as the relationship you have with the user who posted it, the number of comments, the number of shares, and the number of likes that the story has accumulated.

A change in the ranking process now enables older stories (stories that may have been posted earlier in the day but the user never actually scrolled through) to join the “new” stories at the top of your feed.

Read more at ABC News

Study Finds Craigslist Took $5 Billion From Newspapers

A new study by two business school professors examined the issue and concluded that, indeed, Craigslist took a giant bite out of newspapers’ revenues — some $5 billion between the years 2000 and 2007. And that’s not even looking at the Times, the Wall Street Journal or USA Today, which the authors left out in order to have a more homogeneous sample.

Read more at Forbes

More Print News Subscribers Plan To Cancel Subs, Uptick In Mobile Consumption

The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute’s “2013 Q1 Research Report,” revealed that 12.7% of print subscribers plan to cancel their subscriptions in 2013.

On the positive side, the decline in print subscriptions is clearly correlated with increasing consumption of news via digital channels, with a special emphasis on mobile.

Read more at Media Post

British newspapers are becoming more American

Subscriptions online and in print are not enough to make up for print advertising losses. Newspaper advertising this year will be an estimated £2.1 billion ($3.2 billion), around half its 2005 level. Mr Murdoch’s Times loses money in spite of its paywall. Regional newspapers, more reliant on classifieds, are in worse shape. In January there were 1,054 regional titles, down around 18% since 2008.

Read more at The Economist

The Social Media Bubble Is Quietly Deflating

Social media companies drew only 2 percent of the venture capital headed to Internet-based enterprises last quarter" while "Big data and cloud companies" appear to be the hot plays now in Silicon Valley.

Read more at Business Week.

Streaming Audio, Video Surges In 2013

Online audio and video consumption surged in the first half of 2013, according to the latest figures from Nielsen SoundScan and Nielsen BDS, which tallied 50.9 billion audio and video streams in the first six months of the year, up 24% from 41 billion streams in the same period of 2012.

Read more at Media Post

Broadcast TV, Local Cable Ad Spend Up Double Digits

Broadcast TV advertising spending rocketed up by strong double-digit percentages in the second quarter. Standard Media Index says broadcast TV spending was up 16% in the second three months of 2013, and 10% through the first half of the year. By way of comparison, national cable TV advertising moved up more slowly in the second quarter, for a 6% gain.

Read more at Media Post

survey: 1/3 say First Amendment goes too far

One out of three Americans think the First Amendment “goes too far in the rights it guarantees.” That's the finding of an annual survey conducted by the First Amendment Center. More than a third couldn’t name any of its guarantees at all, and just four percent named the right to petition.

Read more here

Can Photojournalism Survive in the Instagram Era?

In his new book Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen, photographer Fred Ritchin tackles these developments and more as he explores what the digital revolution means for his trade.

It’s not a competition, but a question of synergies among all media, particularly on a digital platform. Multimedia is not more media, but the employment of various kinds of media (and hybrid media) for what they each offer to advance the narrative.

Read more at Mother Jones

Pay-TV execs open up to portable devices

If television chained entertainment-junkies to the couch, online video has now released their shackles. Faster broadband, the rise of mobile phones and tablet devices, and services like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube that stream shows to people anywhere with an internet connection have freed viewers to watch programmes wherever they wish.

Pay-television executives have also chosen to take part in this liberation movement, by offering their subscribers “TV everywhere”. Their companies give their customers an access code that lets them watch channels streamed live—or individual shows on demand—on their mobile devices, much as they can on Netflix or Hulu.

So far TV everywhere’s rollout has been slow.

Even so, new competitors are trying to grab the remote control. This week the Wall Street Journal said Google (which owns YouTube) was seeking deals with television companies to set up its own internet-streaming service. Intel is expected to launch a similar service later this year. Netflix, Amazon and other online distributors will plough a combined $750m this year into making their own exclusive shows, to differentiate themselves from each other and from cable channels.

Read more at The Economist

Newsroom staffing stagnates: TV staff size up but number of newsrooms down

The total TV staffing was virtually unchanged from a year ago -- down just 48 to a total local TV news staff of 27,605. Overall, there are now 717 TV stations originating local news ... running that news on those stations and another 235 stations ... for a total of 952 stations airing local news. That's down eight stations originating news from last year's 725, and they're running news on seven fewer additional stations than last year. Most of the stations that stopped originating local news are involved in some form of consolidation.

In contrast, the latest numbers from the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) found that newspaper newsroom staff fell 6.4% from a year ago. That's approaching three times the previous year's drop of 2.4%. That takes the total daily newspaper news staff down from last year's record low of 40,600 to a new record low of 38,000, spread among nearly 1,400 newspapers (twice the number of local TV newsrooms). The average U.S. daily newspaper now has 27.5 news staffers; the average local TV news staff is 38.5.

Read more here

Simple tests can overstate the impact of search-engine advertising

A rise in sales after an ad campaign does not automatically mean that the ads worked... (but) Far from being an industry where cause and effect remain murky, online advertising may yet become one area where the dismal science can predict how to get costs down and profits up.

Read more at the Economist

How One of Google’s Best Customers Could Steal Away Search

Shopping is key to Google’s fortunes, Jordan writes in a commentary just posted over at Fortune. And search is central to what Amazon does:

Amazon is a vertical search engine focused on helping users find products. The overwhelmingly dominant way to find things on their site is the search box. Users enter a keyword phrase and are presented with results that match his or her query. The order of the search results is determined by algorithms that seek to optimize relevance and monetization. Sound familiar?

The big difference between shopping on the two, Jordan says, is that the Amazon user experience is better, to say nothing of price, selection and shipping. “Buying on Google takes chunks of an hour, not an Amazon minute,” he says.

Read more at Wired

NSA Google Search Tips to Become Your Own Spy Agency

There’s so much data available on the internet that even government cyberspies need a little help now and then to sift through it all. So to assist them, the National Security Agency produced a book to help its spies uncover intelligence hiding on the web.

Read more at Wired

How to turn an iPhone into a professional video camera

The Telegraph used an iPhone to film, edit and upload instant video reviews from Glastonbury festival. Chris Stone reviews the accessories he used to do it.

Read the story here