5 simple tips for visual branding on social media

The number one mistake companies make when branding their businesses on various social media outlets is being inconsistent across different platforms. One great example is Quotery.

Use simple branded images and videos on Instagram, such as a peek at a new product.

Use shareable images that can have many interpretations on Pinterest, such as a DIY or recipe with an attractive image that can be pinned to recipe boards, foodie boards and party planning boards.

Use large images that can stand out in a news feed on Facebook, such as a sale or an event poster

Use time sensitive or less important links on Twitter since it stands the possibility of getting, such as an article about an event the night prior.

Keep your profile picture simple and consistent.

Read more at TheNextWeb

5 data-driven ways to get your Facebook posts seen

At any given point a user logs into the Facebook platform, there are more than 1,500 posts that user could be shown.

Try shifting your scheduling strategy from posting during the most popular times in the workweek to the most effective times. Although most of the work marketers put in happens Monday-Friday, the magic actually happens during the weekend. 

Images receive 37 percent more interactions.

Using exclamation points in a post correlates with more engagement.

Add hashtags for 60 percent more engagement.

Our data showed a positive correlation between word count and post effectiveness. More specifically, posts of 80-89 words got 2 times as much engagement.

Read more at The Next Web

Investors are taking an interest in journalism

This week A&E Networks, a television company jointly owned by Disney and Hearst, was negotiating to buy a 10% stake in Vice’s parent company. The deal would value Vice Media at $2.5 billion, nearly double what it was worth about a year ago when Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox bought a 5% stake, and ten times what Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, paid for the venerable Washington Post last year.

BuzzFeed still produces a lot of fluffy content (including, this week, “27 Google Searches All Cat Owners Can Relate To”) but it is hiring foreign correspondents to provide more serious coverage. The Huffington Post, a pioneer of digital news, is seeking readers in places like France and Brazil. Few newspapers have established a truly global business, says Ken Doctor, a media analyst, but a handful of digital news firms could pull it off.

Read more at The Economist

Why is Amazon paying $970m for a video-game streaming startup?

Some amateur gamers have gained huge audiences through streaming sites like Twitch, just as they have on other forms of media. YouTube “vloggers”, often confessional and endearingly personal, are becoming celebrities in their own right. A gaming-related subgenre of video blogs, “Let’s play”, is persistently popular on YouTube. The videos of one “Let’s play” broadcaster, Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, are alone estimated to bring in advertising revenues of up to $16m a year, according to SocialBlade, an analytics firm.
Read more at the Economist

Reading higher among millennials

More millennials read books than their elders, a new Pew Research report finds. According to the report, 88% of Americans 16 to 29 years old have read at least one book in the past year, compared with 79% of people 30 and older.

Read the story in the LA Times

Where gadgets go to die

A growing mountain of electronic waste needs to be disposed of responsibly by rich nations rather than shipped to poorer countries to do the dirty work.

According to a United Nations initiative known as StEP (Solving the E-Waste Problem), electronic waste can contain up to 60 elements from the periodic table, as well as flame retardants and other nasty chemicals. Apart from heavy metals such as lead and mercury, there are quantities of arsenic, beryllium, cadmium and polyvinyl chloride.

What little is known about recycling hazardous waste in America, for instance, suggests that only 15-20% is actually recycled; the rest gets incinerated or buried in landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). There is no evidence to suggest other countries are any better.

Recycling in an environmentally sound manner is expensive. For wealthier countries it remains much cheaper to ship unwanted electronic goods to poorer parts of the planet.

An interactive map giving details of certified recyclers is on the EPA’s website--www.epa.gov/epawaste.

Sometimes you see brands on the balance-sheet, sometimes you don’t

Both American and international accounting rules prohibit companies from recognising brands and many other “intangible” assets (such as customer lists) if they have created them themselves. Some marketers would like to change that. Roger Sinclair, who advises the MASB, an American body that sets marketing standards, points out that rules are inconsistent. The value of a brand—invisible when internally generated—is revealed when another company buys it.

Read more at The Economist

What are brands for?

Brands are the most valuable assets many companies possess. But no one agrees on how much they are worth or why. Most of the time they do not appear as assets on companies’ balance-sheets

Read more at the Economist

All-time low for album sales

For the first time since Nielsen SoundScan began keeping track in 1991, album sales failed to reach the four-million-sold mark this week, totaling just 3.97 million.

Digital album sales are down 11.7 percent for the year, and à la carte downloads are down another 12.8 percent according to Billboard. Illegal downloading has no doubt eroded much of those digital sales, but it’s the emergence of legal streaming sites like Spotify and Pandora that has also chipped away at overall sales.

Read more in Rolling Stone

Study: Facebook news referrals are 'gaining' on Google

Traffic referrals to news sites from Facebook have "gained significant ground at the expense of Google" since the social networking platform changed its algorithm towards the end of last year, according to a study.

The report, entitled How efficient is the news? also showed that although sites with higher traffic have more reporters and, on average, publish more posts, this does not necessarily lead to more page views per story.

Read more here

The growing pay gap between journalism and public relations

The salary gap between public relations specialists and news reporters has widened over the past decade – to almost $20,000 a year, according to 2013 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by the Pew Research Center. At the same time, the public relations field has expanded to a degree that these specialists now outnumber reporters by nearly 5 to 1 (BLS data include part-time and full-time employees, but not self-employed.)

Read more at Pew here

Overall Consumer Magazine numbers fall in first half of 2014

For the first half of 2014, magazines reported a total average of 11.6 million digital replica editions (paid, verified and analyzed nonpaid), or 3.8 percent of total circulation. This compares with 10.2 million digital editions, or 3.3 percent of total circulation, in the first half of 2013. For the 367 U.S. consumer magazines reporting comparable numbers, total paid and verified circulation was down approximately 1.9 percent. Paid subscriptions were down 1.8 percent, and single-copy sales decreased by approximately 11.9 percent.

Read more at Audited Media

Newspaper newsroom employment declined in 2013

The number of minority journalists in daily-newspaper newsrooms increased by a couple of hundred in 2013 even as newsroom employment declined by 3.2 percent, according to the annual census released Tuesday by the American Society of News Editors and the Center for Advanced Social Research.

Read more here

In a tabloidized world, tabloids struggle

Tabloids are still struggling to calibrate their newsrooms for this more crowded, digitally focused market. The Post, which some analysts estimate hemorrhages tens of millions of dollars annually, announced plans last year to cut its newsroom staff by 10 percent. Its print circulation, meanwhile, has fallen from about 600,000 to 250,000 over the past decade, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.

The Daily News has similarly seen print readership dwindle during that span, from roughly 700,000 to 300,000. As first reported by Capital New York, the paper laid off at least 17 journalists earlier this month, most of them print hands or photographers.

See more at Columbia Journalism Review.

Why digital publishers want to be in the magazine business

Print magazines, meanwhile, are everything online publishers want — they stand for something with their audiences, they have established rates based on a long tradition of buying and selling. The publisher can artificially limit supply by cutting pages.

And the magazine-reading experience is different. Magazines may be losing importance as more readers shift online, but they’re still the ultimate engagement vehicle. Research has shown that people are more focused when reading print than when listening to radio or watching TV.

Meanwhile, online publishing is heading for trouble.

Read more here

In China, more people now access the internet from a mobile device than a PC

the latest report published by state-affiliated research organization China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) shows that the percentage of Chinese users accessing the Internet via mobile grew to 83.4 percent as of June 2014, for the first time surpassing the percentage of users who access the internet via PCs (80.9 percent). New numbers released today also show that the overall number of new internet users is still climbing, even if the rate of growth may not be as fast as before.

Read more at The Next Week

Referral share in Q2 2014

In Q2 2014, Facebook gained share, while Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn all fell. Here’s the bigger picture: these eight social referral sites drove 31.07 percent of overall traffic in June 2014. The number has more than doubled: it was at just 15.55 percent in June 2013.

Read more at The Next Web

Eight (No, Nine!) Problems With Big Data

Many tools that are based on big data can be easily gamed. For example, big data programs for grading student essays often rely on measures like sentence length and word sophistication, which are found to correlate well with the scores given by human graders. But once students figure out how such a program works, they start writing long sentences and using obscure words, rather than learning how to actually formulate and write clear, coherent text. Even Google’s celebrated search engine, rightly seen as a big data success story, is not immune to “Google bombing” and “spamdexing,” wily techniques for artificially elevating website search placement.

Read more at the New York Times

How your iPhone is saving literature

Smartphones, even more than tablets and e-readers, have fostered a new type of reading, sometimes called “interstitial” reading. It’s the chapters, pages and paragraphs snatched up during those scraps of time that might once have been squandered on People magazine or just staring off into space. Interstitial reading happens while people are sitting in waiting rooms and the backs of taxis or standing at bus stops and in line for movie tickets or at the DMV.

Read more at Salon

Social Media considerations Drives Google Newsroom decision-making

If you do a Google search on the World Cup game in which Germany slaughtered Brazil 7-1, the top results will say things like "destroy," "defeat," and "humiliate." But Google itself is choosing to steer clear of negative terms. The company has created an experimental newsroom in San Francisco to monitor the World Cup, and turn popular search results into viral content. And they've got a clear editorial bias.

Read more at NPR

The fast-changing market for fonts

Free fonts, once ropy, are getting better; in the past few years Google has made more than 600 available. Talented type-designers find it ever easier to sell their work directly to consumers, sidestepping middlemen just as many book authors now do. The falling price of the design tools they use is encouraging novices to have a go. This, in turn, makes it easier for their big corporate customers to build in-house font teams.

Read more at The Economist

Facebook’s Secret mood manipulation experiment

It shows how Facebook data scientists tweaked the algorithm that determines which posts appear on users’ news feeds—specifically, researchers skewed the number of positive or negative terms seen by randomly selected users. Facebook then analyzed the future postings of those users over the course of a week to see if people responded with increased positivity or negativity of their own, thus answering the question of whether emotional states can be transmitted across a social network. Result: They can!

Read more at The Atlantic

Teens Aren’t Fleeing Facebook After All

Nearly 80% of U.S. teens still use Facebook and are more active on the social networking site than any other, according to a Forrester Research report. The results are actually consistent with a comScore report from earlier this year that found even though there was a three-percentage-point drop in Facebook usage among college-aged adults, 89% of those college kids still use the site.

Read more at TIME

Four factors that make a powerful visual

1. Authenticity
The consumer wants to believe that the people they are seeing are real… what they’re doing and how they’re acting is real.

At Getty Images, we've seen this trend play out with a change in the type of imagery we've been selling over the past five years. Our most popular 2007 baby versus 2012 baby shows the latter is clearly more candid. It’s not the perfect moment, but it is a real moment. And our 2007 woman versus 2012 woman shows quite a change, not just in her look, but in her attitude.

Read more here

What a Data Scientist does

What the industry calls a 'data scientist' now is really several different roles.. each requiring a different skill set.

1 business analyst

The role of business analyst existed long before the terms "big data" or "data scientist" were in vogue. This person works with front-end tools, meaning those closest to the organization's core business or function, such as Microsoft Excel, Tableau Software's visualization tools, or QlikTech's QlikView BI apps. A business analyst might also have sufficient programming skills to code up dashboards, and have some familiarity with SQL and NoSQL.

2 machine learning expert

The second data science role is that of machine-learning expert, a statistics-minded person who builds data models and makes sure the information they provide is accurate, easy to understand, and unbiased. "These are the people who develop algorithms and crunch numbers," said Wu. "They are interested in building models that predict something."

3 data engineer.

The third key job, data engineer, is "the bottom layer, the foundation," said Wu. "They are the ones who play with Hadoop, MapReduce, HBase, Cassandra. These are people interested in capturing, storing, and processing this data… so that the algorithm people can build models and derive insights from it."

Read more at Information Week

Can Twitter Survive?

News organizations have been reporting in recent weeks that Twitter’s growth rate has been slowing, which has spurred speculation about its future... Our studies have shown that Twitter occupies an important segment of the social networking world, but, in sheer numbers, its user base lags far behind the social networking behemoth Facebook.

Twitter is different; not only in who it attracts, but also in how it is used and how messages spread on the platform. Twitter also often acts more like a broadcasting network than a social network, connecting speakers and their content to the public.

Read more at Pew

Time Inc. spinoff reflects a troubled magazine business

While the digital side of the business has been making some gains, overall magazine print circulation (including single-copy sales, subscriptions and even digital replicas) has been down each of the past six years, while the number of print ad pages fell for the eighth year in a row in 2013.

Overall employment on both the business and editorial sides of U.S. magazines fell 3% in 2013, following a 4% decline in 2012, according to Advertising Age Over the longer term, consumer magazines have shed a total of 41,500 jobs since 2003 (a 28% drop).

Read more at Pew

The 100 Most-Edited Wikipedia Articles

The top historical figures, per that report, are George W. Bush, Michael Jackson, Jesus, Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler.

Read more at FiveThirtyEight

Mining for tweets of gold

Dataminr, a New York startup analyses the 500m or so tweets sent out daily.. for important events and news not yet reported by the mainstream media, the firm now has dozens of customers in finance, the news business and the public sector. In January it and Twitter struck a deal to provide alerts to CNN. In April its tracking of tweets was part of a strategy by the authorities in Boston to avoid a repeat of last year’s terrorist attack at the city’s annual marathon.

Dataminr is one of a growing number of firms built on analysing data from Twitter, though most do not have its focus on real-time news alerts.

Read more at The Economist

Three eye-catching big data ventures

1. Open Data Institute

Aim: free data for all

The not-for-profit Open Data Institute has positioned itself as both a catalyst for data innovation and a global hub for data expertise. Based in Shoreditch, east London, the ODI oversees a network of collaborative international "nodes."

2. The Human Brain Project

Aim: to reveal the workings of human consciousness

Flush with €1bn in funding, the Human Brain Project is a 10-year quest to reveal the hidden workings of consciousness.

3. IBM's Computational Creativity

Aim: to make computers 'creative'

Big-data analytics techniques have been deployed by IBM's Thomas J Watson Research Center to create new food recipes – what you might call technouvelle cuisine – mined from sources including Wikipedia and Fenaroli's Handbook of Flavor Ingredients, then tweaked with an algorithm designed to add creativity to matched ingredients. 

Read more here

Some Newspapers to Staff: Social Media Isn’t Optional, It’s Mandatory

The newspapers that mandate participation on social media emphasize a newsroom-wide approach to traffic growth. The Gannett-owned Jackson Clarion-Ledger, for instance, requires its writers to maintain Facebook and Twitter profiles and everyone on staff helps draw attention to the site, Executive Editor and Director of Audience Engagement Brian Tolley wrote in an email.Editors and social media managers play a bigger role in audience-building than other staffers.

Mallary Tenore, former managing editor of Poynter.org, said she doesn’t believe newspapers should require all staff to have social media accounts because people tend to have negative reactions to words such as “mandatory.”

Read more at AJR

Study: Colbert does a better job teaching people about campaign financing than traditional news sources

Viewers of “The Colbert Report” who watched faux-conservative TV host Stephen Colbert set up a super PAC and 501(c)(4) organization during the last presidential election cycle proved to be better informed about campaign financing and the role of money in politics than viewers of other news channels and shows, according to a new study.

Read more here

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.

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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