Television and radio employed more minority journalists last year than the year before, according to the latest release from RTDNA’s annual survey. Minorities now account for 21.5 percent of the television workforce, up from 20.5 percent the year before, and 11.7 percent of the radio workforce, up from 7.1 percent in 2011.
TV continues to clobber newspapers in most measurements of diversity. Earlier this year ASNE figures showed the percentage of minority employees continued to decline in print newsrooms.
Read more here
Friday, August 24
Thursday, August 23
Agencies Don't Pin Pinterest
Pinterest may be the darling of the social media world, but it has not been widely embraced by agencies. A new survey by the Creative Group finds that only 7% of advertising and marketing executives said their firms are using the visual social network for business purposes and 44% have no interest in adopting Pinterest.
Another 18% had never heard of the site, and 17% said it caught their eye but they were hesitant about using it for work. Just 10% said they planned to start using Pinterest as a business-related tool.
Pinterest enjoyed meteoric growth earlier this year, becoming the fastest stand-alone site to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark, according to comScore. As of July, it had 23 million monthly visitors.
Read more here
Another 18% had never heard of the site, and 17% said it caught their eye but they were hesitant about using it for work. Just 10% said they planned to start using Pinterest as a business-related tool.
Pinterest enjoyed meteoric growth earlier this year, becoming the fastest stand-alone site to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark, according to comScore. As of July, it had 23 million monthly visitors.
Read more here
Sunday, August 19
A new boss for an old paper
The New York Times Company (has) appointed Mark Thompson, the departing director-general of the BBC, a British public broadcaster, as its new boss. But Mr Thompson is an odd choice to lead a big, struggling private company. One analyst uncharitably compares his appointment to hiring the boss of a big charity to do a corporate turnaround. Mr Thompson has spent most of his career in public-service broadcasting at the BBC, save for a few years as boss of Britain’s Channel 4 television, a commercial broadcaster. The BBC is state-backed, and owes its survival to a tax on every household in Britain with a television set.
Last year it adjusted its pay wall and by June had boosted the number of digital subscribers to 509,000 between the New York Times and its stablemate, the International Herald Tribune, up by 12% in three months. However, the company still relies on advertisers for over 40% of its revenues, and online advertising rates are lower than those in print. Mr Thompson will have to devise a more radical business plan than trying to catch print papers’ fleeing subscribers.
Read more here
Last year it adjusted its pay wall and by June had boosted the number of digital subscribers to 509,000 between the New York Times and its stablemate, the International Herald Tribune, up by 12% in three months. However, the company still relies on advertisers for over 40% of its revenues, and online advertising rates are lower than those in print. Mr Thompson will have to devise a more radical business plan than trying to catch print papers’ fleeing subscribers.
Read more here
the impact of digital technology on the Islamic World
A recent survey by Ipsos, a market-research firm, found that rich Muslim-majority countries boast some of world’s highest rates of smartphone penetration, with the United Arab Emirates ahead at 61%. But even in poorer Muslim lands adoption is respectable: 26% in Egypt, not much below Germany’s 29%. More than a third of people in the Middle East now use the internet, slightly above the world average.
Muslims use their gadgets in much the same way as everyone else: they text, they use social networks, they buy online. But the adoption—and Islamification—of the technology has a deeper meaning, says Bart Barendregt of Leiden University, who has studied South-East Asia’s growing digital culture. “Muslim youngsters are adopting technology to distance themselves from older, traditional practices while also challenging Western models,” he argues.
Read more here
Muslims use their gadgets in much the same way as everyone else: they text, they use social networks, they buy online. But the adoption—and Islamification—of the technology has a deeper meaning, says Bart Barendregt of Leiden University, who has studied South-East Asia’s growing digital culture. “Muslim youngsters are adopting technology to distance themselves from older, traditional practices while also challenging Western models,” he argues.
Read more here
Saturday, August 18
They All Want to Know Your Face
Next time you’re looking up at a billboard, there’s a chance it may be looking back down at you. Immersive Labs has developed software for digital billboards that can measure the age range, gender, and attention-level of a passerby and quantify the effectiveness of an outdoor marketing campaign. Beyond just bringing metrics to outdoor advertisements, facial detection technology can tailor ads to people based on their features.
Vending machines have been making a high-tech resurgence, selling everything from iPods to high-end cupcakes – some now include cameras that are analyzing your face. Facial detection technology can enable a machine to present a customer with items they would typically purchase based on their physical characteristics.
With today’s Internet-connected TVs and attached devices, companies have a chance to peek into the living room to see who’s around. Microsoft Kinect, the popular motion-sensing gaming device, has advanced abilities to identify its users and has built an entire advertising platform around “audience engagement” – being able to tell who is in the room, how old they are and whether they are paying attention to what is on the screen.
Today, these types of sensors may be part of the television when you purchase it already; in the last year alone, Sony, Samsung, Lenovo, and Toshiba have each introduced “Smart TVs” with facial recognition technology built in.
Read more here
Vending machines have been making a high-tech resurgence, selling everything from iPods to high-end cupcakes – some now include cameras that are analyzing your face. Facial detection technology can enable a machine to present a customer with items they would typically purchase based on their physical characteristics.
With today’s Internet-connected TVs and attached devices, companies have a chance to peek into the living room to see who’s around. Microsoft Kinect, the popular motion-sensing gaming device, has advanced abilities to identify its users and has built an entire advertising platform around “audience engagement” – being able to tell who is in the room, how old they are and whether they are paying attention to what is on the screen.
Today, these types of sensors may be part of the television when you purchase it already; in the last year alone, Sony, Samsung, Lenovo, and Toshiba have each introduced “Smart TVs” with facial recognition technology built in.
Read more here
Wednesday, August 15
Radio still dominates music discovery
Radio remains by far the main way US consumers discover music, despite the likes of YouTube and other rival options, according to research by Nielsen. Its Nielsen Music 360 Report of 3,000 online consumer surveys found 48% of those questioned discover music most often through radio stations, compared to 10% from friends and relatives and 7% from YouTube. However, when it comes to listening to music YouTube rules among teenagers with 64% saying they use it to hear music compared to 56% listening to music on the radio, 53% through iTunes and 50% to music on CD.
Read more here
Read more here
AP Stylebook moves faster than Merriam-Webster as linguistic authority
Merriam-Webster has officially sanctioned a bunch of words by adding them to the dictionary, hereby removing most of the fun of saying things like “F-bomb” and “sexting.” Merriam-Webster paints this as a way of keeping up with the changing nature of language, but of course we all know that it’s a direct challenge to the AP Stylebook, which every cardiganed copy editor knows is the true arbiter of a journalist’s vocabulary.
The inclusion of these words raises an interesting question: Which is more in tune with the English language: Merriam-Webster, which traces its origins to the early 1800s, or the AP’s Stylebook, which only two years ago sanctioned “website“?
Read more here
The inclusion of these words raises an interesting question: Which is more in tune with the English language: Merriam-Webster, which traces its origins to the early 1800s, or the AP’s Stylebook, which only two years ago sanctioned “website“?
Read more here
Monday, August 13
Wondering How Far Magazines Must Fall
Magazines, all kinds of them, don’t work very well in the marketplace anymore. Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff. Last week, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that newsstand circulation in the first half of the year was down almost 10 percent. When 10 percent of your retail buyers depart over the course of a year, something fundamental is at work.
Historically, certain categories of magazine will encounter turbulence, but this time all categories were punished in the pileup.
It’s not just consumers who are playing hard to get: advertising is down 8.8 percent year to date over the same miserable period a year ago, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. With readership in such steep decline and advertising refusing to come back, magazines are in a downward spiral that not even their new digital initiatives can halt.
Read more at the NY Times
Historically, certain categories of magazine will encounter turbulence, but this time all categories were punished in the pileup.
It’s not just consumers who are playing hard to get: advertising is down 8.8 percent year to date over the same miserable period a year ago, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. With readership in such steep decline and advertising refusing to come back, magazines are in a downward spiral that not even their new digital initiatives can halt.
Read more at the NY Times
Friday, August 10
NYT Hosts Media Fire Sale
Combine a massively disruptive technology (the Internet), a weakened company (The New York Times Co.), and a brutal recession, and what you get is a kind of slow-motion fire-sale.
First went the real estate. Then went the NYT’s stake in the Boston Red Sox and NESN (a regional sports cable network). Then went 16 regional newspapers for $143 million. Next (probably) goes About.com, which the NYT purchased for $410 million years ago and is now desperate to sell for $270 million.
Next (after About.com is unloaded) goes the “New England Media Group,” which is to say: The Boston Globe, The Worcester Telegram and some printing operations in Massachusetts. The sale of the New England Media Group won’t fetch much because it carries on its books large under-funded liabilities (retiree health and pension plans). No sane investment group will take on those liabilities unless they are somehow diminished or at least ring-fenced.
Once all that happens—and it will happen—what will The New York Times Company look like? It will not look like a growth stock. For the foreseeable future, and probably beyond, advertising revenue will remain flat (at best). Subscription revenue might increase a bit; many people would be willing to pay $1000 annually for a complete (paper + online access) NYT package, but a wave of baby boom journalists and editors will be retiring, so the company’s pension and retiree health costs will consequently spike. Those costs will increase with each passing year as more boomer journalists reach retirement age, thus making the Times’ margin for error even smaller than it already is, which is very small. The New York Times Company will look, in a word, vulnerable.
Read more here
First went the real estate. Then went the NYT’s stake in the Boston Red Sox and NESN (a regional sports cable network). Then went 16 regional newspapers for $143 million. Next (probably) goes About.com, which the NYT purchased for $410 million years ago and is now desperate to sell for $270 million.
Next (after About.com is unloaded) goes the “New England Media Group,” which is to say: The Boston Globe, The Worcester Telegram and some printing operations in Massachusetts. The sale of the New England Media Group won’t fetch much because it carries on its books large under-funded liabilities (retiree health and pension plans). No sane investment group will take on those liabilities unless they are somehow diminished or at least ring-fenced.
Once all that happens—and it will happen—what will The New York Times Company look like? It will not look like a growth stock. For the foreseeable future, and probably beyond, advertising revenue will remain flat (at best). Subscription revenue might increase a bit; many people would be willing to pay $1000 annually for a complete (paper + online access) NYT package, but a wave of baby boom journalists and editors will be retiring, so the company’s pension and retiree health costs will consequently spike. Those costs will increase with each passing year as more boomer journalists reach retirement age, thus making the Times’ margin for error even smaller than it already is, which is very small. The New York Times Company will look, in a word, vulnerable.
Read more here
Are Tablet-Only Publications Dead?
The last few weeks have cast an ominous shadow over this niche industry following substantial staff cuts at News Corp.'s The Daily and a decision by the Huffington Post to give up on charging for its iPad magazine after just five issues. While some media observers are quick to write off the format, many in the industry see recent woes as part of the natural growing pains of an emerging market.
Two years later, however, the tablet publishing market isn't the runaway success many envisioned. Yet despite glaring questions from media pundits, many media buyers and industry veterans are surprisingly calm.
Read more here
Two years later, however, the tablet publishing market isn't the runaway success many envisioned. Yet despite glaring questions from media pundits, many media buyers and industry veterans are surprisingly calm.
Read more here
Monday, August 6
Aggregators Help Radio Reach Online Audiences
For the radio industry, there may be no better symbol for the challenges of adapting to the digital age than two candy-colored mobile apps. The apps, iHeartRadio and TuneIn, are aggregators — conduits for thousands of online radio streams. With a few taps on a smartphone, a listener can dart among a pop station in New York, gospel in Atlanta and talk almost anywhere.
Both have quickly amassed big audiences. TuneIn, which offers 70,000 streams from around the world, announced on Monday that it has 40 million monthly users. IHeartRadio, owned by the broadcasting giant Clear Channel Communications, has been downloaded 95 million times and has attracted more than 12 million registered users.
For broadcasters, these aggregators can help reach audiences in the growing but increasingly fragmented world of online radio, which can mean anything from a customized playlist on Pandora or Spotify to an iTunes stream.
For now only a fraction of the radio audience is online; John Hogan, chief executive of Clear Channel Media and Entertainment, the company’s radio and online division, said that 98 percent of listening to his company’s stations is still on its terrestrial signals. But it is growing quickly. According to Triton Digital, a company that measures Internet radio audiences, Clear Channel’s online audience has risen 117 percent in the last year. But making money through online radio remains a puzzle, largely because of its royalty structure.
Read more here
Both have quickly amassed big audiences. TuneIn, which offers 70,000 streams from around the world, announced on Monday that it has 40 million monthly users. IHeartRadio, owned by the broadcasting giant Clear Channel Communications, has been downloaded 95 million times and has attracted more than 12 million registered users.
For broadcasters, these aggregators can help reach audiences in the growing but increasingly fragmented world of online radio, which can mean anything from a customized playlist on Pandora or Spotify to an iTunes stream.
For now only a fraction of the radio audience is online; John Hogan, chief executive of Clear Channel Media and Entertainment, the company’s radio and online division, said that 98 percent of listening to his company’s stations is still on its terrestrial signals. But it is growing quickly. According to Triton Digital, a company that measures Internet radio audiences, Clear Channel’s online audience has risen 117 percent in the last year. But making money through online radio remains a puzzle, largely because of its royalty structure.
Read more here
Sunday, August 5
Social media stocks lose their luster
The shine is off social media stocks, said Scott Thurm in The Wall Street Journal. “Investors who six months ago clamored for shares of social media firms have turned against them with a vengeance.”
Once touted as being worth $100 billion, Facebook is now valued at less than $65 billion and headed lower. With shares of Groupon and Chinese social network Renren also far below their market debuts, investors are “infinitely more skeptical,” said investment consultant Nick Zaharias.
Read More here
Once touted as being worth $100 billion, Facebook is now valued at less than $65 billion and headed lower. With shares of Groupon and Chinese social network Renren also far below their market debuts, investors are “infinitely more skeptical,” said investment consultant Nick Zaharias.
Read More here
Friday, August 3
The Truth About Pay TV: It’s Still Not Shrinking
Reuters says more than 400,000 Americans have dropped pay TV this year. If you want to evaluate the state of the pay-TV business, you have to include the results from the telco guys, who have been taking share from the cable and satellite guys. And you have to look at numbers for the whole year, not a single quarter. Once you do that, you end up with numbers that are basically flat, give or take a few thousand subscribers.
You can argue that the pay-TV industry’s no-growth or barely-there growth is due to a weak economy and lousy household formation numbers. Or you can argue that it’s because people really are swapping out pay TV for Netflix, Apple TV, etc. Or a mix of both, or whatever.
But for now, at least, you can’t argue that the pay-TV industry is shrinking. Read more here
You can argue that the pay-TV industry’s no-growth or barely-there growth is due to a weak economy and lousy household formation numbers. Or you can argue that it’s because people really are swapping out pay TV for Netflix, Apple TV, etc. Or a mix of both, or whatever.
But for now, at least, you can’t argue that the pay-TV industry is shrinking. Read more here
Americans drop pay-TV
More than 400,000 American homes drop their pay-TV service since the start of the year.
DirecTV Group, the No.1 U.S. satellite TV provider, revealed its first ever quarterly customer losses on Thursday, with some 52,000 homes dropping the service in the second quarter. That was more than analysts expected from a company long seen as the best run video provider in the industry.
Also on Thursday, Time Warner Cable Inc, the No.2 cable provider said it lost more subscribers than analysts expected with 169,000 customers leaving the service. The biggest U.S. TV distributor, Comcast Corp, lost 176,000 video subscribers.
The idea of cord-cutting has gathered steam as several major technology companies have held talks with program makers about putting together TV packages that will be delivered via the Internet. The idea would be to use cheaper, smaller TV packages to attract customers to buy or use their services. So far Google Inc, Intel Corp and Amazon are among those known to have held talks.
Read more here
Also on Thursday, Time Warner Cable Inc, the No.2 cable provider said it lost more subscribers than analysts expected with 169,000 customers leaving the service. The biggest U.S. TV distributor, Comcast Corp, lost 176,000 video subscribers.
The idea of cord-cutting has gathered steam as several major technology companies have held talks with program makers about putting together TV packages that will be delivered via the Internet. The idea would be to use cheaper, smaller TV packages to attract customers to buy or use their services. So far Google Inc, Intel Corp and Amazon are among those known to have held talks.
Read more here
Thursday, August 2
4 reasons investors don't like Facebook
In a little more than two months since its initial public offering, Facebook has gone from being a stock that investors fought to own to one they can't get away from fast enough. Wednesday, it set a new low. Anyone watching the unrelenting drop may wonder how Facebook's star dimmed so quickly on Wall Street. Four reasons:
•Disconnect between serving consumers vs. investors. The fact that Facebook seems more concerned about designing products than finding ways to profit from them is irking investors.
•Overhype from the start.
Read more here
•Disconnect between serving consumers vs. investors. The fact that Facebook seems more concerned about designing products than finding ways to profit from them is irking investors.
•Overhype from the start.
Read more here
Belo: Sinking Newspaper Revs
A.H. Belo, which publishes the Dallas Morning News among other newspapers, saw total revenues decrease 5% from to $109 million in the second quarter of 2012, the company announced Wednesday. Total advertising revenues sank 8%, from second-quarter 2011 to second-quarter 2012, with display ads down 15% to $21.5 million, preprint revenue down 1% to $20 million, and classifieds down 13% to over $13 million. Total digital ad revenues increased 1% to $9 million, while circulation revenues decreased 3% to $34 million.
Last week McClatchy, which publishes newspapers including The Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee and Charlotte Observer, reported that total revenues slipped 4.8% to $299 million in the second quarter of 2012.
Lee Enterprises -- which owns almost 50 daily newspapers, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch -- said total revenues decreased 4.3% to $179 million in the second quarter of 2012, due mostly to a nearly 6% drop in advertising revenue, to $125 million.
Read more here
Last week McClatchy, which publishes newspapers including The Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee and Charlotte Observer, reported that total revenues slipped 4.8% to $299 million in the second quarter of 2012.
Lee Enterprises -- which owns almost 50 daily newspapers, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch -- said total revenues decreased 4.3% to $179 million in the second quarter of 2012, due mostly to a nearly 6% drop in advertising revenue, to $125 million.
Read more here
Tuesday, July 31
A Quarter of E-Commerce Could Be Mobile By 2017
Just about every aspect of desktop migration to devices is accelerating to a pace that many of us couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. ABI Research is now projecting that by the close of 2017, 24.4% of e-commerce will be m-commerce.
The striking estimates are based on what the company calls a “spectacular” doubling of worldwide m-commerce to $65.6 billion in 2011 alone. Rapid adoption of smartphones is driving the consumer side of the equation as developing countries join more mature markets in moving directly to more advanced devices.
Read more here
The striking estimates are based on what the company calls a “spectacular” doubling of worldwide m-commerce to $65.6 billion in 2011 alone. Rapid adoption of smartphones is driving the consumer side of the equation as developing countries join more mature markets in moving directly to more advanced devices.
Read more here
Monday, July 30
Median Writer and Reporter Wages by State
Here’s how journalist wages compare to the national median ($49,192) for writers/authors by state:
Read more here
Read more here
iPhones make Chinese eyes light up
Ask about Apple inside China and you hear little but praise. It is one of the most admired brands in the Middle Kingdom. A survey last year by researchers at Stanford University found that iPad penetration was greater at an elite high school in Beijing than at one in Palo Alto, California. In the first quarter of this year Apple earned $7.9 billion in greater China, making it the firm’s second-biggest market.
In short, Apple’s products are selling fast and likely to sell even faster. Some predict that China will overtake America to become Apple’s largest market within a few years.
Read more here
In short, Apple’s products are selling fast and likely to sell even faster. Some predict that China will overtake America to become Apple’s largest market within a few years.
Read more here
Transfer of Value
Traditional newspapers that move online are about to lose the war against pure players and aggregators. Armed with the conviction their intellectual superiority makes them immune to digital modernity, newspapers neglected today’s internet driving forces: relying on technology to build audiences and the ability to coalesce a community over any range of subjects — even the most mundane ones.
On one side, legacy medias: Great franchises who grew on strong values, such as “pristine” journalism, independence, storytelling, fact-checking, solid editing, respect for the copyright… Along the way, they made their share of mistakes, but, overall, the result is great. After all, at the height of the Fourth Estate’s power, the population was better informed than today’s Facebook cherry-pickers. Now, this (aging) fraternity faces a new generation of media people who build their fiefdom on a completely different set of values. For instance, the notion of copyright has become exceedingly elastic.
Original stories are getting very little traffic due to the poor marketing tactics of old-fashion publishers. But once they are swallowed by the HuffPo’s clever traffic-generation machine, the same journalistic item will make tens or hundred times better traffic-wise. Who is right? Who can look to the better future in the digital world ? Is it the virtuous author carving language-smart headlines or the aggregator generating eye-gobbling phrases thanks to high tech tools? Your guess. Maybe it’s time to wake-up.
Read more here
On one side, legacy medias: Great franchises who grew on strong values, such as “pristine” journalism, independence, storytelling, fact-checking, solid editing, respect for the copyright… Along the way, they made their share of mistakes, but, overall, the result is great. After all, at the height of the Fourth Estate’s power, the population was better informed than today’s Facebook cherry-pickers. Now, this (aging) fraternity faces a new generation of media people who build their fiefdom on a completely different set of values. For instance, the notion of copyright has become exceedingly elastic.
Original stories are getting very little traffic due to the poor marketing tactics of old-fashion publishers. But once they are swallowed by the HuffPo’s clever traffic-generation machine, the same journalistic item will make tens or hundred times better traffic-wise. Who is right? Who can look to the better future in the digital world ? Is it the virtuous author carving language-smart headlines or the aggregator generating eye-gobbling phrases thanks to high tech tools? Your guess. Maybe it’s time to wake-up.
Read more here
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