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