The divide between having ideas and reporting

Increasingly think-tanks are doing journalism—not just blogging and tweeting but foreign reporting, too. Deskbound journalists, meanwhile, are embracing data and spreadsheets.

Unlike non-profits, such as ProPublica and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, think-tanks are in journalism more to promote ideas than to inform the public or expose wrongdoing. Much of what they publish is about policy. For officials and politicians, writes Jeremy Shapiro of the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank, “The thinkers are the validators. They will write op-eds, give pithy quotes to important newspapers, and appear on network news programmes.” Think-tank journalism comes closest to the traditional sort when it is in the field.

For journalists, the news is not so good. Twitter, blogs and newsletters can get a think-tank’s ideas to its audience direct. Hence a relationship that used to be symbiotic, with wonks helping create news and hacks distributing it, is becoming competitive—especially in the battle for influential readers, such as politicians.

Read more at The Economist

China tries to restrict foreign entertainment online

China’s TV regulator said that, from April, any foreign series or film would need approval before being shown online. Chinese media say that regulators are also considering limiting the number of foreign series shown online to a specific proportion of total output. The new rules appear aimed at closing one of the biggest loopholes in China’s control of its media: on terrestrial TV, for example, foreign dramas are banned in prime time. Many are forbidden altogether.

Read more at The Economist

Surveillance is the advertising industry’s new business model

By monitoring the websites people visit, these companies can infer their location, income, family size, education, age, employment and much more. One data firm has compiled a billion profiles of potential customers, each with an average of 50 attributes. Consumers are lumped into “segments” such as “men in trouble”—presumed to have relationship problems because they are shopping for chocolates and flowers—or “burdened by debt: small-town singles”. When people visit websites, advertisers bid to show them precisely targeted ads. The auctions take milliseconds and the ad is displayed when the website loads.

Targeted advertising has advantages for consumers. It pays for many popular websites which people can enjoy free of charge. Relevant ads are probably more useful to consumers than irrelevant ones. But any business based on covert surveillance is vulnerable to a backlash.

Someone who is categorised by a data broker as a “motorcycle enthusiast” might find his rates for medical or accident insurance rise. “Men in trouble” might find it harder to get a job. Until objections were raised, OkCupid, a dating website, used to sell data about people’s drug and alcohol consumption. It is not going to be to anybody’s advantage to have such information about them widely available.

Read more at The Economist

TV is increasingly for the old

According to new research by media analyst Michael Nathanson of Moffett Nathanson Research. ..The median age of a broadcast or cable television viewer during the 2013-2014 TV season was 44.4 years old, a 6 percent increase in age from four years earlier. Audiences for the major broadcast network shows are much older and aging even faster, with a median age of 53.9 years old, up 7 percent from four years ago. Read more in the Washington Post

65% of smartphone users check their device upon waking

A third of all smartphone users in the U.K.—or 11 million adults—check their phone within five minutes of waking, according a report published Thursday from consulting group Deloitte. 67% of 18 to 24-year-olds do so within 15 minutes. And there is a set routine. Most smartphone owners first check their text messages (33%), followed by e-mail (25%), and then social networks (14%), says the report, based on data from a survey of 4,000 people.

The pattern of phone “addiction” continues during the day. One in six adults looks at their phones more than 50 times a day. 18 to 24-year-olds check their device on average 53 times a day, and for 13% the figure is more than 100 times.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

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