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Archive for the ‘Online media’ Category

A blip or the start of a trend

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on May 3, 2011)
The New York Times reports today, “For the first time in 20 years, the number of homes in the United States with television sets has dropped.” It’s not a gigantic drop — 96.7 percent of American households now own sets, down from 98.9 percent — but the unanswered question cited in the story is whether this is the start of a trend because part of the drop is attributed to young adults doing without TV; whatever they watch, they get online. It may be a TV parallel to what has happened with phones, with many young people increasingly doing without landline phones, relying just on their cell phones. So why bring this up in a blog devoted to news? Together with the time-shifting already going on in TV watching due to DVRs, this obviously has implications for the TV ad revenue model, which has implications for everyone — just as changing consumer behaviors have socked newspapers’ advertising model, which in turn socked newsroom (along with every other department’s) budgets.

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Keeping an eye on different audiences

Posted in Online media, Social media, tagged , , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on April 26, 2011)
An article from emarketer.com (Nicole McMullin of Richmond.com pointed it out) points up differences in the reading habits of two audiences: those who find content through searches, and those who find it through links in social media such as Facebook. Links from social media are far outnumbered by search, but social media is much more likely to link to news and entertainment stories, which happen to be an awful lot of what we do.

The issue is that people who come in via links in social media “have fewer page views per session and a higher bounce rate” — they are less engaged than people who come in from a search link.

It seems that the lesson in this simply is to pay attention to both your social media links and what you are doing to optimize your site for search engines to find your content. You can’t drop social media because that’s the forum where people are most likely to want to share what they find interesting, but you can’t ignore SEO because that’s how people who might be the most interested in a particular topic you are covering will find your story.

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It ought to be SOP

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on April 19, 2011)
Poynter.org has some interesting details about the Pulitzer Prize the L.A. Times won for its investigation of outrageous public salaries in Bell, Calif. (among the more interesting details to me, as an editor and former reporter, is that a story can’t get on A1 in L.A. if it’s not filed by 2:30 p.m., Pacific time — before most stories at almost any paper in the Eastern time zone are even filed), but one thing that stands out is a little function that the Times took on as a result of the reaction to the stories:

“Once the Bell city salaries became public, town activists began filing open records requests to learn more. The City of Bell was often slow to respond to public records requests so the Times created a tool to help citizens get the answers they deserve.

“’As part of our coverage, we created a public records request form, to help people to get information from their local governments. One of our city desk assistants still answers those calls and helps people with their public records filings,’ Gottlieb said.

“Then, the Times created a special online DocumentCloud section where readers can share public documents they discover. The section also teaches readers about their rights to read public information and explains what California law says about open records and open meetings. The special section includes public documents that Times reporters obtain on a wide range of topics.”

It’s great the the Times started doing that, but it seems like something that a major news organization — certainly one of that size and prominence — should have been doing already. Maybe every one should.

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How to use SEO in the newsroom

Posted in Online media, tagged on May 15, 2011| 1 Comment »

(Originally posted April 5, 2011)
One piece of a Q&A interview with the editor of Slate hits on a topic that remains a fault line in the newsroom: writing with search engines in mind. I’m happy to read David Plotz’s response because it sounds like the right way to handle it — you don’t let your knowledge of what gets picked up by search engines affect what you choose to cover, but once you write about something you sure as heck make sure you’re doing what you can to be sure search engines will find it. The relevant Q and A:

How much are Slate writers and editors encouraged to think about stuff like SEO when crafting a piece?

If there’s a story that we want to do just because we want to, we go ahead and do it. But when we’ve done it, we look to figure out what people are searching around this topic, what they are going to be searching for, and how we can ensure our menu lines and the various things that search engines pay attention to reflect how readers are actually searching.

Sometimes we see that people are looking for such and such topic on the Web, and if someone has a great angle on it, we decide how to do the story. So of course we keep an eye on it – it would be a mistake not to keep an eye on it.

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Lessons learned from a killing

Posted in Online media, tagged , , , , on May 15, 2011| 2 Comments »

(Originally posted on Feb. 25, 2011)
Allbritton Communications unceremoniously demoted TBD.com to the status of glorified E! channel this week. If you remember all the way back to last year, when some people (like me) had high hopes for TBD as a model for local news online, read CJR’s interview with Jim Brady, who stepped down from leading TBD late last year when it must have become obvious that Allbritton intended to decapitate TBD. One thing that is true is that TBD’s model — aggregating news throughout the community, whether from partners or from competitors — was a success, as far as measured by traffic: In January, just five months after its debut, it attracted 1.5 million unique visitors, nearly double its December total of 838,000 and far surpassing November’s total, 715,000, the internal figures show; over the past three months, TBD’s traffic was substantially higher than Web sites operated by local TV stations WRC (Channel 4), WUSA (Channel 9) and WTTG (Channel 5), according to Compete.com.

“I’d even go so far to say that that model is, for a local news site, sort of indisputable. The debate over whether you work with people in your community, or whether you just say, ‘Here’s our website, and here’s all the stuff we produced today and that’s it,’ I think that has to be over. Newspapers had that power because they had the power of distribution. But on the web, people are going to go to all different sites, and so if you can be that place that connects people to good content that they’re interested in regardless of source, then you’re going to be the place they start their day. And on the web, that’s how you win: you have to be in somebody’s short list of sites they always go to. People would say, ‘Why are you linking off-site? You’re driving people away from your site!’ But what’s the counter-argument to that, that if you never link off-site, then people will never leave your website?

“I mean, they’re going to leave your website anyway, whether it’s to go check their e-mail or go to TMZ.com or whatever. So the concept that you’re losing people by doing that, is actually the opposite of what’s actually happening — which is that you’re building loyalty by performing the role you’re supposed to perform, which is to be a conduit for useful information.”

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Manifesto destinyo

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Jan. 20, 2011)
Some (a lot of) folks think newsrooms are full of pinkos, so I like to take advantage of that cultural prejudice to indulge myself by gorging a little on a manifesto here and there. In the 21st century, they’re a little scarce. Former Guardian science editor, letters editor, arts editor and literary editor Tim Radford has condensed his journalistic experience into a handy set of rules — a manifesto for the simple scribe. But you need not be a newspaper writer. The key to this manifesto is the conveying of information in the news, as described clearly in No. 5: “No one will ever complain because you have made something too easy to understand.” And those of you who appear on TV could just as easily render No. 6, “Nobody has to read this crap,” as, “Nobody has to listen to this crap.” The news is the news, information is information, so if your job is the news, everything in this manifesto relates to what you do in one way or another.

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Counterintuitively, the Web seems to push you into the world

Posted in Online media, Social media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Jan. 18, 2011)
It hasn’t worked this way for me, but one of the many branches of the Pew Research Center says that Internet users are far more likely to be active in real-world social groups. And I think most of the groups they’re talking about don’t involve dressing up in medieval garb. So why am I posting this is a news blog? Just as a way of reminding us all that people are active in their social networks, and people talk about things casually among friends, including topics in the news. Besides, I had to update this blog. I’ve had a cold and been away a while.

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The trend continues

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Jan. 5, 2011)
The internet is now the main source of news for those in the 18-29 year-old bracket. According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the internet has, for the first time, surpassed TV as the primary news source for the demo. And among those 30 to 49, the internet is on track to equal, or perhaps surpass, television as the main source of national and international news within the next few years. I point this out not because it’s a new thing but because it’s a continuation.

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Crossing the digital divide

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Dec. 21, 2010)
About a month ago, Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center wrote about three signs your newsroom isn’t ready to cross the digital divide. A great many new-media and journalism-innovation types heaped praise on it. I wanted to post something here about it but struggled to figure out what to say. Thankfully, there is now a followup that helps: a Q and A with John Robinson, the editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, about changes that Michele’s original post prompted him to make. The Greensboro paper’s weekday circulation is under 65,000, so reading about changes in that newsroom is not at all like reading about structural changes in a place like Orlando, Atlanta or Dallas.

Read the whole thing, but here’s what seems to me the biggest change: Starting Jan. 1, the News & Record’s digital editor essentially becomes the No. 2 editor in the room, answering to John and carrying “the authority to direct anyone in news to do what is needed digitally. … He also is charged with knowing what the reporters are working on and making sure that they file online reports when we need them to versus when they get to it.”

In his own blog post about why he decided to make the changes, John wrote that when he read McLellan’s post, “I realized that our newsroom isn’t ready. That embarrassed me and inspired me.”

On a related note, not quite three weeks ago the new CEO of the Journal Register Co. made a much-discussed presentation about efforts to get that company transformed to a digital-first news operation, and his remarks share a key element with what John is trying: If you truly want to make a change like that, the people in charge have to be primarily digital, not rooted in the traditional platform.

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Lists and predictions

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Dec. 20, 2010)
One of the standby features that come out at the end of a year is predictions for next year. The Nieman Journalism Lab has been rolling out predictions for journalism in 2011. Give them a read, but look for trends and broad agreement. The views expressed are all over the map. Notably, I haven’t seen anyone predict the closing of any big-city newspapers — which was a popular prediction to make a couple of years ago — but one guy predicted big trouble, if not the end, for the syndication model.

On a related note, a contributor to Mashable offered his own top 10 predictions for the news media. It being the tech-oriented Mashable, the predictions are heavier on the tech side of things than the ones at Nieman are.

UPDATE 12/22: On a related note, Ken Doctor on Newsonomics brings us his list of 11 conventional news wisdoms that will be tested in 2011.

UPDATE 1/3/11: Belatedly, David Carr of the New York Times chimes in with his own media predictions.

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