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Archive for the ‘Print media’ Category

Trends in news consumption

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

(Originally posted on Sept. 13, 2010)

The good news: Americans are spending more time with the news. People say they spend 70 minutes getting news from various sources, the Pew Research Center says, the highest amount of time reported since the mid-1990s. From there, though, the news is a little murky except that news seen on digital platforms is taking off.

And there is unambiguous bad news for printed newspapers: While 26 percent of all Americans say they read a print newspaper yesterday, that figure falls to just 8 percent among adults younger than 30. And, as you can see in the chart above, people spend less time with the newspaper than with the other media options they have.

And an interesting note: 33 percent regularly use search engines to get news on topics of interest, up from 19 percent in 2008. That points up the growing importance of making sure you are writing online headlines with search engines in mind — and making sure you understand how search engines work.

UPDATE: Related to the search engine note above, during a conference call of news directors today Jason Clough of WNCN pointed out the importance of adding tags to videos posted to YouTube. During coverage of Hurricane Earl, the first videos the station loaded to YouTube weren’t getting much traffic, but once staffers started adding every tag they could think of that people might use to find Earl video, the viewer stats shot way up. (WNCN posts its video to YouTube, by the way, because linking to the YouTube video from Facebook makes the video viewable on mobile devices, while sometimes video posted directly to Facebook is not viewable on some mobile devices. Good tip to remember.)

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Then and now – an idea to steal

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

(Originally posted on Aug. 27, 2010)

A post at the Knight Digital Media Center blog points to an excellent project that is “within reach of even small local news organizations” to emulate: CNN’s “Hurricane Katrina: Then and Now.” As Amy Gahran writes:

“When you stroll down a familiar street, or glance at a familiar landmark, your mind’s eye superimposes how that scene looked in years or decades past, under typical and extreme circumstances.

“That common experience is what makes CNN.com’s recent photo retrospective Katrina Then and Now so compelling—and it’s something other news organizations can emulate, not just for disaster remembrances…

“The result is a gallery of 31 haunting photos.

“In each image, a hand holds up a 2005 photo of Katrina’s devastation—in front of that same scene, but in the present day. The images align to create the strong illusion of a window into the past.”

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A moment to feel some nostalgia

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

(Originally posted on July 16, 2010)

Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten reflects on the ways the newsroom has changed in recent years:

“Call me a grumpy old codger, but I liked the old way better. For one thing, I used to have at least a rudimentary idea of how a newspaper got produced: On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.”

He finds much wrong, to his traditionalist’s eye, in the new, Web-oriented way of doing things. He has some good points. He also seems to recognize what’s in the past is in the past and staying there. We all have to.

UPDATE: As if to underline my last line (what was my last until I started this), along comes a look at the implications of the rapid growth of mobile Web use, which within five years is expected to surpass Web use on computers:

“It won’t be enough just to build branded mobile applications that repurpose content across all of the different platforms. That’s like newspapers taking the print experience and replicating it on the web as they tried back in the 1990s. Rather, we will need to rethink, remix and repackage information for an entirely different modality than platforms of yore.”

In other words, if you think the newsroom has changed, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

This video may or may not make you feel better about it.

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Trust and relevance

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

(Originally posted July 12, 2010)

An online media consultant makes a powerful case that ews organizations that fail to engage their audience in social networks are shortsighted. First, the relevant behavior:

“Ask someone under 30 what websites they visit first thing in the morning.  They’ll list a number of social networking and aggregation sites.  Most of them don’t actually visit media sites at all.  Rather, they’ve come to know that ‘If the news is important, it will find me.’  And, they’re unlikely to outgrow this behaviour.  That’s why according to Compete, Facebook now beats Google as a referral site to large portals such as AOL, Yahoo and MSN.

“Social media is a media site’s new best friend.  In fact, a recent Hitwise study revealed that over 75% of Facebook referrals will return to print and broadcast media sites in the same week.  Twitter is the fastest growing video referrer and it’s users watch a stream for 63% longer than a Google user.”

Then, the argument:

“Why is social media so powerful?

“Two reasons. Trust: we don’t send our friends crap to read. Relevance: we’re more likely to have common interests with our social network and therefore our links are more likely to be relevant.

“Ah, trust and relevance. Sound familiar?”

By refusing to listen to and engage their audience by ignoring social media, limiting comments and erecting pay walls, she argues, “they are destroying trust and hastening their irrelevance. They are destroying the core, not protecting it.”

Yes, it takes time to pay attention to Facebook and the rest, but don’t let it languish.

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New technology, new role

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

(Originally posted July 9, 2010)

Required reading for any journalist: Rethinking the Role of the Journalist in the Participatory Age on PBS’s Mediashift blog. The premise essentially is that the gatekeeping role that news organizations traditionally have held — we report the news, we decide what’s important and how it’s played — can’t exist on the Web, where we can still report the news but have almost no control over anything else:

“New media technologies do not just offer journalists new ways of doing their old job. A newspaper online is not the same as a newspaper in print. On paper, the newspaper delivers a bundle of stories, ads and amusements, such as the crossword puzzle. On the web, the newspaper package is unbundled into individual fragments.”

And that much is true. Ask someone who keeps track of your site’s traffic how many people come to any story from the front page compared to the story’s overall traffic. Through social networks and search, people are doing their own gatekeeping.

But online media brings new roles for us:

“(D)igital media is more participatory, collaborative and distributed, and less finalized, individualized and author-centric than previous forms of media. The journalist still matters. But as Tom Rosenstiel has suggested, they shift from being the gatekeeper to being an authenticator of information, a sense-maker to derive meaning, a navigator to help orient audiences and a community leader to engage audiences.”

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The real story

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

(Originally posted July 6, 2010)

A former newspaper publisher with a background as a reporter and editor has a common complaint about a recent story on an emotional meeting he attended: The reporter’s account of the meeting was dry as dirt. He doesn’t link to the story or identify the newspaper, so we can’t tell exactly how much the story failed to capture the meeting, but what he describes is absolutely commonplace, and not just in stories about meetings. Just last week, while thumbing through a stack of various MG papers, I saw a story about a public hearing on a topic that was stirring local residents’ emotions. At least, that was implied. The story did not show that. There was nothing to provide a reader the sense of what it was like to be in that room. Not only that, all the highest quotes in the story came from elected officials. Members of the public, the majority of those who spoke at the hearing, were relegated to the bottom of the story.

One of the important things any story should do is answer the question “What was it like?” (or, if the story is about a person, “What is he/she like?”), and one of the cardinal rules about stories that involve regular people to get the regular people high up and the talking heads (politicians, or anyone likely to talk at length without saying anything, or anything that isn’t predictable) down low, or out entirely. As writing coaches often say, how would you tell the story in person to your mother, or a friend? If you think about your story like that, you’re less likely to fall into a formulaic, official-sounding presentation.

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How Web-first publication looks at a small newsroom

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

(Originally posted on June 21, 2010)

After all the cuts every newsroom in the country has made in recent years, “We don’t have enough people to do that” may be the most-used sentence (or thought) in response to any suggested change, especially asking newsrooms to start posting to Facebook and/or Twitter posts and the Web throughout the day. The editor of the 6,000-circulation paper in Middletown, Conn., says she heard it, but she found a way to get her staff started. Her staff, besides her, consists of three copy editors, two people in sports, and an unspecified but obviously small number of reporters, so it’s larger than I would expect most 6,000-circulation papers have, but not by much. Consider her general approach and see if any of it could work for you. Consider especially that when her copy editors said they didn’t have time to do their regular work plus the Web work, she changed everyone’s jobs, including her own — and let the editors themselves work together to figure out how to accomplish the new work.

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Action

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

(Originally posted on June 17, 2010)

If you have ever been in a newsroom that has been through a reorganization, there’s a good chance you noticed at some point that while titles had changed and people may have changed places, the actual tasks being performed weren’t different and the stories being produced weren’t different. <a href=”http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/to-change-an-organization-focus-on-action-not-the-org-chart/” title=”It’s not true of all reorgs, but it’s common”>It’s not true of all reorgs, but it’s common</a>, Steve Buttry writes. Focus on actions and the desired result, not the newsroom structure:

“Every organization has strong default settings – that gravitational pull – that will override most changes in the org chart. … You achieve innovation by changing what people are doing. Structural changes need to be something that is incidental along the way. In that way, the tweak in the org chart is seen as logical because people can see that it supports the new things you are doing.”

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The younger part of your audience

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

(Originally posted on June 9, 2010)

AJR boils down a Pew report on Millenials, those people born after 1980, and looks at the implications for news organizations. Relevant highlights:

“Millennials are the best-educated generation in history. Fifty-four percent of today’s 18- to 28-year-olds have had at least some college education, compared with 49 percent of Gen Xers, 36 percent of Boomers and 24 percent of the Silent Generation (age 65-plus) when they were the same age. While younger people are historically less likely to vote in political elections, in 2008 the gap between voters over and under 30 was the narrowest it’s been since 1972, when 18-year-olds were granted the right to vote.”

“Slightly more of them cite television as their main source of news, at 65 percent, with the Internet in second place at 59 percent. … Of those who cited television, 43 percent said they get most of their news from cable news, only 18 percent from the major networks and 16 percent from local TV. Only 24 percent said they got most of their news from newspapers. In a separate Pew study released in March, 35 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said they follow the news most or all of the time. That’s a smaller percentage than older generations, but still seems kind of impressive.”

The main point of the article appears to be to try to jostle some of the traditionalists out of the idea that these young people will ever become more like our traditional readers (subscribers) and viewers, citing that 83 percent say they SLEEP WITH THEIR CELL PHONES and that “This is a generation that identifies technology use as the main difference between itself and other generations.” Unfortunately, the article comes no closer than any others to coming up with the answer to, “Now what?”

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So what does this mean for the media?

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

(Originally posted on June 3, 2010)

Using the Internet rewires the human brain, and the result often is worse comprehension of information: “Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”

A South Carolina journalism professor read the above-linked article and wonders in a blog post whether multimedia journalism is a positive thing, even though he and others in his school enthusiastically back it. Maybe he’s asking the wrong question.

Is it the inherent nature of the Web that promotes “cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning,” or is it the way that information on many — if not almost all — websites is presented that causes that? How “busy” is a typical Web page? If you have a page full of distractions and no visual center of gravity, with text that does not clearly and quickly tell you what you need to know, you create the same problem as on a similar-looking printed page.

6/7/10 UPDATE: The Nieman Journalism Lab provides some thoughtful analysis of the hubbub on the above issue.

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