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Another thing you’ll miss about newspapers

September 28, 2011 by Guy


Ever see an iPad crease? Maybe it can happen, but I bet you can’t read it after that. But a newspaper crease, sometimes that’s the hand of God at work, perhaps a mischevous God testing to see if we’re paying attention, as when a crease merges an f and a t so that “shift” appears as sometime much more interesting. See more on the above from Charles Apple.

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Where people get their news

September 26, 2011 by Guy

They buried the lead. You have to read to nearly the end of a press release from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism to get to what seems to me to be the most important element of a new study by Pew’s Internet & American Life Project, produced in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, asking about where people get their local information:

“While there are a variety of demographic dimensions that are linked to the way people get local news and information, the most striking is the difference between younger and older information consumers. Simply put, one generation into the web, older consumers still rely more heavily on traditional platforms while younger consumers rely more on the internet. Among adults under age 40, the web ranks first or ties for first for 12 of the 16 local topics asked about.”

That’s not earth-shaking, but it’s “the most striking” demographic breakdown, underlining and confirming that younger news consumers’ habit of getting information online is not changing. (Note also a recent Knight Foundation survey of high schoolers and their news habits.)

Also notable to me was the finding on mobile use:

“Nearly half of adults (47%) use mobile devices to get local news and information. Not surprisingly, mobile is particularly popular for ‘out and about’ categories of information, such as restaurants.”

Perhaps the only thing in the study results that really surprised me, though, was the high percentage of people who reported doing things that Pew calls “participating” in the news — and note here, again, how this group focuses on the Internet:

“And 41% of all adults can be considered ‘local news participators’ because they contribute their own information via social media and other sources, add to online conversations, and directly contribute articles about the community. Both these groups are substantially more likely than others to use the internet to get local news and information on almost all topics.”

Posted in Broadcast media, Mobile media, Online media, Print media, Social media | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

Another advance toward personalized news

September 20, 2011 by Guy


This one feels a little different: the Wall Street Journal has launched a new Facebook app, but it keeps the user on Facebook the entire time while also delivering the Journal’s subscription-protected content (though sponsorships may allow that content to be delivered free within the app). That seems like a huge advance in the current, Facebook-dominated landscape.

But the bigger news, as Megan Garber reports at Niemen Journalism Lab, is the app advances the concept of personalized news, making “every user an editor” and “elevating the role of people as curators of content.” People already have been curating content — that’s the essence of sharing links — but this app seeks to make it a more seemless process, and the fewer clicks needed to do what the person wants to do online, the more pleasing the Web experience. It raises the question, will people be more willing to pay for the news if it’s this easy to interact with it?

9/26/11 UPDATE: The Washington Post also has an app to feed news directly to Facebook, but it’s even broader, including news from partners The Associated Press, Reuters, Mashable and SB Nation. At Poynter.org, Jeff Sonderman sounds a note of caution about such apps — asking, among other things, whether news organizations can trust Facebook as a partner — but I still think the movement of the audience in a fragmented, digital world makes it imperative to find ways to make it easy to stay in front of people’s eyes, and that means only having your own website and linking to it may not be quite enough. We’ll see if people adopt the apps.

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Follow your audience’s lead

September 14, 2011 by Guy


The folks at insidenova.com, the website of the News & Messenger in Manassas and Prince William County, Va., stumbled into an excellent example of how to respond to what you see happening locally in social media. After severe flooding in the region last week, people found themselves without a clearinghouse for information and discussion — but they gravitated to the insidenova Facebook page and were filling it with just such information. So, seeing that, interim managing editor Kari Pugh created a flood information clearinghouse page on Facebook. In just a few hours it had garnered about 250 “likes,” and the community discussion on it was mostly self-sustaining. The community is doing the organizing and exchange of information, but the news organization has facilitated that and put itself at the hub of the conversation.

Posted in Social media | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments »

Social media still growing strong

September 13, 2011 by Guy


You could summarize the results of the new Nielsen Social Media Report as “all the trends you’ve heard about are still happening,” except there are a couple of details that seemed a little surprising. Topping the list: Internet users over the age of 55 are driving the growth of social networking through the mobile Internet. I did not know that and would not have guessed it. Less surprising is social media’s growing ubiquity: Social networks and blogs account for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet, and nearly 4 in 5 active Internet users visit social networks and blogs.

I can’t tell how good or bad some numbers in the report are, such as that Americans spend 22.5 percent of their Internet time on social networks and blogs, and just 2.6 percent on current events & global news. As Steve Myers points out at Poynter.org, blogs could include news blogs, and portals post news stories. And he doesn’t point it out, but many news organizations now make social networks, especially Facebook — where Nielsen says Americans spend more time on than on any other U.S. website — a key part of their efforts to engage the audience, so people could be on social networks and still be on a news-related site.

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How newspapers commemorate tragedy

September 12, 2011 by Guy

A friend and former colleague gets irritated by the way the media in general make big deals of round numbers — the 10th, the 100th, the 500th, the 1,000th whatever — and the 10th anniversary of 9/11 was no exception. He posted on Facebook, “Sept. 11: blow it out every year, or don’t blow it out at all.” I understand his point, but the media attach greater significance to big, round numbers because that’s human nature; if we didn’t do it, people would ask why because they themselves (with a few exceptions such as my friend) do it. So if you look over the Sept. 11 pages archived by the Newseum, for the most part you’ll see attempts to note the weight the date carried. Not all of them attempted to “blow it out,” but many did. At Poynter.org, Julie Moos highlights 25 front pages that she felt convey the power of deliberative design: “By using tower imagery, illustration, flags and iconic photos, they carry the power of the moment.” One that didn’t make Moos’ list but is extremely evocative is the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a very arty design of two arms either reaching into the air or grasping at it, with a person falling between them:

Cleveland Plain Dealer

None of Media General’s pages from the day made the 25, but as you can see below there was quite a range — from pages that look almost like any other day to ones qualifying as keepsakes. What’s most striking may be that there are no two that look very much alike.

Richmond Times-Dispatch Tampa Tribune Winston-Salem Journal Bristol Herald-Courier Charlottesville Daily Progress Culpeper Star-Exponent Danville Register and Bee Dothan Eagle Hickory Daily Record Jackson County Floridan The McDowell News Morning News Mooresville Tribune News and Messenger The News-Herald Opelika-Auburn News Statesville Record and Landmark The News Virginian

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Earth-shaking news coverage

August 24, 2011 by Guy

Virginia Tech seismograph, WSLS
Tuesday’s earthquake was a perfect “example of a breaking news story that called for audience engagement to be at the center of news reporting,” as Matt DeRienzo, a group editor of Journal Register Company’s publications in Connecticut, wrote in a blog post describing his company’s new-gathering efforts. I quote him mainly because the Journal Register currently is pointed to as a digital-first model, which a heavy emphasis on the Web and on social media, and yet as I read what DeRienzo describes I was struck by the parallels with what I knew had gone on at a number of the properties in my own Media General. JRC gets plenty of positive press, we don’t, so I’ll point out a few of the success stories.

In the most detailed story I have received so far, Ike Walker at WCMH in Columbus, Ohio, describes a big success using Twitter — and key to it is something mentioned a few months ago in a post by The Lost Remote:

“Within a minute of the quake hitting here our email inbox was filled with people asking what had happened. We tried to answer as many of them via email as possible but immediately switched our strategy to social media. Within a few minutes we had started the hashtag #columbusquake and were asking for people to share their stories and locations. The #columbusquake hashtag generated a large number of submissions and made it easier to track conversations in real-time with our users. Lesson learned: when you have a big event like this and you want to dominate the conversation at least on Twitter start a hashtag.”

Beyond Twitter, he has more often-repeated lessons — have staff dedicated to Web-first efforts, pay attention to what people in your audience are saying, and respond to them:

“As people continued to send us stories we used them on air and then created a Google map with pinpoints to map all of the stories showing how widespread the reports were. Because the reports were coming in so fast we had to dedicate a person to handling the map. I don’t know yet how many people clicked on the map however the story got almost 30k page views.

“The conversation continued on Facebook with our staff jumping in and engaging users.”

Kevin Justus at WSPA in Greenville/Spartanburg, S.C., says his station was soliciting information from the audience via social media 20 minutes before others in the market:

“Immediately after we felt the tremor we sent out a simple ‘Did anyone else feel that shaking?’ on Facebook and Twitter. Within 10 seconds we had more than 50 comments, so we knew it was an earthquake. We continued to cover the story on social media as the information came in. Our Facebook wall became a forum for our user’s experience with the earthquake.”

And cross-promote your online and social efforts, not only purely as promotion but also because during a news event such as this, phone lines and websites might be overwhelmed. Kari Pugh, the interim managing editor at the News & Messenger/insidenova.com in Prince William County, Va., just outside Washington, says she heard from readers that the phone and Internet were so overwhelmed in the region that the only news they were getting at times was from text relaying the updates to the insidenova.com Facebook page:

“We gained about 300 Facebook fans yesterday, and we were the only news source for people because Internet and cell and landline phone lines were clogged. They said they were able to get our FB updates via text. We posted continuous updates about damage, traffic, evacuations, aftershocks from the time it happened til about 1:30 a.m.”

(For a refresher on tips for “mastering live news,” have a look back a post on the subject at Steve Buttry’s blog.)

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Your audience is not a monolith

August 23, 2011 by Guy

A survey from Ad Age shows why news sites — or any content provider — need to be concerned about comments on the site and ways to engage the audience. In my own experience, people my age and older often seem baffled that anyone even bothers to comment on things they see on the Web, and that is reflected in the survey:

“Fully half of the 1,003 households that took part in our online survey said that adding more tools for engagement would have zero impact on the likelihood that they would visit a news site. Add in the 13% who said they would be less likely to visit and you get nearly two thirds of site visitors seemingly uninterested in having comments, photos and videos from their peers mixed in with the news content from the staff reporters and editors.”

But breaking down the numbers changes the picture substantially:

“Younger millennials (18- to 24-year-olds) are three times as likely as those 55 and older to say that engagement tools will make them more likely to visit a site.

“Almost 80% of the 55-plus crowd said they rarely or never comment on stories, compared to only 24% of the 18- to 24-year-olds and 27% of the 25- to 34-year-olds.”

As Matt Carmichael sums up in the Ad Age post, the younger generations “aren’t building the same news habits as previous generations who are keeping print afloat.” Online, where your organization’s future is, you have to pay attention to the habits those groups are developing.

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Are relationships ‘transactions’?

August 16, 2011 by Guy

Having said in the past that while I was not entirely comfortable with using “brand” as the modern term of discussion for a journalist’s reputation but accepted it as the term already in wide use, I find myself now saying I’m not ready to make a similar leap to describe the online interactions between journalists and their audience as “transactions,” as Lewis DVorkin does at Forbes. He explains:

“Now, journalism is not commerce and it’s not advertising. But the Web’s impact on the news media is not dissimilar. No longer is the journalist addressing the abstract notion of ‘the reader.’ On the Web, the author connects one at a time with individual readers, right down to the IP address. That means journalists now must engage, or ‘transact,’ accordingly.”

Although I can acknowledge it’s just a degree of a semantic difference, and we may both be looking for the same end result, “transaction” doesn’t feel quite human enough to me.

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One argument for a leaky paywall

August 12, 2011 by Guy

New York Times logo
Felix Salmon makes the case for the New York Times’ version of a paywall, which in the Times’ case is a “leaky” wall, not hard to avoid and, as Salmon points out, not even trying to block a great deal of traffic. The argument is that letting access remain fairly easy encourages frequent visitors, and then the paywall reminds them of how they can pay for this thing they like so much. Though to me that sounds like putting up a sign on an open park saying it costs $5 to enter the park, then hiring a bum to carry a jar around and poke people while asking if they’ve paid yet. If the argument carries water, why not have no paywall but have a prominent button on every page where people can choose to pay as much as they like? If they WANT to pay to support the Times because they love it so much, that should work, shouldn’t it? Have Sally Struthers record a video intro. “Just $5 a day can feed an investigative reporter who otherwise would sit home in his underwear and blog. He’s waiting.”

Not that I’m against the idea that people should pay for news. I’m just on the fence myself on the topic of paywalls. I can see merit to the argument that paywalls inevitably will turn news sites into niche products targeting a wealthier demographic rather than general-interest sites benefitting the public at-large without regard to payment. However, that’s kind of what newspapers have become anyway, while television (free news) has become the main place most people get their news. There are varying approaches to paywalls. As I said a couple days ago, the experiments continue.

8/16/2011 UPDATE: At Poynter.org, Jeff Sonderman makes an excellent point about “leaky” paywalls — that essentially is the same pay model as is used for the print edition. More:

“The Newspaper Association of America has long claimed there are 2.3 readers for every print edition circulated — which means more people were picking up a loose paper at their kitchen table, coffee shop or subway station than were buying one. And when someone drops a quarter into a newspaper box on the street, you could get away with taking an extra copy (or all of them).

“So, if it’s always been possible on any given day to pick up the local paper somewhere for free, why did people ever pay? Not because they had to, but because it was easier to get it placed on their doorstep every morning (convenience), because they felt if they were going to read it every day they ought to pay (duty), or because they wanted to support the institution and people that produced it (appreciation).

“Those are the same three reasons someone might subscribe to the The New York Times’ digital content.”

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