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Posts Tagged ‘audience’

Keith Urban is not an ovum (Urbahn either)

Posted in Mobile media, Online media, Social media, tagged , , , on May 17, 2011| Leave a Comment »

visualization of the bin Laden death tweets

Brian Solis reflects on the spread of news about Osama bin Laden’s death and, from there, launches into a brief history of media on the Web. (I’m not exaggerating much; the title is “The End of the Destination Web and the Revival of the Information Economy.”) Not only is it chock full of information, it’s chock full of visuals, such as the above, which has nothing to do with the fertilization of a human egg.

You may wonder about some of his statements or observations — probably about where he switches from what has gone before to what is going on now (or needs to be, for media organizations that hope to survive). But it’s a useful read for journalists as a reminder of the wider information world and its continued movement.

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Where people go when big news breaks

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

(Originally posted on May 12, 2011)
Stats from the news of Osama bin Laden’s death illustrate that an old piece of wisdom favorable to TV news remains true:

“The lesson is clear: when big news breaks, people flock to TV. And when they’re online, they still flock to TV, or else they go to the main sites they think of for providing good fast web-native news. Other news sites, like NYT and WaPo, are lucky just to break into the top ten. They’re very good at what they do. But the broad population still doesn’t think of them as being real-time in the way that TV and the web are.”

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Nothing new here

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

(Originally posted on May 9, 2011)
The headline on the new Pew study, Navigating News Online, was “Where people go, how they get there and what lures them away,” but it would have been just as accurate and more to the point if it had been “Every trend we’ve reported in the past few years is still true.” There also is no recommendation on what any news organization should in light of these trends (it says, “All of this suggests that news organizations might need a layered and complex strategy for serving audiences and also for monetizing them,” which might be more accurately translated as, “We don’t know for sure what you should try”). A summary:

Most folks who visit news sites are infrequent visitors and don’t stay very long at all — less than five minutes a month. Yes, A MONTH. A small group — very small, in some cases — comes more often and spends more than an hour a month.

Google continues to be the top place driving traffic to news sites, but social media, and Facebook in particular, are growing fast as news referring sources. The study confirms, however, that Twitter barely registers as a referring source. (Note that is a general observation; if you are getting great results from Twitter, by all means keep using it.)

The “share” tools that appear alongside most news stories rank among the most clicked-on links on news sites.

One bit of good news: The age of news consumers online is on par with Internet users overall. In other words, not the mostly older (I won’t say “dying”) group that is the audience for so much traditional media.

5/17/11 UPDATE: Some people have pointed out problems with the Pew study, among them Steve Buttry. Steve lists five problems, but each of the five is a lengthy complaint. They fall generally under the headings of methodology and sloppy stats. Perhaps the most damning criticism for most journalists would be No. 5:

“Whatever validity this study has is heavily skewed toward national news because PEJ studied only the top 25 news sites, based on unique visitors for the first nine months of 2010. Of the 25 sites studied, at most six could be described as local news sites, the sites of the Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle and Chicago Tribune. And some, if not all, of those have significant national audiences, at least for a sports franchise they follow. With that heavy a national sample, the study is nearly worthless for local news sites.”

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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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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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Like a foreign population

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

(Originally posted on Oct. 12, 2010)

The “Reflections of a Newsosaur” blog reflects today on a recent study of young media consumers by BVA, a French market research firm, and <a href=”http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2010/10/digital-natives-more-different-than-you.html” title=”the larger implications for the news industry”>the larger implications for the news industry</a> if the findings can be extrapolated to young people over here as well. Summary: Our existing products may be very poorly positioned to appeal to this group, which distrusts all authority, relies foremost on friends for information, talks back, and values speed, mobility and bite-size information.

“The research is important to anyone worried about the future of the newspaper business, because it demonstrates how profoundly next-generation consumers differ from the aging geezers (this writer included) who account for more than half of newspaper readership in the United States even though they represent barely 30% of the population.

“The French study found that young people have utterly different attitudes than their elders with respect to such seminal concepts as, say, institutional authority. Further, those attitudes are diametrically opposed to the values, expectations and economic underpinnings that suffuse the newspaper business.

“The almost complete disconnect between generations means editors and publishers have lots to learn – tout de suite – about modern consumers, if they hope to preserve the long-term sustainability and value of their franchises. But it won’t be easy. Because learning to think, speak and act in this new and alien paradigm is even harder than learning French.”

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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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A successful experiment

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

(Originally posted Sept. 3, 2010)

Repeated here is a very slightly edited note Alex Marcelewski of Media General’s Digital Media distributed after MG’s first-ever multi-property, multi-state online chat, which was about Hurricane Earl. Excellent all the way around:

On Wednesday night from 7:30pm – 8:30pm a multi-property & multi-state interactive chat session was held by Media General for our East Coast properties on Hurricane Earl.  This was the first time an event such as this took place where more than one Media General location and its community were involved.  Overall it was a great success from both a public service and community interaction standpoint.

At one point in the evening we had over 100 participants in there at one specific time along expert representatives from WNCT, WNCN, WCBD, WBTW, and WSLS both in the weather centers and in the field at the Outer Banks of North Carolina.   The chat room was offered and utilized by several MG properties within their own websites (WNCT, WNCN, RTD, WBTW, WCBD, WSLS, and WSAV).   Each of these properties highly promoted the event both on-air and online; which helped drive participants to it.

Our viewers/readers/users were able to ask specific questions on Hurricane Earl which in turn were funneled to the appropriate location and MG expert.  Many of the users commented on their appreciation of having a venue to pose their concerns and questions too.  Interactive chat sessions have been and are being used by various MG properties for different things and each time we see the benefit of it and the service we provide to our communities.

Users were asked via a built-in poll where they were from:

50% – Eastern North Carolina (WNCT area)
18% – Central North Carolina (WNCN area)
18% – Lowcountry Region of South Carolina (Charleston/Georgetown DMA – WCBD)
7% – Central and Coastal Virginia (RTD & WSLS areas)
4% – Grand Strand Region of South Carolina (Myrtle Beach – WBTW/FMN area)
4% – Savannah Georgia (WSAV area)

The following MG Staff who participated as experts were identified via their Photos to set them apart from the public:

David Sawyer (WNCT) – served as overall moderator
Wes Hohenstein, WNCN
Rob Fowler, WCBD
Frank Johnson, WBTW
Scott Leamon, WSLS (on location in Atlantic Beach) via his MG Blackberry
Holly Bounds & Megan Kramer, WSAV
Josh Marthers, WCBD

George Crocker (WNCT) & Jason Clough (WNCN) championed & coordinated the overall project as well as each MG property took turns to help moderate the comments from the public (no comment was posted till approved) – this was a hard task with all the comments that were lining up in the queue but they did real well.

“This coordinated chat session further demonstrated the teamwork philosophy of Media General.  It was a privilege to work with the team of meteorologists and reporters who further confirmed the like mindedness of forecast  tracks; which gave me confidence it my forecast presentation to the viewers of Eastern North Carolina”  – David Sawyer, WNCT Chief Meteorologist

“When we are on TV it is a one way street; but in the chat room it became a two-way street with the viewer which is a valuable interaction to have.” – Wes Hohenstein, WNCN Chief Meteorologistlocal

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A TV trend to watch

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

(Originally posted Sept. 1, 2010)

If you’re in TV news and you’re a morning person, this might constitute great news: A growing number of stations are putting on extra-extra-extra-early news shows. How early? 4:30 in the blessed a.m.. They’re just going where the audience is:

“Americans are either staying awake later or waking up earlier — and either way, they are keeping the television on.

“In the past 15 years, the number of households that have a TV set on at 4:30 has doubled, to 16 percent this year from 8 percent in 1995. At 11:30 p.m., by comparison, when most local newscasts end, 44 percent of televisions are on, up 10 percent from the levels 15 years ago.”

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