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Posts Tagged ‘audience’

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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Social networking will be permanent

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

(Originally posted July 9, 2010)

Required reading, especially if you’re skeptical of social networking:

“In a survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, an overwhelming majority of technology experts and stakeholders believe that social networking and online sharing is more than just a fad for today’s youth.

“More than two-thirds of those surveyed indicated that the Millennial generation — otherwise known as Generation Y — will continue to use social networking tools as they mature into adult life stages and have families of their own.”

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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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The thinking behind continuous-news strategy

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

(Originally posted May 13, 2010)

I’ve heard more than once news people questioning why news sites (many, not all) put their newest stories at the top of the list of headlines as new things are posted through the day. A post at Lost Remote sums it up:

“This is hard for traditional news sites to grasp – we’re used to the finished news product and deciding which story to tell the audience is the lead – but continuous news is how people consume information online. It also doesn’t hurt that the format plays very nicely with Google. I’ve seen what happens at stations that switch to this web-native format, and the results are astounding: instant jumps in pageviews and time spent on site, and by several multiples as well.”

That post also cites a longer explanation posted on the pomoblog. A key point:

“The paradigm of ranked presentation is what the newspaper industry dragged with it to the Web in the mid ’90s, which was then copied by the television industry, because, well, that’s the way media companies did it. … Meanwhile, the people who built the Web moved in an entirely different direction, in part, because they knew something media companies didn’t — that the Web is a real time database, not a transport system for content.”

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