News Leadership 3.0
Posts tagged with: Pew Project For Excellence In Journalism
March 11, 2010
2010 was supposed to be the year of the online pay wall in the mainstream print news industry. But so far, we’ve seen little action on that front. (Among other things, the impending arrival of the iPad and the increasing urgency of mobile may be drawing news industry attention away from the idea that they might be able to charge people for access to content on their Web site.) At the same time, a different ethic may be taking hold. Happily, this one seems better suited to the Web.
It’s the ethic of participation and sharing.
A few examples from the past week or so:
ProPublica’s Reporting Recipe - ProPublica posted its Reporting Recipe, detailing how ProPublica and The Los Angeles Times pulled off an investigation that discovered serious breakdowns in the state of California’s regulation of nurses.
From the intro: “We realize that many newsrooms face competing priorities and limited resources, so we’re making our reporting recipe public ... We understand that many reporters and members of the public will not be able to dedicate the same resources. Still, there are many things you can do to get a good understanding of how well your state regulators are performing.”
The note also includes contact info for ProPublica staffers and lets users sign up for a conference call about the investigation. Wow. What a gift!
Open311 - The cities of San Francisco and Washington, D.C. boosted collaboration on a shared, open standard for municipal information with the announcement that those cities would launch the Open311 API within weeks. 311 systems enable citizens to report problems such as pot holes or graffiti, to government via Web or texting. The systems promise to give officials access to more information and to make them more responsive without the need for more inspectors. The idea of the Open311 initiative is to give cities a boost in developing their systems, to facilitate improvements by the development community, and to give systems the capacity to work together (jargon alert: This is often referred to as making them “interoperable”).
Social media editors - Of course, sharing is alive and well on social media. Encouragingly, the American Journalism Review reports, that more mainstream news organizations are assigning staff to focus on social networks. I hope these moves help traditional organizations move past their view that social networks are a one-way delivery system and I hope the journalists in these new roles invest some time in figuring out how do a better job of tending online comments and fostering a worthwhile discussion. Other sites manage to do this, and it’s a mystery to my why more news outlets don’t seize this opportunity to engage with their users.
Twitter - Twitter is my preferred social network, and, as I have pointed out, it’s my most significant source of news and information about topics I care about. Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, emphasized a similar idea last week at Knight’s recent Media Learning Seminar for leaders of the nation’s community foundations, many of whom are stepping up to fund local and state news and information projects. Ibargüen noted that he’d heard some at the conference express skepticism that information delivered by new digital technology “couldn’t be taken seriously.” He showed slides of tweets by Jay Rosen and others to reinforce the idea that people are sharing serious information and discussion on social platforms. “They are real and they are useful and they are how we will continue to deliver information.” (Here’s the video of Ibargüen’s comments. He talks about Twitter from 8:00 through 11:14.) (Disclosure: I do some consulting with Knight Foundation.)
Reporter as host - John Temple, editor of the Peer News local start up in Honolulu, reinforced the idea of sharing and participation very aptly in job descriptions for the newsroom staff members formerly known as reporters. “Today it’s my pleasure to announce the names of the first people who’ll be joining the service as “reporter and host.” Yes, you read that correctly. The job profile for reporters at Peer News includes the role of host, reflecting our commitment to community engagement as a central part of the reporters’ role,” Temple said on his blog.
Local news partnerships - The Pro journalism vs. Am(ateur) journalism argument has taken up a lot of bandwidth. That’s changing. Now it’s about Pro AND Am, working together to cover the news. Pro-am efforts are merging on many fronts. More on that in my comments on the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s annual State of the News Media report, to be released Monday.
What is your news organization doing to foster sharing and participation online? Please post your ideas in the comments. Thanks.
Bonus link: Yesterday, Josh Stearns posted this list of collaborations among news organizations.
By Michele McLellan, 03/11/10 at 5:39 am
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May 25, 2010
This week, Pew’s Project on Excellence in Journalism published a new study: New Media, Old Media: How blogs and social media agendas relate and differ from the traditional press. This intriguing study covers several bases, including a comparison of which types of news stories get shared most across blogs and social media (particularly YouTube and Twitter).
The report’s second paragraph illustrates the key strengths and weaknesses of this research effort: “While most original reporting still comes from traditional journalists, technology makes it increasingly possible for the actions of citizens to influence a story’s total impact.”
If you’re reading, citing, or reporting on this study, it helps to understand some key context about how this research was done, and what kind of news it does and does not cover…
By Amy Gahran
PEJ’s research into how citizen actions can influence a news story’s impact looks pretty solid, and is quite interesting. Some highlights:
- Peer sharing is a key primary news source. “44% of online news users get news at least a few times a week through e-mails, automatic updates or posts from social networking sites.”
- People share different types of news through different channels. “Of the 29 weeks that we tracked all three social platforms, blogs, Twitter and YouTube shared the same top story just once. That was the week of June 15-19, 2009, when the protests that followed the Iranian elections led on all three.”
- Social media attention is fleeting. “On blogs, 53% of the lead stories in a given week stay on the list no more than three days. On Twitter that is true of 72% of lead stories, and more than half (52%) are on the list for just 24 hours.
Blogs and news: PEJ’s questionable data sources.
The “Blogosphere” section of the PEJ report includes this assertion:
“Despite the unconventional agenda of bloggers, traditional media still provides the vast majority of their information. More than 99% of the stories linked to came from legacy outlets like newspapers and broadcast networks. American legacy outlets made up 75% of all items. Web-only sites, on the other hand, made up less than 1% of the links in the blogosphere.” (Emphasis added.)
This finding has led to some headlines such as Blogs depend on traditional media (The Australian), New Media Loves to Link to Old Media—Almost Exclusively (TheWrap)
This made me wonder: Which blogs was PEJ checking for this study? The report’s methodology section explains:
”...To study new and social media, PEJ wanted to be able to include as wide a range of outlets as possible. For unlike the traditional press, blogs and social media pages reach into the millions and change daily as new ones emerge and other dissolve. In exploring various options, we saw value combining the work of some sites that specialize in tracking these outlets continuously with our own coding scheme and analytics.
“Two prominent Web tracking sites, Technorati and Icerocket, monitor millions of blogs and pieces of social media, using the links to articles embedded on these sites as a proxy for determining what these subjects are. The website Tweetmeme uses a similar method to monitor the popular links on the social networking site Twitter.
“Each of these sites offers lists of the most linked-to news stories based on the number of blogs, tweets, or other pages that link to them. PEJ does not determine what constitutes a ‘news’ story (as opposed to some other topic), but rather relies on the classifications used by each of the tracking sites.
“A PEJ staff member manually captured the lists from each site every weekday between 9 and 10 am ET. From those lists, the top five linked to articles were captured for further analysis by PEJ staff.
“Through July 3, 2009, PEJ captured information about blogs from both Technorati and Icerocket. However, the relevant component of Technorati’s site stopped working in early July and has been down ever since. Therefore, the 26 NMI reports beginning the week of July 6-10 only included blog data from Icerocket.”
A close look at PEJ’s chosen resources for blog data reveal some significant potential flaws.
Technorati’s “What’s Popular” section is no longer available on that blog aggregator’s site. The most recent version of that page available from the Internet Archive shows that the “What’s Popular” section once featured “news stories people are talking about right now, ordered by new links to news sites in the last 48 hours.” Those references to “news stories” and “news sites,” and the nature of the links listed there, indicate that in this section Technorati focused specifically on blog posts that discussed or expanded upon content produced by mainstream news.
Similarly, Icerocket says its Top News Stories section showcases “Top stories posted in the blogosphere, measured by new links to Official News Sources in the last 48 hours.” In other words, this is a list of links to stories published by mainstream news outlets that are getting the most links from recent blog posts.
Icerocket’s Top News Stories differs from its Top Blog Posts section. Top Blog Posts lists “Top stories being discussed in the blogosphere right now.” When you scan this list of links, you’ll see some posts from mainstream news organizations (like Boston.com and the Wall St. Journal’s All Things D tech news site). But you’ll also see posts from sites like Google’s Adsense blog, or The Anchoress blog on First Things (a site published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life), or the Clean Techies blog.
If PEJ’s goal was to gauge the prevalence of original news reporting in the blogosphere, it might have done better to include Icerocket’s Top Blog Posts in its research base, rather than Top News Stories. Even better, they might have gathered data from Google Blogs.
PEJ apparently chose to count blog links coming mainly from a preselected portion of the blogosphere that focuses mainly on what mainstream news orgs are talking about. Given that context, it’s not surprising that they found that 99% of the outbound links from those blogs led to traditional news stories.
...But it’s probably a stretch for PEJ to make the blanket claim, based on this data, that bloggers (in general, not just those blogs in particular) rely on traditional media for the vast majority of their information. Or that “most original reporting still comes from traditional journalists.”
Both of those assertions may or may not be true; PEJ’s research simply is not sufficient to support them.
The Disconnect: What is “news”?
I suspect that part of the problem here is terminology and convention, rather than substance.
We’ve all been immersed in a culture where, for more than a century, when most people said “the news” they really meant “content produced by news organizations.” That’s an easily discernible category—but it’s circular reasoning to basically say, “news is whatever news organizations do.”
For instance, Schneier on Security (an independent blog by globally recognized security expert Bruce Schneier), frequently features quite significant original news and analysis. But it’s not generally called a “news blog.”
Resources such as Icerocket’s Top News Stories which focus on the ripple effects of mainstream media are completely appropriate if that’s what you’re trying to measure. But if you’re trying to gauge instances of original reporting across the blogosphere or social media, Icerocket’s Top Blog Posts or Google Blogs might be a more appropriate data resource.
There are all kinds of news out there, coming from all kinds of places. Many of the sources from which journalists gathered news are now publishing their own news and analysis directly. They’re not waiting to be quoted by a news organization. They’re being found and shared directly, via blogs and social media.
PEJ’s research on the impact of social media on the dissemination of news is valuable, and I recommend reading it. Just be aware that people share many kinds of news, big and small, for many reasons. Linking and sharing is clearly a fast-growing channel for news discovery, and news ventures should understand and capitalize on that mechanism.
But also, recognize that “the news” is becoming less and less defined by what news organizations produce. Traditional news orgs are still a big part of the news picture—but other news sources matter too, and they’re growing. Increasingly, news is becoming more about the “long tail” than the “top story.”
By Amy Gahran, 05/25/10 at 7:55 pm
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December 14, 2011
The holiday shopping season is generally a revenue-booster for ad-supported news venues—but new Pew research indicates that more people are turning to the internet than newspapers when seeking info about local businesses.
How might this insight help local news publishers update their revenue strategies for the coming year?...
By Amy Gahran
Where people get information about restaurants and other local businesses is a just-published report compiled by Pew’s Project on Excellence in Journalism and the Internet and American Life Project, with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
A few highlights from the Pew report:
Local restaurants, bars, and clubs. 55% of U.S. adults say they get news and information about local dining and nightlife—and just over half (51%) go online to get this information. In contrast, a total of 31% turn to printed newspapers (26%) and news sites (5%) for this info—even though news venues tend to publish local event calendars, dining/nightlife guides, and annual local “best of” ratings.
“Specialty websites” (probably such as Yelp, although the report does not name any specific sites) are a more popular source of local dining and nightlife info: 38% of adults use them. Furthermore, 23% rely on word of mouth, 8% turn to on local TV, and only 3% use social networking services.
Other local businesses. According to Pew, 60% of adults say they get news and information about local businesses besides restaurants and bars. Here the internet is still the most popular resource, but not quite as popular (47%). Specialty sites (again, think Yelp) are less popular here, cited as a resource by just 16% of adults. And social media is used by only 1%.
For the local general business sector, newspapers are the next most popular resource—29% of people look to printed copies for this info, but only 2% turn to news websites. Word of mouth: 22%. Local TV: 8%. Local radio: 5%.
Demographics. The Pew report contains charts showing the demographics of people who seek each type of local business information. In general, these consumers tend to be wealthier and more upscale.
But there are some differences between the sectors. Pew notes: “The 55% of adults who get information about restaurants, bars, and clubs are more likely to be women, young adults, urban, and technology adopters. The 60% of adults who get information about other local businesses are also more likely to be tech users.”
Local news “junkies” are especially likely to want info about local businesses. According to Pew: “Heavy local news junkies are considerably more likely than others to get material about local restaurants. ...When it comes to restaurant information, 71% of those who used at least six platforms monthly got news and information about local restaurants—compared with 34% of those who relied on just one or two sources.”
Also: “72% of those who used at least six [local news/info] platforms monthly got news and information about [other] local businesses, compared with 39% of those who relied on just one or two sources.”
This kind of data could be a reason for local businesses to advertise in local news venues, compared to search advertising or other marketing.
Mobile has become a leading way for people to get local news and info. This could have profound implications for local advertising.
Pew noted that 47% of U.S. adults get local news and information on their cell phones. “These mobile consumers, who were younger and more upscale in terms of their household income and educational levels, were even more likely than others to get material about local restaurants: 62% of mobile local news consumers got information [about local bars and restaurants], compared with 48% of others.”
Also: “65% of mobile local news consumers got information about other local businesses, compared with 55% of others.”
LESSONS AND IDEAS FOR NEWS VENUES
1. Make local business information easy to find, especially to search for, on your website, in your mobile offerings (mobile site as well as apps) and through your print or broadcast offerings. The staggeringly low number of people who currently turn to news sites for local business information indicates that this info either isn’t there, or it can’t be easily or reliably accessed.
2. Search-friendly repurposing. If you publish a local business directory, “best of” ratings, or an event calendar that lists venues, explore ways to surface this information in general searches of your site. Ideally, each listing could become a basic mobile-friendly landing page. This could be a simple database, and it might be seeded by scraping data from regular search engine queries for local business info. (An upsell service might allow business owners to update or expand their own listings, at will.)
3. Realize who your competition is: paid search ads. SearchEngineLand reported on a recent study which found that paid search drives $6 in local sales for every $1 in online sales. News publishers will have to work hard to demonstrate that their ads can compete with—or at least complement—that performance. So…
4. Create links between your content, ads, and local business info. This could be a key advantage of news publishers, and it should be multidirectional. If you maintain a database of local businesses and events, you might be able to automatically augment each listing with links to stories and upcoming events which mention that business, as well as current ads that business may be running in your site or paper. Then you may be able to adapt your content management system to link stories and ads back to your database listings, making it easier for people to get more info, context, and targeted exposure to advertising.
5. Sell USEFUL local mobile advertising units. Position mobile ads as an actionable information service that adds value, rather than just space to display a banner. Recently SearchEngineLand published a good guide mobile marketing guide for local businesses, as well as an overview of social-local-mobile marketing, and a guide to small business advertising planning for 2012. Read these, and consider how your venue could fit into this picture—from the local advertiser’s perspective.
6. Geocode local business info and ads with latitude/longitude and street address data. This can support “search nearby” functionality, which you can add to your main site search engine, and possibly even support via GPS in mobile devices.
7. Support user bookmarking, sharing, ratings, and comments/tips of local business info on your site. These features can either be a matter of personalization for registered users (visible only to individual users), or a source of additional public content or context for your site. For bookmarking, an option to forward a business name, address, and phone number to your cell phone via SMS text message might be especially useful—especially for the majority of mobile users who still use feature phones.
8. Monitor search requests for local info on your site, and user activity (such as bookmarking, sharing, link clickthroughs, click-to call phone numbers), to spot opportunities to fill in information gaps or meet emerging local market needs. This can be used as feedback to advertisers, or as selling points for prospective advertisers or upsells.
9. Regularly publicize in your print or broadcast channels all the options you offer for finding local business information, and explain how people can use them—and benefit from them. Consider this an ongoing marketing/education effort, and dedicate space and time to it. Don’t just expect people to find these services on their own.
10. If you cannot feasibly build or maintain your own database of local businesses, and connect that to your content management system and ad delivery tool, then consider partnering with (or at least linking to) relevant local business listings in places like Yelp, Google+ brand pages, public Facebook pages, and Bing.
The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The Knight Digital Media Center at USC is a partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. The Center is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
By Amy Gahran, 12/14/11 at 11:25 am
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March 20, 2012
By Amy Gahran
Increasingly, people are turning to mobile devices to get news throughout the day. Thus, mobile was the big trend highlighted in this year’s State of the Media report from the Pew Project on Excellence in Journalism—which echoes other recent findings from comScore and elsewhere.
How can news and information publishers get ahead of the mobile wave?...
“The age of mobile, in which people are connected to the web wherever they are, arrived in earnest. More than four in ten American adults now own a smartphone. One in five owns a tablet. New cars are manufactured with internet built in. With more mobility comes deeper immersion into social networking. For news, the new era brings mixed blessings,” the PEJ report’s introduction began.
Some highlights from the mobile section of the PEJ report:
Digital news is becoming a multi-device experience. For now, desktop and laptop computers remain the most popular way that people in the U.S. access digital news venues. However, PEJ notes: “Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults, 23%, now get news on at least two devices: a desktop/laptop computer and smartphone, a computer and a tablet, a tablet and a smartphone, or on all three.”
Also: “For most with multiple devices, there is not a single place for news. People who acquire mobile devices appear to be using them to get news on all their devices. This also suggests they may be getting more news more often. About a third (34%) of desktop/laptop news consumers now also get news on a smartphone. About a quarter (27%) of smartphone news consumers also get news on a tablet. While this smartphone/tablet news consumer group is small—just 6% of the population overall—it is a large percentage of those who own smartphones and tablets. Fully 44% of people who own both kinds of devices use both for news. What’s more, most of those individuals (78%) still get news on the desktop or laptop as well.”
“...Smartphone news users are now nearly split between their laptop and smartphone as their primary news platform: 46% still get most of their news on the desktop/laptop and 45% get most on their smartphone. Another 7% of these smartphone owners say they get most of their news on a tablet. Early tablet news users are moving in the same direction, but remain somewhat more reliant on the laptop or desktop computer. Of tablet owners, 47% still get most of their digital news via desktops or laptops, while a third (34%) have already transitioned to consuming most of their news on the tablet.
This echoes findings from comScore’s Digital Omnivores report last summer, which made this point: “Devices influence the way people consume content and it is important to remember that they do not exist in isolation of one another, but have a complementary relationship in consumers’ lives. ...Understanding how consumers are utilizing the full spectrum of digital devices available to them will become increasingly important to building effective digital strategies.”
Both PEJ’s and comScore’s findings indicate that in the long run, creating an integrated and relatively seamless user experience across devices will be important for retaining loyalty from mobile news users.
Site features like BostonGlobe.com’s “MySaved” (which saves stories bookmarked by an individual user in the cloud, for downloading to any device for later reading) may become crucial for a good user experience. However, such features probably will have to add more value compared to popular third-party tools like Instapaper, which support device- and reader-friendly aggregation across all websites (not just one news site at at time) and across multiple devices.
Deploying such services will be more streamlined for news and information sites that adopt responsive web design—a strategy that adapts webpage display for the type of device being used. Coupled with HTML5, which supports app-like features via the web browser, responsive design can vastly enhance the overall news experience for multiple-device users.
News brands are key for drawing mobile traffic. PEJ noted that news brands appear to drive traffic on every device, but they seems to matter most to tablet news audiences. “For all three digital platforms, the most common method for accessing digital news now is by going directly to a news website or app. And that has been helped by the advent of mobile. A third of those who get news via the laptop or desktop say they go directly to a news organization’s website ‘very often’ as do a third of smartphone news consumers and 38% of tablet news consumers.”
Keyword search is also important for mobile news discovery. According to PEJ about 70% of people who get news on a smartphone, tablet or both use keyword searches to find news at least occasionally. However PEJ’s earlier analysis of data from Nielsen indicate that much of news search traffic actually goes to the home pages of news site home pages, indicating that people may be searching quite often for news brands.
News aggregator apps are gaining mobile popularity. Just over a quarter of tablet and smartphone news consumers use aggregator apps such as Flipboard or Topix to access news stories. So it’s worth using these apps to make sure your news content displays well in this context.
Social media isn’t quite as important for mobile news discovery—yet. According to PEJ, “In total, just 9% [of digital news consumers] follow news recommendations very often from either Facebook or Twitter on any of the three devices.”
But: “This peer-to-peer sharing or recommending of news does appear to be an emerging trend, however, and may become a part—if not soon a primary part—of news consumption. If one adds to the tally those who say they follow these recommendations ‘sometimes’ to the 10% who say they do it ‘very often’ the number increases about three-fold. For both smartphones and tablets, more than a quarter (27%) follow recommendations from Facebook at least somewhat often. 9% for each device follow Twitter news recommendations at least somewhat often. On the desktop/laptop the percentages come to 22% for Facebook and 5% for Twitter.”
That said, it’s generally a mistake to view social media primarily as a tool to broadcast links to your content in order to drive traffic to your site. Social media’s key value is for two-way engagement with your community—a way to discover what interests them, amplify their voices, and build credibility by being part of the public conversation. This in turn can influence the content you produce for any platform, to make it more compelling to your community across the board.
Mobile apps get used more frequently, but care is warranted. PEJ examined data from Localytics, a company that provides an analytics platform for advertising through mobile apps. According to PEJ, this data indicates: “People spend more time per session with news on mobile devices than they do on computers, and read more articles per session and more articles per month. Comparing this data to data collected on news website behavior suggests on average that users return to news apps more than five times as often over the course of the month and spend a minute longer per session.”
While PEJ did not speculate on what drives this trend, it’s possible that the ability of apps to provide “push notifications” may increase the frequency of app use. Increasing engagement through apps is crucial, since last year Localytics found that only one fourth of all apps get opened more than 10 times.
Platform-specific mobile apps generally require more resources to develop and maintain, and require more action from news consumers, than mobile websites. Also, apps don’t always automatically open in response to inbound links on a mobile device. So if you decide to deploy mobile news apps, make sure you also have a strong mobile web presence, and offer optional push notifications. Also offering an array of SMS text message alerts can help boost mobile traffic for both websites and apps.
...To put all of this research in context, it’s important to recognize that very soon your digital audience will soon be accessing your content mostly via mobile devices. Last September analysts at IDC predicted: “By 2015, more U.S. Internet users will access the internet through mobile devices than through PCs or other wireline devices.”
In other words, your news and information audience is going mobile fast. Building a strong brand and a good mobile experience for your users can help build your business. This may especially give brand new sites and advantage, since they aren’t hindered by legacy publishing systems that can’t easily accommodate responsive design and other new opportunities for mobile media.
The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The Knight Digital Media Center at USC is a partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. The Center is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
By Amy Gahran, 03/20/12 at 3:53 pm
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