News — AEJMC Hot Topics

From Poynter – It’s time: 4 reasons to put up a metered paywall

October 19, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

From Bill Mitchell on Poynter, Oct. 19, 2011

For media executives awaiting reassuring evidence before experimenting with digital subscriptions, the time has arrived.

Simply put, their more adventurous colleagues at other companies have discovered multiple paths around the biggest risk attached to the pursuit of subscription revenue: diminished audience reach.

Here’s how they’ve navigating that tricky challenge:

They’ve adjusted their paywall meters to permit whatever number of monthly free visits makes the most sense in their balance of reach and revenue. The trend, by the way, is definitely toward leaky walls rather than hard ones.

They’ve recognized that, financially, their sites could afford to lose substantial traffic because their “sell-through” of online ads rarely approached their inventory anyway.

They’ve made smart decisions, journalistically, about what content should remain outside the wall.

Read the full article on Poynter

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Paywalls, Poynter

Tablet owners read more news than they did previously

October 17, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

A new study by the BBC and Starcom MediaVest showed that tablet users spend more time consuming news than did previously.

Jeff Sonderman from Poynter said,

The results overall are encouraging for publishers hoping that iPads and other emerging tablets will play an important role in their digital futures. Among the most interesting findings:

- 63 percent of people said tablets lead them to rely more on traditional news providers and less on news aggregators.

- Tablets enhance the appetite for news. Fifty-nine percent said they access national or local news more often since they got a tablet. Seventy-eight percent said they follow a larger volume of news stories, and a greater variety of topics than before.

Read the full post on Poynter here

Filed Under: News Tagged With: bbc, News, Poynter, tablet

World Press Trends: Newspapers Still Reach More Than Internet

October 14, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

By Larry Kilman on WAN-IFRA, Oct. 12, 2011

Newspaper circulation declined in print world-wide last year but was more than made up by an increase in digital audiences, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) said Thursday in its annual update of world press trends.

“Circulation is like the sun. It continues to rise in the East and decline in the West,” said Christoph Riess, CEO of WAN-IFRA, who presented the annual survey Thursday at the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum in Vienna, Austria.

The survey found:

Media consumption patterns vary widely across the globe. Print circulation is increasing in Asia, but declining in mature markets in the West.

The number of titles globally is consolidating.

The main decline is in free dailies. “For free dailies, the hype is over,” said Mr Riess.

For advertisers, newspapers are more time efficient and effective than other media.

Newspapers reach more people than the internet. On a typical day newspapers reach 20 percent more people world-wide than the internet reaches, ever.

Digital advertising revenues are not compensating for the ad revenues lost to print.

Social media are changing the concept and process of content gathering and dissemination. But the revenue model for news companies, in the social media arena, remains hard to find.

The business of news publishing has become one of constant updating, of monitoring, distilling and repacking information.

The new digital business is not the traditional newspaper business.

Read the full article on WAN-IFRA

Filed Under: News Tagged With: circulation, IFRA, Internet, Newspapers, WAN

Eric Newton: Journalism schools can be leaders in innovation and the news

October 13, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

By Eric Newton on Nieman Lab, Oct. 13, 2011

Everyone knows the news about the news. A once-in-a-generation media policy report for the Federal Communications Commission — The Information Needs of Communities, released this summer — made things abundantly clear. It detailed the decline of “local accountability journalism.” The evidence: 15,000 journalism jobs lost in the past few years, the lion’s share at daily newspapers. It’s a paradox of the digital age: More information than ever, but less local watchdog journalism. The same communications revolution that makes everyone a potential journalist has at the same time maimed America’s heavily advertising-based method of paying for professional journalism.

The nation’s institutions of higher learning have an important role to play in the local news crisis. In August, at the annual convention of the Association for Journalism and Mass Communication Educators in St. Louis, universities showed they are increasingly getting into local journalism. This is good news. Watchdog journalism is the “security camera” that keeps the powerful honest. Without it, government corruption always increases. The story of Bell, California, a town too small for a daily newspaper, where officials raided the city coffers to pay themselves six-figure salaries, is proof enough that a decline of local news is not without dire consequences.

Can journalism education really play a major role in local news flows? Teaching hospitals are some of our best medical institutions. Legal clinics at law schools take on major cases. And a new Harvard report, on the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, shows that journalism schools can do it, too. Long thought to be the caboose on the train of American journalism, they can instead be engines of change that drive news agendas.

Read the full article on Nieman Lab

Filed Under: News Tagged With: AEJMC, Eric Newton, Future, higher education, Journalism, Nieman Lab

Move Over PCs, Mobile Devices Are in Town

October 13, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

As sales of tablet computers and smartphones increase, the PC will soon be overshadowed by a mobile world. The Economist posted an article earlier this week about the rise of mobile devices and said this,

Sales of tablet computers, though still small, are also growing rapidly. Since Apple’s iPad arrived last year, a host of rivals have appeared, such as RIM’s Playbook, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Sony’s Tablet. All eyes are now on Amazon’s Kindle Fire. With smartphones, which seem to be surgically attached to the hand of every teenager and many an adult, tablets have opened up a new dimension to mobile computing that is seducing consumers. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, believes that in 2011 combined shipments of smartphones and tablets will overtake those of personal computers (PCs).

Read the full article on The Economist

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Mobile Technology, PC, The Economist

How Mobile Phones Could Bring Public Services to People in Developing Countries

October 12, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

By Miguel Paz (Bio) on PBD Media Shift Idea Lab, October 6, 2011

In Santiago, Chile, more than 60 percent of the poorest citizens don’t have access to the Internet. In the rest of the country, that number increases to 80 percent, and in rural areas, an Internet connection is almost nonexistent. But there are more than 20 million mobile phones in the nation, according to the latest survey by the Undersecretary of Telecommunications. (That’s actually around 1.15 cell phones per capita in a nation of 17,094,270 people.) And in rural areas, cell phones are king.

As Knight News Challenge winners FrontlineSMS, Ushahidi and NextDrop have shown, mobile communications are crucial for citizens living in rural areas, where being able to reach other people and access relevant news and public services information make a huge improvement in people’s lives. Plus, cell phones are tools that most already have.

What if, apart from efforts to widen connectivity in isolated areas and government programs to provide computers for schools in rural areas (which has been a very good, but slow, undertaking, and not an attractive business for telecom companies), governments of underdeveloped countries create and provide easy ways to access public information and services on mobile phones with an application or open-source web app that could be downloaded from government websites (in Chile it’s Gob.cl)? Or cellular service providers could pre-install an app or direct access to a web app on every smartphone or other devices?

This could mean a great deal for people, particularly in rural and impoverished areas where the biggest news is not what’s happening in Congress or the presidential palace, but what is happening to you and your community (something Facebook understood very well in its latest change that challenges the notion of what is newsworthy – but that’s a topic for a separate post).

People could do things like schedule a doctor’s appointment or receive notice that a doctor won’t be available; find out about grants to improve water conditions in their sector; receive direct information about training programs for growing organic food and the market prices for products they might sell; find out how their kids are doing in a school they attend in the city or if the rural bus system will go this week to the nearest town or not. These are just a few very straightforward examples of useful public services information that could be available on people’s phones. Such availability of information could save time and money for those who lack both things.

Read the full article on MediaShift Idea Lab

Filed Under: News Tagged With: mobile phone, Mobile Technology, PBS, public service

Paywalls ComeTo College Newspapers

October 12, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

By Laura Hazard Owen on PaidContent, Oct. 11, 2011

Students work for their college newspapers for all sorts of reasons—and while college papers are sheltered from the harsh realities facing national and local newspapers in many ways, it’s probably never too early for a crash course in revenue models. Hence the new collaboration between digital subscription company Press+ and the Knight Foundation: Starting today, the first 50 college newspapers to sign up with Press+ will be able to install free meters on their websites, allowing them to collect donations and subscription fees from readers.

Press+, which is owned by RR Donnelley (NSDQ: RRD) and already operates metered paywalls for “grownup” newspapers like the Baltimore Sunand many MediaNews Group and Lee papers, says it is “providing students with a sustainable way to target parents, alumni, and other engaged readers for donations or subscriptions.

Read the full post on PaidContent

Filed Under: News Tagged With: college newspapers, paywall, press

CJR: Long-form articles have plummeted at WSJ since late 2007

October 11, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

From Ryan Chittum at CJR, Oct. 11, 2011

Story length in journalism by itself doesn’t mean much. We read too many news stories that are just too damned long.

But, on the other hand, without going long, it’s hard to achieve greatness. It sure makes harder to tell a story or lay out evidence, much less capture nuance and complexity. A longer story signals to readers that this story is important and that more work went into it.

This is to say that your average 4,000 word piece is just going to be reported more deeply and edited more heavily than your average 400-word FT news story, say. It’s possible there’s a great business journalism haiku poet out there, I suppose. Let us know if you spot one.

The Wall Street Journal’s page one has long been the standard-bearer for business writing and reporting, at least for newspapers. It took news and turned it into narrative nonfiction, everyday, twice a day, for decades. But Rupert Murdoch made it no secret that he disdained the Journal’s page-one tradition of long-form journalism, and it’s been de-emphasized under his ownership. That’s our qualitative impression, anyway, based on reading the paper, following the tealeaves, and talking to former colleagues.

Number of A1 stories longer than 1,500 words in the last decade. From CJR

Read the full article on CJR

Filed Under: News Tagged With: CJR, Journalism, Long-form, short-form, WSj

Study ranks blogs’ use of traditional media as sources in 2006 election

October 6, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

At the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Seth Meyers poked fun at the notion that bloggers take stories from traditional news media sources. He was giving the audience a mock rundown of the after-parties when he hit on something that research has confirmed.

Meyers joked, “The New York Times party used to be free, but tonight there’s a cover, so like everyone else I’ll probably just go to the Huffington Post party. And the Huffington Post party is asking people to go to other parties first and just steal food and drinks and bring it from there.”

The truth in Meyers’ joke is that blogs do tend to use stories from other traditional media outlets, like The New York Times. And the newspaper used most, according to a study published recently in Newspaper Research Journal is The Washington Post.

Marcus Messner, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Bruce Garrison, a professor at the University of Miami, studied the relationship between political bloggers and elite traditional news media and found both bloggers and elite media rely on each other to some degree rather than on original reporting. While traditional news media are the dominant sources for bloggers, blogs compete with many other sources in shaping traditional news media agendas.

The top-ten rankings for most cited media by blogs in the findings included:

1. The Washington Post
2. CNN
3. NBC News
4. The New York Times
5. ABC News
6. Fox News
7. Los Angeles Times
8. USA Today
9. CBS News
10. Christian Science Monitor

The findings are limited to the popular blogs used in the study. The liberal filter blogs were DailyKos, Talking Points Memo, Eschanton, Crooks and Liars, and Think Progress. The conservative filter blogs were Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Powerline, and Quarters.

The study was published in the summer 2011 issue of Newspaper Research Journal.

Contacts: Sandra H. Utt Cell: (901) 628-2553 e-mail: nrj@newspaperresearchjournal.org or Elinor Kelley Grusin e-mail: egrusin@memphis.edu

Download “Study Shows Some Blogs Affect Traditional News Media Agendas” by Marcus Messner and Bruce Garrison

Filed Under: News, Research Tagged With: blogs, Bruce Garrison, election, Marcus Messner, Newspaper Research Journal, Traditional Media