The newsonomics of the News Corp. split

June 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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By  on Nieman Journalism Lab, June 27 – 

Are two Ruperts even better than one? We may soon find out, as News Corp.moves forward today to clone itself.

The cloning, or splitting, of the $34 billion company certainly has its logic. Hive off those pesky newspaper assets and the company’s book arm HarperCollins into a separate company. Then let the News Corp. entertainment conglomerate — satellite, cable, broadcast, movies, and more — focus on global opportunities as both the Internet and old-fashioned pipes offer seemingly unlimited upside for the distribution of entertainment content. (Fox News, best understood for its entertainment value, would go appropriately with the entertainment company, not the publishing one. That raises the question of whether those two operations, to be owned by separate companies, would continue to uneasily share prime Times Square office space. And who gets the News Corp. name? The company with the news or the company without it?)

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Mobile users aren’t abandoning print any faster than non-mobile users

June 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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By Lucia Moses on AdWeek, June 20 – 

Two-thirds of U.S. adults now use at least one mobile media device such as a smartphone or tablet, and they’re the kind of people marketers want to reach—they skew more educated and higher-income than people who don’t own those devices, according to a survey by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. And, happily for purveyors of print, they haven’t abandoned newspapers and newsmagazines in droves. For marketers looking at where to place their bets, smartphone and large media tablets (iPad) owners are more likely to be male while e-readers and small tablets skew female. People who own Apple and BlackBerry devices tend to be higher-educated and earn more than their Android-wielding counterparts.

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Journalism education cannot teach its way to the future

June 15, 2012 By 1 Comment
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By Howard Finberg on Poynter, June 15 – 

“As we think about the changes whipping through the media industry, there is a nearby storm about to strike journalism education.

The future of journalism education will be a very different and difficult future, a future that is full of innovation and creative disruption. And, I believe, we will see an evolution and uncoupling between the value of a journalism education and a journalism degree.”

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DirecTV could deploy ad skip technology

June 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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By Liana B. Baker and Yinka Adegoke on Reuters, June 12 – 

DirecTV Group (DTV.O), the largest U.S. satellite TV operator, could deploy technology that would enable its millions of subscribers to automatically skip television advertising, its top executive said on Monday.

Mike White, chief executive of DirecTV, said his company bought rights to the technology from a company called Replay TV nearly five years ago but has not seen any need to make it available to customers.

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Tracking Viewers From TV to Computer to Smartphone

June 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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By STUART ELLIOTT on The New York Times, June 11 – 

A consortium of media owners, advertisers and media agencies says it is pleased with the results of two pilot tests, commissioned more than a year ago, that are intended to help improve and modernize the way video viewership habits are measured — all the better to cash in on those new habits.

The consortium, which was formed in 2009 and is known as the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, or CIMM, on Tuesday is to present  the results of the tests, conducted separately by two big media measurement firms, Arbitron and comScore.

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Improving students’ Arabic at Northwestern University in Qatar

June 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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By D. D. GUTTENPLAN on New York Times, June 11 – 

At Northwestern University in Qatar the administration recently came up against a surprising problem: How to improve students’ Arabic.

The overseas campus of the renowned university in Evanston, Illinois, attracts students from 30 countries for its programs in communications and journalism, popular majors in the hometown of Al Jazeera, the satellite broadcasting network. Although courses are given in English, about 60 percent of students speak some form of Arabic. “But most of them don’t speak Arabic well enough to appear on Al Jazeera,” said Everette E. Dennis, the school’s dean.

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Forty years after Watergate, investigative journalism is at risk

June 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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By Leonard Downie Jr. on The Washington Post, June 7 – 

Investigative reporting in America did not begin with Watergate . But it became entrenched in American journalism — and has been steadily spreading around the world — largely because of Watergate.

Now, 40 years after Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote their first stories about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate office building, the future of investigative reporting is at risk in the chaotic digital reconstruction of journalism in the United States.

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