Image courtesy of PEW Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a year’s worth of data yesterday on the top news stories discussed and linked to on blogs and social media pages, and seven months’ worth on Twitter. The study, New Media, Old Media, returned some very interesting findings on the differences between what the most popular story is for mainstream news outlets versus what the top news story is on social mediums. In addition it turned out some interesting data on the difference between what headlines draw crowds on these new social mediums.
The study examined the blogosphere and social media by tracking the news linked to on millions of blogs and social media pages tracked by Icerocket and Technorati from January 19, 2009, through January 15, 2010. It also tracked the videos on YouTube’s news channel for the same period. It measured Twitter by tracking news stories linked to within tweets as monitored by Tweetmeme from June 15, 2009, through January 15, 2010.
Of the 29 weeks that PEW tracked all three social platforms, blogs, Twitter and YouTube, the different mediums only shared the same top story just once. That was the week of June 15-19, when the protests that followed the Iranian elections. When you dive deeper into the differences between the social mediums you can also see that each has a certain personality associated with its user-base.
The clearest example of that was illustrated by the popularity of technology news on Twitter. More than 40 percent of stories linked to on Twitter were technology related. Meanwhile only eight percent of stories on on blogs were technology related and only one percent of stories in the mainstream press and on YouTube were technology related. These findings may have been expected in 2008, with early adopters driving Twitter’s use, but it is surprising that technology stories are so popular and prevalent today, as Twitter stretches its mainstream appeal. Comparatively only six percent of the stories linked to on Twitter were focused on politics.
Meanwhile political news and foreign events dominates the other mediums, with 29 percent of stories on blogs, 47 percent of stories on YouTube and 24 percent of the newshole at mainstream news outlets being political or foreign event focused. Stories linked to on Twitter also have much shorter shelf life’s. On Twitter, 72% of lead stories are no longer on the top linked to list after three days, and more than half (52%) are on the list for just 24 hours.
There are also numbers within the research that offer a contrarian view to the idea of news items bubbling up from Twitter, to the blogs, to the mainstream press. Across the entire year studied, just one particular story or event – the controversy over emails relating to global research that came to be known as “Climate-gate” – became a major item in the blogosphere and then, a week later, gained more traction in traditional media. Twitter is even less tied to the mainstream press in terms of drawing attention to stories and distributing information from mainstream outlets. Nearly 40 percent of the links on Twitter went to web-only news sources such as Mashable and CNET.
What all this means is hard to say. It will be certainly be interesting to see how it changes over time. However, in terms of those seeking to gain attention in the Twittersphere and with technology influencers, they should takeaway:
Twitter drives the technology news-cycle. If stories linked to on Twitter were cross-referenced with Techmeme, the technology Website of record, they’d likely be very similar. Therefore if you want your news to drive the technology agenda, it better make the trending topics on Twitter.
Like the platform itself, Twitter news and attention moves in real-time, on the 1,440-minute news-cycle. You may capture attention, but it won’t be for very long.
Don’t count on the news bubbling up. While you may reach technology influencers on Twitter, this data “echoes” the thought that Twitter can be an echo-chamber of technology advocates.
Reuters issued their social media policy to employees yesterday, and the one thing that’s attracting the most attention is a policy that news should be broken on Reuters.com, not on Twitter:
As with blogging within Reuters News, you should make sure that if you have hard news content that it is broken first via the wire. Don’t scoop the wire. NB this does not apply if you are ‘retweeting’ (re-publishing) someone else’s scoop.
The policy also notes that Reuters employees should have the word “Reuters” in their Twitter user-name and all tweets from that account should be professional, not personal. Facebook and Wikipedia are also briefly discussed, but the breaking news element is quite interesting.
For a while now, reporters have been scrambling to break news first. on Twitter websites, blogs, or anywhere possible. Embargoes are almost entirely a thing of the past (according to TechCrunch they already are the past), and some companies are breaking their own embargoes on Twitter.
So why is Reuters opposed to reporters breaking stories on Twitter?
Quite simply, reporters that have a large, intense Twitter presence are able to turn themselves into a brand, while Reuters and other media outlets want the company to remain the strongest brand. When Bloomberg took over BusinessWeek and sent a significant number of journalists packing, it was the well-known visible people who were laid off. Reuters’ social media policy is meant to keep their reporters reporting factual and reliable news, instead of participating in a second-by-second race to break every last little piece of news.
“Fox News, Fair and Balanced.” Some say, it’s the most biased slogan in all of news. Others would argue that Fox News isthe most believable.
No matter what side of the fence you’re on, it’s tough to argue with the fact that there are more sources than ever before in the age of cable news and digital media, with varying shades of slant sprinkled throughout them.
In fact, a study last year by the PEW Research Center found that nearly 74% of Americans believe news organizations tend to favor one side of story and 60% believe news organizations are politically biased.
One new multi-media startup aiming to address these issues, along with the need for cost-effectively produced web and mobile video content, is Missouri-based Newsy.com. Newsy.com is a online video news site that monitors, analyzes and presents multi-sourced (or unbiased) news in video form for multiple platforms. The service is positioned as a video analyzer, not a video aggregator (such as VideoSift or Dabble.com), which means it employs an editorial staff to assist with the analyzing, sourcing, producing and repackaging rather than simply aggregating the video content.
“Look at the health care issue right now and there are likely 15,000 pieces of news coverage in all forms,” Newsy.com’s Founder and President Jim Spencer noted to me last week. “We sift through all the pieces of coverage and present one multi-sourced video.”
Missouri would seem like a funny home for a video startup to most, but Spencer, a J-school graduate from the University of Missouri, found just what he was looking for in returning to Columbia. A natural partnership with the J-School lowers staff and production costs, while offering two courses to students: An online audience development class, and a global converged news class taught by Newsy.com Vice President of Editorial Pam Maples, who was previously the managing editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
Another cost saver is Newsy.com’s proprietary technology that manually records and captures content. This allows the company’s 22 full and part-time employees, and assisting students, to sift through hours of media in an efficient way. All of this, in addition to the overall production prices being lower in Missouri than San Francisco or New York allows Newsy.com to analyze, produce and distribute news at a discount of as much as 40 percent on the dollar. Or as Spencer notes, “We can now compete with Mumbai.”
The notion of being “smarter and faster” provides several revenue stream options for Spencer, who is a veteran of new media offerings. Formerly the VP of Content and Answers at Ask Jeeves (Ask.com) and the GM of News and Information Programming at AOL, Spencer believes Newsy.com can drive revenue in a variety of ways outside of traditional on-site advertising. Namely, content licensing, branded news casts and revenue shares through syndication.
These revenue streams also apply to mobile video, which Spencer sees as a big opportunity. “There is a demand for short video news analysis on mobile devices,” he noted. The iPhone and its support of high quality video is certainly a driver of that. Last June, YouTube reported a 400% jump in video uploads driven by the release of the iPhone 3G and there’s an equal demand for consuming video on mobile devices. In fact, Newsy.com’s video news app for the iPhone reached number five on the list of free apps in the News category within the iTunes App Store last October (ahead of TIME, Wall Street Journal and Huffington Post apps).
Spencer, who plans to launch a similar video playing app for Android this week sees this growth as validation of Newsy.com’s platform agnostic approach. “It’s an affirmation of our multi-sourced, multi-platform approach. We’re ahead of this trend.”
Yesterday Boston Celtics forward Sheldon Williams sent out a tweet with very little information: “Man when it rains it pours!!! Yall will find out what I mean soon!!!!”
Within minutes, NBC and Celtics blogs began speculating what he could be talking about. The first assumption that quickly picked up steam and David Aldridge of NBA.com soon reported that Paul Pierce had a broken foot and would miss a large part of the remainder of the season. People on Twitter were RT’ing each other recklessly, blogs were posting this information at reckless speeds, and this had all come from one very vague tweet.
The something happened – the Celtics put out a statement contradicting the Twitter buzz. It said that Pierce strained his foot and was listed day-to-day. This news was quite different from what was being circulated on the Internet.
Maybe Sheldon Williams was indeed talking about Pierce’s injury – just for the mere fact that he was hurt. Maybe he was talking about something else basketball related, or maybe it was a totally separate subject. In any case, many media members have become so focused on breaking the story first that the accuracy of what they’re reporting suffers.
I don’t blame the reporters for this – they’re just trying to earn a living and make a name for themselves. It’s the structure of reporting that has initiated this change. Twitter’s popularity and 140 character posts have simplified reporting to quick announcements that don’t need sources attached to them. It’s allowed reporters to broadcast news to a large audience quickly and claim their dominance of the story before getting into the details and writing a full article. Often times this is great – it enables people to get information so quickly, like during Apple’s iPad announcement. However, as we saw in this case yesterday, it also increases blind assumptions sacrifices accuracy.
Earlier this week Cision and George Washington University released a survey, which reported that 84 percent of journalists believe social media sources are less reliable than traditional ones. Of the nearly 400 editors/journalists, which answered a custom questionnaire, 89 percent reported using blogs, 65 percent reported using social networking sites and 52 percent reported using micro-blogging sites like Twitter as part of their news gathering.
However, almost all of the respondents noted the reliability issues with Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites. In fact, none of the responding journalists / editors said “that news and information delivered via social media is a lot more reliable than news delivered via traditional media.”
Is this really a surprise though? I’m a huge advocate of journalists, editors and news organizations using these social media platforms, but I think we all understand that you need to take your bits of information and source leads with a grain of a salt. Yes, they’re a great tool for finding new potential leads, stories and information, but after that it comes back to the basic guidelines of reporting (verifying with two sources, fact checking, being objective, etc.).
That’s why this whole sending 5 journalists to a farmhouse in France with only Twitter and Facebook access to report stories doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Yes, it’s fun story. A bizzaro, Real World France-journalistic hybrid; but it won’t really prove anything. While these tools are growing in importance, they’re still just a part of your toolbox. The phone is still a powerful tool – people will say things there that they won’t say on social media or in an email (no paper trail). Your writing acumen, commons sense, etc. are powerful tools.
In addition, when looking strictly at news gathering – corporate Websites continue to be the most common destination for reporters doing background research or looking for information (Chart below).
Of course, the study also overlooks that social media is a powerful distribution / aggregation tool for journalists and editors. According to Venturebeat the NYTimes.com received nearly 3% of its traffic from Facebook in December 2009. And even with a scheduled move to metered traffic, the Timeswill still allow referral traffic from social media sites to see Times stories, without counting against their “meter”.
So while the five strangers picked to live in a farm-house in France, and have their stories Twittered, may have trouble confirming their sources and fact-checking, they should have no trouble distributing their stories.
