Not only are consumers spending more time than ever before on social networks, they’re also using social networks as a one-stop-shop for news and information. The latest study released by Pew Research Center today found that 75 percent of online news consumers get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites.
However, online news consumption isn’t completely taking over offline (mainly TV and radio) consumption. Instead, consumers are combining both offline and online sources to digest news. In fact, 59 percent of the 2,259 U.S. adults (18+) surveyed, noted they use both sources. Meanwhile, only two percent noted they only use online sources for news and 38 percent of those surveyed still use offline sources as their main news provider each day.
Pew goes onto note that today’s multi-platform news environment is becoming portable, personalized and participatory:
33 percent of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones
28 percent of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them
37 percent of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter
Looking closer at Facebook as a news hub, it will become increasingly important for brands to ensure that their messages and announcements penetrate the social network. This could be through their Facebook fan pages, personal posts, aggregation buttons on corporate blogs or even journalist posts. In addition, news stories with brand and message inclusion should also be scored on if they make “most emailed” lists, are posted to an outlet’s Facebook page (i.e. the New York Times posting a story) or if a reporter personally posts a story to their page (example illustrated above).
Personally, Twitter has been a great crowd-sourcing tool for myself each morning that often beats the morning paper in terms of multiple sources, stories and varying points of view. However, I’ve found myself going to Facebook for the same type of crowd-sourcing recently. With the combination of friends’ updates and news posts from both friends, colleagues, news outlets and clients it becomes a more personal experience. I also find that with more information posted (no character limit), I spend less time clicking through to stories (not necessarily a good thing for media companies).
And that personal experience isn’t only key for myself. Despite all of the online activity, Pew notes that the typical online news consumer routinely uses just a handful of news sites. Most likely because the news and information is overwhelming and consumers opt for sites that they are comfortable with and engage within themselves.
Jon Meacham Appearing on Charlie Rose, upon the launch of the “new” Newsweek (Last May)
Newsweek’s “intellectually satisfying” new layout may not be working out as planned. Keith Kelley of the New York Post reports today that the Washington Post Company (owners of Newsweek) somewhat hid within their Q4 earnings that Newsweek lost $28.1 million in 2009. Newsweek CEO Tom Ascheim tells Kelly that they expected losses in 2009 and even in 2010 with their lower circulation, but expect to break even by 2011.
We reported last May on the transformation of Newsweek; from a venerable weekly into an Economist-like read for the intellectual elite. As part of the transformation, Ascheim and Meacham laid the groundwork for trimming down its circulation from 3.1 million to 1.2 million. As of January, Newsweek had cut its circulation down to 1.5 million. The circulation cut, which was done to focus on its “core readership,” also laid groundwork for trimming its staffing costs. Newsweek has offered severance to 44 staffers over the last year.
Despite trimming and cover stories such as “The Case for Killing Granny,” “Is Your Baby Racist?” and “Obama is Wrong,” Newsweek struggled with its transition throughout the media meltdown of 2009 (no different than most magazines). According to information from the Magazine Publishers of America the magazine witnessed a 25.9% drop in 2009 ad pages and a $105 million loss in revenue with its print business. Yes, you can blame the gradual circulation change and redesign, but what business could stay in the green with a 30 percent loss in money coming in – no matter how many people you lay off.
Things may turnaround for Newsweek as we continue to come out of the economic tumult (Ascheim notes Q4 was their best), but does the Washington Post Company have the stomach to wait until 2011 to break even? And perhaps more importantly what is their online strategy to offset these losses? Is there a paywall in the future?
Some waking from a coma this week might think the Apple Tablet is able to find the cure to cancer or create world peace due to all of the attention that it’s getting. There are articles popping up left and right telling us all about this new tablet, even though we still don’t have real confirmation that it exists. It’s overshadowing everything, including President Obama’s speech tomorrow – which seems to be a lot more important then Apple’s rumored new device. Has a gadget ever received so much attention before it was launched or confirmed?
Sure, the Apple Tablet sounds cool – I admit, it should be good for newspapers and magazines if it can provide them with a decent revenue model, but it’s not like people are going to need to purchase this product – it’s very much a luxury. First, it will likely be very expensive, just like all of Apple’s products. This means then a very small percentage of the population will actually purchase one. Second, is a tablet the right product for right now? People have been purchasing smaller mobile devices (smart phones), not larger ones. Since the Tablet won’t fit in your pocket, it simply replaces a laptop, or becomes another gadget for the living room.
I understand that people follow Apple’s every move, but this time it seems a bit overdone (how funny would it be if tomorrow’s announcement is about a completely different topic!) Can we please see the Tablet for what it really is: another device Apple wants us to purchase and add to our collection of gadgets so that we can post tweets and brag about which gadgets we have and how cool they are.
I’m not against the Tablet (although the constant talk is getting pretty old at this point), I’m just questioning how it can possible live up to the hype. If it was some other lesser known company that was developing it, there would be a lot of questions brought up instead of people drooling over the chance to see some photo-shopped picture of the device.
So let’s take a step back and see what the Tablet is all about before we credit it with changing the world.
Disclosure: Racepoint Group works with Sony’s eReader division.
While it’s not on par with the drama of Rupert Murdoch’s coup of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal (so 2007), news today that MSNBC is following up its purchase of the breakingnews twitter handle, with the acquisition of breakingnews.com, may be better sign of the state of media as we enter a new decade.
Just ask the folks that now work under Rupert at the Wall Street Journal. It’s no longer about the information provided or the depth of that insight, it’s about who breaks it first. All of that making an operation like breakingnews.com so valuable in the age of real-time search; and entrepreneurs like 19 yr old Michael van Poppel the media moguls of the next decade.
In their release, Charlie Tillinghast, president of msnbc Digital Network noted, “Not everyone wants news surrounded by commentary or features. Hard and fast breaking news is currently an underserved market. With www.breakingnews.com we can now provide the optimal solution.”
Although MSNBC will now work to drive traffic to the breakingnews.com Website, the twitter handle is currently more valuable in-terms of influence. The breakingnews Twitter handle has more than 1.5 million followers, while Quancast reports that breakingnews.com had roughly 67,000 U.S. visitors in November of 2009. Of course, actual terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In his typical fashion, David Carr of the New York Times eloquently sums up in today’s Media Equation column why coverage of business isn’t following the business rebound. Or as he mixes words much better than I, “Business is a Beat Deflated.”
Despite, positive news on the economic front, those that cover business continue to be hit with painful developments, which Carr references:
Last week the Wall Street Journal closed down its Boston office, which had been a long-time staple of deep-dive reporting and investigative journalism. Although they noted that some investigative function will remain, the closing ended Bill Bulkeley’s multi-decade run at the Journal. Bulkeley had been with the Journal for 37 years, covering technology since 1979. He was, up until his exit, the main beat reporter of IBM and EMC, two Fortune 500 staples. (Update: Bill noted to me earlier this week that he was “blindsided” by the closing and was still trying to figure out what was next after 3 decades there).
Fortune announced last week that it will cut back from 25 issues to 18 issues a year. In addition, insiders believe that additional cuts will occur across TIME Inc. magazine properties by the end of the year.
Forbes already announced last week that it will cut a quarter of its staff.
Carr doesn’t mention that his own paper will shed 100 news room jobs by the end of the year.
Carr uses the data to outline his theory that: “While the business of business may be back, the business of covering it with heroic narratives and upbeat glossy spreads most certainly is not. And probably never will be.”
Its hard to argue against and even tougher to explain to clients (especially CEO’s) that have grown accustomed to associating PR success with their appearances on glossy covers. Peter Himler touched on this last week, when looking at Michael Bush’s piece for Ad Age:
“There remains a vast swath of corporate communicators and their bosses in the C-suite for which a Twitterfeed, company blog, YouTube or Facebook page takes a distant backseat to a prominent piece in Business Week or The Journal or an appearance on ‘Today’ or ‘Squawk Box.’ Believe it or not, even a client’s by-line in the world’s most popular (and conversation catalyzing) blog Huffington Post isn’t viewed by many as having the same value as a piece in The New York Times or the New Yorker.”
It’s not going to get any better. As we know, the business of business journalism is broken in the digital age. With business updates by the second, readership for past-tense features are rapidly dwindling. Therefore, ad dollars that still exist, are moving away from the magazines and into new digital channels. However, Carr hits on something much deeper than just the business being broken. He attributes part of the collapse to consumer resentment and being out of date / touch:
“It’s not that the public has lost its appetite for stories about handsome men in three-piece suits who clink whiskey glasses at the end of a long, not-so-hard day while talking smack about their female co-workers. But “Mad Men” pretty much sates that need. The businessman as Colossus is by now a nostalgic impulse.”
It’s a valid argument. Heck, TIME is trying to leverage the resentment as a way to make money on its business coverage (cover above). Unfortunately, that isn’t a good story for TIME’s colleagues at Fortune, the Bill Bulkeley’s of the world or CEO’s looking to get their name in print – or even Google searches. Those that consume business media consume, as Carr notes “hope and aspiration.”
The issue of Fortune on newsstands now, adorned with a digital image of Obama and Google glasses will probably be one of the best-selling issues of the year. Just like this Economist cover probably was. Therefore, when I look back a few weeks ago to Bulkeley telling me in advance of a briefing that he and the WSJ Boston office were kept away from Obama’s cleantech discussion at MIT “because DC owns all Obama coverage,” it was probably a bad sign on a variety of fronts.
There just isn’t much hope in business journalism these days, unless you’re working on cable TV.
Social media is obviously a hot topic for the mainstream media. They see opportunity in using it towards turning their career paths and organizations around, and thus their coverage of it is through the roof.
That said, it was puzzling to hear earlier this year that a survey by PR Week / PRNewswire found that only 22% of journalists were leveraging Twitter for crowd-sourcing, connecting with readers and aggregating their stories on the Web. A separate survey, around the same time, by the TEKgroup found that only 38% of journalists would be interested in receiving corporate news via corporate Twitter handles. Yes, those second numbers seemed promising, but where were the mandates to adopt these strategies – FAST?
Well, perhaps the moves by media organizations like the New York Times, to get serious with social media have paid off.
According to a new survey from Middleberg Communications and the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), 70% of journalists said they use social networks to assist in reporting. Compare that to the 41% that said they used social networks to assist in last year’s “Survey of Media in the Wired World.”
The online survey, which will remain open for a few more weeks, has the responses of 317 journalists to date. Far less than the 2,174 polled by PR Week and PR Newswire in April, so the validity of the findings may be in doubt.
For what it’s worth, The Survey of Media in the Wired World also found that:
69% of journalists go to company Web sites to assist in their reporting
Almost a year after announcing that they would no longer accept most embargoed news, TechCrunch has declared that the embargo is officially dead – at least in their opinion. Michael Arrington argues that since Google and Microsoft are no longer able to hold their embargoes (PaidContent broke Google’s embargo about Sidewiki on Wednesday), the last tree in the forest has fallen, effectively leaving embargoes news on the side of the road for trash day.
The Wall Street Journal has also adopted a similar policy as TechCrunch, only accepting embargoes for exclusives.
One of the more interesting discussions comes in TechCrunch’s comments section, where one reader discusses the value of having multiple outlets reporting on news as opposed to one outlet that is granted an exclusive. In response, Sarah Lacy argues that it’s easier to get news just from one source which explains the popularity of aggregators like Techmeme. However, Techmeme is actually a collection of stories from various sources, effectively making the reader’s point that readers value different sources for information.
In any case, TechCrunch has declared that the embargo is officially dead, so now the big question is how many other outlets will follow suit…
Whenever I receive an email notification that someone new is following me on Twitter, I visit their profile page, review their tweets, and if I am interested, click “follow” to begin receiving their updates.
Today I was notified that @230NoSt_Hingham was following me on Twitter. I have family in the next town over from Hingham, so I wondered if they had noticed me tweeting about my favorite local spots in that area.
As it turns out @230NoSt_Hingham is not a person, but a property listing. The bio for the Twitter handle reads “Condo gem for sale in a quaint community that’s walkable and within easy public transit to Boston.”
Is Twitter the new forum for real estate listings?
In my post yesterday, “How Craigslist Killed the Hometown Newspaper”, I commented on the presence of Craigslist in small towns causing a decrease in classifieds (such as real estate listings) in local papers, thus decreasing their revenue.
If realtors now have two, free online alternatives to the paid, print classifieds (Craigslist and Twitter), will newspaper real estate listings, and thus local newspapers, become obsolete?
Last week, my fellow RaceTalk bloggers Ben Haber and Kyle Austin each commented on Twitter’s decision to localize its offering, adding new features that would enhance the site’s sharing capabilities amongst users in the same geographic area.
This week, another website ups the local ante, this time, by expanding its services to 140 new cities. Who is coming to a small town near you?
According to Brad Stone in his post for the New York Times’ Bits blog, “the San Francisco company quietly added new sites for 140 cities, a 25 percent increase, bringing its global directory to 690 cities over all. The additions include 87 cities in the United States, eight in Canada and 45 outside North America.”
Not only are these numbers staggering due to the sheer growth and heightened reach of the site, but this expansion is going to yield more than just another place to find a cheap futon.
In most major U.S. cities, Craigslist is the primary resource for finding an apartment, scouring for cheap furniture and even searching for job listings. Where Craiglist lives, “want” ads do not. In an economy where print publications are scaling back on staff and content, and ramping up their list of advertisers to stay afloat, the threat of a free advertising option does not bode well for the hometown newspaper.
Brad Stone suggests, “where Craigslist goes, of course, the fortunes of local newspapers often plummet, since classified ads on the site can mostly be placed free.”
It seems where Craigslist unpacks, hometown papers pack up. Will you miss them?
In April RaceTalk reported that The Wall Street Journal decided to follow TechCrunch and no longer accept embargoed news. Today, paidContent.org reported that the WSJ will in fact accept exclusive embargoed news, but will not take herd embargoes:
The Wall Street Journal has a new policy for its editorial staff, we have learned: it will not accept embargoes for stories, but will take exclusives if handed to them. We have confirmed the policy from various sources, although a WSJ spokesman told us: “There is no change with our embargo policy. We honor deals when we make them.” Not all embargoes are identical—according to our sources, the WSJ will accept embargoes for exclusives but not when other media outlets are involved unless the story is considered big enough.
While the WSJ has this policy in place, paidContent.org reports that there are some exceptions if the story is big enough.
When a Racepoint Group employee contacted TechCrunch this morning, a TechCrunch blogger noted that the WSJ had adopted their policy and suggested it may be best to steer clear of the publication going forward – a tongue-in-cheek reference to the controversy that TechCrunch caused throughout the media and PR world after instituting their own embargo policy back in December 2008.
