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Media trends digest
– March 2009
US political reporting changes shape
Political reporting in the US has dramatically changed shape, with less being done by local broad-reach media and more by both foreign correspondents and highly specialised outlets pitched at narrower and sometimes elite audiences.
Journalism.org at Pew Research reports: The corps of journalists covering Washington DC at the dawn of the Obama Administration is not so much smaller as it is dramatically transformed. And that transformation will markedly alter what Americans know and not know about the new government, as well as who will know it and who will not.
A careful accounting of the numbers, plus detailed interviews with journalists, lawmakers, press association executives and government officials, reveals that what we once thought of as the mainstream news media serving a general public has indeed shrunk—perhaps far more than many would imagine. A roll call of the numbers may shock.
But as the mainstream media have shrunk, a new sector of niche media has grown in its place, offering more specialized and detailed information than the general media to smaller, elite audiences, often built around narrowly targeted financial, lobbying and political interests. Some of these niche outlets are financed by an economic model of high-priced subscriptions, others by image advertising from big companies like defense contractors, oil companies, and mobile phone alliances trying to influence policy makers.
In addition, the contingent of foreign reporters in Washington has grown to nearly ten times the size it was a generation ago. And the picture they are sending abroad of the country is a far different one than the world received when the information came mainly via American based wire services and cable news.
Consider a few examples:
ClimateWire, an on-line newsletter launched less than a year ago to cover the climate policy debate for a small, high-end audience, deploys more than twice the reporting power around Capitol Hill than the Hearst News Service, which provides Washington news for the chain’s 16 daily newspapers.
The Washington bureau of Mother Jones, a San Francisco-based, left-leaning non-profit magazine, which had no reporters permanently assigned to the nation’s capital a decade ago, today has seven, about the same size as the now-reduced Time magazine bureau. [1] The Washington bureau of the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera, which opened a modest bureau when George W. Bush took office eight years ago, now has 105 staff members in its various services accredited to cover Congress, similar in size to that of CBS News—both radio and television—at 129. [2]
Or consider that the organization with the largest number of journalists accredited to the press galleries Congress is CQ, a news operation that produces an array of on-line and print publications with names like CQ Budget Tracker and CQ Senate Watch. Its 149 reporters eclipse the number of Hill-accredited journalists at the Associated Press (134) and congressional staffers dealing with accreditation say CQ has since surpassed even the hometown Washington Post in numbers. A decade ago, CQ had 40.
Collectively, the implications of these changes are considerable. For those who participate in the American democracy, the “balance of information” has been tilted away from voters along Main Streets thousands of miles away to issue-based groups that jostle for influence daily in the corridors of power.
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Tips for freelancers
From the MEAA: Nuts and bolts of freelancing - how to avoid being ripped off, negotiation tips,
customising the model contracts and digital rights are some of the many areas
that will be covered in the Nuts and Bolts session at this year’s Freelance Convention
on March 19 and 20 in Melbourne.
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Internet TV picks up
Knowledge Networks (USA): One in five (21 per cent) Internet users ages 13 to 54 now accesses streaming video to watch full episodes of TV programs – up from 10 per cent in 2006, according to a new report from Knowledge Networks. Two-thirds (65 per cent) of these "streamers" say they "expect" to be able to watch their favorite shows on "the device of my choice" – an expectation that reaches across generations, from 66 per cent of teen "streamers" (ages 13 to 17) to 57 per cent of those 50 to 54.
How People Use TV's Web Connections is now in its third year, detailing consumers' changing use of and attitudes toward television network content on the Internet. The report shows that, among 13-to-54 streamers of TV network content,
* use of third-party hosting sites (such as Hulu) to access TV network video content has doubled since 2007, from 14 per cent to 28 per cent
* the networks' own websites are still their most common source of network content, with the highest level being among streamers ages 18 to 34 (68 per cent)
* 87 per cent say they view full TV programs online so that they can "watch a current episode that I missed" – more than double the proportion (40 per cent) who are watching "older" or "last season" episodes – and 18 per cent say they are "trying out a new program"
* 30 per cent have forwarded a link to network content to somebody they know – and almost half (44 per cent) say they have received a link to network content from a family member or friend
Making full TV episodes available online also creates good will – for networks and sponsors alike; 86 per cent of 13-to-54 streamers said they are more engaged with programs that they can watch on the Internet – up from 78 per cent in 2006. And 66 per cent said that having access to complete episodes increases their consideration of sponsoring brands, compared to 58 per cent in 2006.
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Magazine sales update
UK – see his link (Guardian); USA – see this link (NY Times);
In Australia, the news was mixed for the December quarter of 2008. Across the board, sales have slumped over 10 per cent, with the big-circ womens titles hardest hit with drops of up to 16 per cent. There were exceptions in other sectors, with a few lifting. Newspapers generally fared a little better, experiencing a drop of around two per cent.
Local newspaper sales summary – see this link
Standards slip as purse strings tighten
LA Times via Benton: The airwaves are getting more grown-up, and it's not just the shows. The Absolut Vodka commercials that aired in Los Angeles and 14 other cities during Sunday night's Grammy Awards marked the first time in years that liquor ads ran in prime time on network-owned stations. Also crowding the airwaves during heavy viewing hours are infomercials once reserved for the middle of the night and ads touting extramarital affairs and the intimate uses of K-Y Jelly. As the recession takes its toll on firms that rely on advertising, TV stations aren't the only companies running ads once considered inappropriate. In recent months, the NBA rescinded a ban on courtside advertising by liquor companies. Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. did the same for ads they run on their websites. Billboard operators have allowed more strip clubs to hawk their establishments on roadside signs. "When you have the evaporation of advertising revenue, you have to look for new and creative ways of getting sellers in the door," said Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council. "It's coming in the way of adult-themed products and content."
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WIkipedia doomed by its own design?
Arstechnica: Law professor Eric Goldman loves Wikipedia, but he's also convinced that the site contains the "seeds of its own destruction." In other words, not to put too fine a point upon it, Wikipedia will fail.
In Goldman's view, the very popularity of the site stands in tension with its goal of radical openness. The freely editable nature of Wikipedia has made it a canvas upon which vandals, spammers, and pranksters can paint at will.
Case in point: the bizarre recent news about Germany's new economic affairs minister, whose full name is Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. As noted Wednesday on Slashdot, some Wikipedian inserted a "Wilhelm" somewhere in the dizzying list of names; the extra "Wilhelm" was picked up in reputable German publications (whose staffers are clearly not above using Wikipedia to check their facts); the Wikipedia page then linked to the articles in question as evidence that "Wilhelm" was an actual component of Freiherr zu Guttenberg's name.
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Content’s ‘crown’ damaged by write-downs
Time magazine, via Benton: Up until very recently, perhaps as recently as six months ago, the prevailing wisdom among analysts who covered the media industry was that "content is king." It is an inexact way of looking at what editors, photographers, actors, producers, and reporters create. But content is rapidly being devalued. The first people to press that case are accountants. They have insisted that companies write-down tens of billions of dollars in assets. Part of the problem with content value is tied directly to the recession. Accountants should take it easy when they lean on that too hard. The best assets bounce back when the economy recovers. But, by forcing companies to write-down their content assets so extremely they are saying that the firms can never go home again. Their TV shows, movies, magazines, and newspapers will never recover all of their value. No one knows to what extent content will be "re-valued" as the economy improves.
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Are video games good for you?
Reuters via Benton: Videogames can be good for children, encouraging creativity and cooperation, a European Union report concluded Wednesday which ran counter to the violent reputation of some titles.
In conclusions that may either surprise or reassure parents of game addicts, the study by the European Parliament Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection found a number of benefits and no definitive link to violent behavior.
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Maybe not…
Reuters via Benton: Among young college students, the frequency and type of video games played appears to parallel risky drug and alcohol use, poorer personal relationships, and low levels of self-esteem, researchers report.
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Censor or reform?
Benton: A Bahraini crackdown on websites the government deems indecent or socially explosive has triggered calls for reforms by rights activists and bloggers, who say the ban tarnishes the kingdom's reputation for openness. "Instead of tackling the social issues people discuss online, the government blocks websites. But that does not change the reality," said Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. "Hundreds of websites are blocked now, and many are related to politics, human rights issues or are Shia community forums." Bahrain's Culture and Information Minister Sheikha Mai bint Mohammed al-Khalifa issued a decree in January advising local Internet service providers to block access to websites it considers pornographic or incite violence and religious hatred.
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Mobile boom for India
Benton: Even amid the global economic slowdown, one Indian industry continues to boom: selling cellphones to the rural poor. Economists have slashed Indian economic growth forecasts for this year and the stock market is in the doldrums. But cellphone companies are signing millions of new subscribers a month, making India the fastest growing mobile-phone market in the world. There is no sign of a slowdown yet: figures to be released later this month are expected to show that new subscriptions in January reached a record 11 million. The demand for cellphones is coming mainly from rural consumers, who typically earn less than $1,000 a year. These buyers haven't been affected by plunging stock and real-estate prices or tighter bank lending since they typically don't own land and don't borrow. A large majority of them don't have access to regular landline phone networks -- there are only about 40 million landline subscribers in India -- so once cellular coverage comes to their towns or villages they scramble to get their first phones.
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Can you sell news by the slice?
NY Times via Benton: Every so often the dream of getting people to pay for online content recurs. It's recurring now because of the newspaper crisis: they have been hemorrhaging subscribers and advertisers for their paper editions, even as they give away their contents online. In the current Time, its former managing editor, Walter Isaacson, urges a solution: "micropayments." A more promising idea is the opposite: give away the content without the paper. In theory, a reader who stops paying for the physical paper but continues to read the content online is doing the publisher a favor. If the only effect of the Internet on newspapers was a drastic reduction in their distribution costs, publishers could probably keep a bit of that savings, rather than passing all of it and more on to the readers. But the Internet has also increased competition — not just from new media but among newspapers as well. Or rather, it has introduced competition into an industry legendary for its monopoly power.
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Sevenload launches in Australia
Media release: sevenload.com today announces the launch of the new localised video platform and social community for Australia.
sevenload is different to the other sites out there because it opens the door for young artists to prove their talent with their own webTV-format. sevenload offers them their own time slots in the cosmopolitan sevenload community and allows them to develop their own fan base.
In addition to user-generated content, sevenload offers the owners of premium-content access to a relevant target audience on the webTV market through branded entertainment, video advertising, viral video seeding and crossmedia solutions.
"The unbelievable response to our founding history in Europe convinced me, that we can provide our users and spectators individual entertainment and webTV in every country worldwide. Launching sevenload in Australia shows that we look beyond our borders and extend sevenload to an international media company" declares Ibrahim Evsan, founder and CTO of sevenload, about the background of the expansion.
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Defamation rules on web 2.0
SF Gate via Benton: The Web 2.0 movement, which ushered in an interactive Internet, sought to put power in the hands of the people by tapping the so-called wisdom of the crowds to change the world - and to keep such a digital democracy in check. A decade later, as defamation lawsuits have begun to mount, some are questioning the wisdom of the crowds, and wondering if it hasn't turned into mob rule. "I don't know why this has taken so long," said Andrew Keen, author of a controversial book, "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture." "The Internet is a culture of rights rather than responsibilities. We have no coherent theory of digital responsibility. The issue has broken through, broken out of Silicon Valley - now it affects real people with real reputations to defend."
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More books on web
NY Times via Benton: In a move that could bolster the growing popularity of e-books, Google said Thursday that the 1.5 million public domain books it had scanned and made available free on PCs were now accessible on mobile devices. Also Thursday, Amazon said that it was working on making the titles for its e-book reader, the Kindle, available on a variety of mobile phones.
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Special anti-trust rules for papers?
LA Times via Benton: The US newspaper industry needs help. It could come from the government in the form of a antitrust exemption that would allow all US newspaper companies -- and others in the English-speaking world, as well as popular broadcast-based sites such as CNN.com -- to sit down and negotiate an agreement on how to scale prices and, then, to begin imposing them simultaneously. That, in turn, would set the stage for tackling the other leg of this problem -- how to extract reasonable fees from aggregators like Google and Yahoo, which currently use their search engines to link to news that newspapers and broadcasters pay to gather.
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Paper website traffic is up
BizReport.com, USA: Paper-copy circulation of most daily newspapers may be dropping, but their online circulation is rising. According to the latest numbers from Nielsen Online year over year traffic to the top online newspaper websites grew 16 per cent.
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