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Media trends digest – June 2009

June 12

Murdoch on newspapers
“Within ten years, I believe nearly all newspapers will be delivered to you digitally, either on your PC or a Newton, a development of the Kindle, shall we say. ... Something that's quite mobile, you can take around with you. Communications are changing totally. We're moving into a digital age, and it's going to change newspapers. But if you've got a newspaper with a great name and a great reputation, and you trust it, the people in that community are going to need access to your source of news. What we call newspapers today, I call news organisations, journalistic enterprises, if you will. They're the source of news. And people will reach it if it's done well, whether they do it on a BlackBerry or a Kindle or a PC. ... I think people will miss a great deal not getting everything that you get in the newspaper. You may not read everything in it, but your eye catches things, and you learn things you didn't expect to learn. And I think we'll get back to that when we get these mobile readers that you carry whole newspapers on them."
Source: Fox News
Ed’s note: Murdoch is also among those publishers saying the ‘free ride’ offered by the web is unsustainable and charging for content will eventually become the norm. See this Editors Weblog backgrounder on the current state of play.
Also (Editor & Publisher): Apple has released new features within the iPhone OS that are going to be relevant to publishers. "The iPhone has redefined mobile and now the iPhone is going to give publishers the technology to redefine publishing news and advertising delivery," said Art Howe, CEO of Verve Wireless.
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Green on Crikey
The Editor of online commentary newspaper Crikey, Jonathan Green, recently wrote a piece for The Australian about online media and credibility.
He said, in part: “People won't let it go. How credible is Crikey, they ask? It's online isn't it? Is that real journalism? And this is what I say: that after working through a media epoch that has reduced the majority of Australian newspapers to journalistic zombies -- some selling, some not, but all driven either by ideology, populism or commercial desperation -- the stuff we do at Crikey is a return to something simple, wholesome and traditional.”
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MEAA scopes the future
Wired Scribe - The Alliance’s Future of Journalism website has recently been revamped. You can now watch some of Australia’s leading journalist discussing the future of the industry, join our Facebook group, catch up on the latest media news with our blog, Wired Scribe, and download our landmark report into the future of journalism. More
Journalism experiment - A team of journalists and educators based at Melbourne’s Swinburne University is preparing to launch the Foundation for Public Interest Journalism, which aims to experiment with new ways of delivering journalism in the new media world. The Foundation is now calling for nominations to the board and aims to be up and running by the end of the year. More

New paper for Detroit
While everyone else seems to be shutting down print newspapers, a pair of publishers in Detroit (Ed: of all places!) aim to start a new daily.
Associated Press reports: (Publisher) Mark Stern said the Detroit Daily Press should appeal to older readers who prefer a print copy of the paper, and its primary niche will be those who want their paper home-delivered. The newspaper also will have a Web site with a brief summary of the news for nonsubscribers.
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Never to young to start
The Guardian: Most of us were drinking cider in the park and setting up BMX assault courses when we were 13, but Scott Campbell is more interested in building his own web business. Together with his friend Nathan Adam, he's already six months into an online news project called NetNewsDaily that claims to aggregate and verify the best news on the web and serve it up efficiently for time-starved web users.
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Wikileaks wins Amnesty awards
At times controversial and even hated website Wikileaks recently won Amnesty International’s annual award for new media. What’s significant about this is that it was given to a collaborative outlet. See this link for the Amnesty nominations and winners.

Is public media the future?
Mashable has had a look at the ongoing success of the USA’s NPR: n March of this year, National Public Radio (NPR) revealed that by the end of 2008, 23.6 million people were tuning into its broadcasts each week. In fact, NPR’s ratings have increased steadily since 2000, and they’ve managed to hold on to much of their 2008 election coverage listenership bump (with over 26 million people tuning in each week so far in 2009), unlike many of their mainstream media counterparts.
Compared to cable news, where most networks are shedding viewers, and newspapers, where circulation continues to plummet, NPR is starting to look like they have the future of news all figured out. Or at least, they appear to doing a lot better at it than the rest of the traditional media.
But what is NPR doing differently that’s causing their listener numbers to swell? They basically have a three-pronged strategy that is helping them…
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Too many feeds
Speaking of Mashable, a quick look at its feed options (we couldn’t get all of them into the screen snapshot) suggests that maybe this whole transmission scene desperately needs a cull.

New wave from Google
OPA: A team of Google engineers introduced an early, unfinished version of a product called Google Wave at the Google I/O conference on May 28. Google Wave is a collaborative tool that combines the use of email, instant messaging and wikis so that people can create a mashup of real-time conversation without being burdened by the clunkiness of email threads. While IM and email conversations typically take place in chronological order, Google Wave allows a participant to go and reply to something higher up in the thread and create a sub conversation within it. It also allows you to later invite more collaborators to the thread and gives them the ability to "play back" the conversation so they can understand the structure of how it unfolded. The entire process is completely live. In fact you can even see what another collaborator is typing as he is still typing it, rather than waiting for him to press the "send" button.
Early reaction to the launch has been positive. Media journalists say that this is a revolutionary step toward the "live web" and is even more immediate than Twitter. BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis said, "Just as I was thinking they were behind the curve on the live web - and argued they should buy Twitter - Google attacked it from the left flank with Wave." Jarvis noted that this would be a good tool for journalists, imagining a scenario in which a team of reporters are able to contribute photos and news to the same Wave, with other witnesses later adding their own accounts to the live document. Many note that this would eliminate all the clunky inefficiencies of email. For instance, with email it can be sometimes difficult to follow a thread of messages when there are multiple people replying to them in the same thread; it can be hard to discern who is replying to whom. Google Wave, on the other hand, is a virtual sandbox that allows you to see every footprint as it's made, and even play back those footprints if need be. However, some critics say that the real time nature of the product can add to the confusion, because you might have multiple people replying to multiple sub threads, making for a "hairy mess," as CNET's Rafe Needleman put it. Google has yet to say how they will monetize the product, and it can be difficult to imagine how the company could use contextual ads on a real time conversation.
Wave guide – Business Week
Wave preview – Google

June 10

Social media & video the web future – Nielsen
Nielsen Media Research: Online engagement by Internet users is deepening, according to a new report on the online landscape released by The Nielsen Company. This increased engagement is in part a result of a shift toward video content and social networking as popular online subcategories. The full report was distributed at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco.
“The Internet remains a place of continuing innovation, with users finding new ways to integrate online usage into their daily lives,” said Charles Buchwalter, SVP, Research and Analytics, Nielsen Online. “In recent years the Internet has changed dramatically as people seek more personalized relationships online. In particular, time spent on social networks and video sites has increased astronomically. Advertisers are starting to positively re-assess the value of the online experience and create more meaningful relationships with consumers.”
Since 2003, interests of the average online user have shifted significantly. Categories that consisted of portal-oriented browsing sites, such as Shopping Directories and Guides and Internet Tools/Web Services, used to be the top categories for user engagement. However, today the active Internet user tends to prefer sites that contain more specialized content. This change in preferences is seen in the fact that video and social networking sites have moved to the forefront, becoming the two fastest growing categories in 2009.
Highlights include:
The number of American users frequenting online video destinations has climbed 339 per cent since 2003.
Time spent on video sites has shot up almost 2000 per cent over the same period.
In the last year alone, unique viewers of online video grew 10 per cent, the number of streams grew 41 per cent, the streams per user grew 27 per cent and the total minutes engaged with online video grew 71 per cent.
There are 87 per cent more online social media users now than in 2003, with 883 per cent more time devoted to those sites.
In the last year alone, time spent on social networking sites has surged 73 per cent.
In February, social network usage exceeded Web-based e-mail usage for the first time.
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US goes digital
The USA switches off analogue television in a week. Here’s a statement from President Obama’s office: "On June 12 -- one week from tomorrow -- the nation's full-power television stations will switch to all-digital programming. The transition to digital will free up airwaves for broadband and enhanced emergency communications for our police officers, firefighters, and other first responders. In February, I worked with Congress to postpone the deadline television broadcasters had to end their analog signals, because it was clear that millions of Americans would have been left in the dark if the conversion had gone on as planned. I directed key members of my Administration to reach out and help Americans, especially those in our most vulnerable communities, to make the switch to digital television. In the months since then, we have worked hand in hand with state and local officials, broadcasters, and community groups to educate and assist millions of Americans with the transition. The number of households unprepared for digital television has been cut in half.  Still, some people are not ready. I want to be clear: there will not be another delay. I urge everyone who is not yet prepared to act today, so you don't lose important news and emergency information on June 12.  And I encourage all Americans who are prepared, to talk to their friends, family, and neighbors to make sure they get ready before it's too late."

Long exposure for brief malfunction
Janet Jackson’s infamous ‘wardrobe malfunction’ during a sports broadcast in 2004 is still winding its way through the courts. Broadcasting & Cable (via Benton) reports that a Federal Communications Commission fine of US$550,000 levied against broadcaster CBS was “capricious” and no longer stands.
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Should newspapers be non-profit?
Washington Post via Benton: In the burgeoning field of fretting about the future of newspapers, some think the solution is to recruit a new set of wealthy and civic-minded individuals or families. Others think a better answer is for newspapers to become officially what they are becoming in reality: nonprofit. Even as newspapers have sunk, there has been a rising tide of rich, media-oriented foundations. The grandee solution and the nonprofit-foundation solution have emerged as favorites because both offer a plausible answer to the question of how newspapers can survive without making money. Their answer is: Don't worry about it. But which of these "models" (to use the modish term) is best?
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US Online video use overstated – report
MediaPost via Benton: The amount of time Americans spend watching online video is vastly overstated, according to the findings of some highly regarded research made public Tuesday. The disclosure, which is likely one of the more controversial findings being mined from an ambitious piece of academic research that actually observed how people spend their time consuming media, was made during one of a series of so-called "collaborative alliance" meetings hosted by Havas media shop MPG for the advertising and media industry in New York. "This may be the first study to document the dramatic overstatement of online video and mobile video," said Jim Spaeth, one of the founders of Sequent Partners, which collaborated with Ball State University's Center for Media Design on the Video Consumer Mapping Study on behalf of the Nielsen-funded Council for Research Excellence. The project, which cost $3.5 million to field, directly observed how people spent their day using media, found that while growing rapidly, online video and mobile video still account for a small fraction of the amount of time Americans spend watching all forms of video content, including live TV programming, time-shifted television, DVDs, video games, etc.
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Psychological profiling the next frontier
Psychological profiling of internet users so that advertising can be more accurately targeted, is next frontier for online marketers according to the Behavioral columnist, Laurie Sullivan, at MediaPost.
He writes: “Can behavioral targeting also mean understanding human behavior in reaction to an advertising campaign? Companies touting the targeting of online ads to consumers as a mixture of art and science could soon find psychologists employed among their midst. The need to better understand human behavior will prompt the shift, as the technology becomes more affordable and agencies attempt to regain their online footing following the industry slowdown.”
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See also the Centre for Digital Democracy

Who’s to blame?
Editor & Publisher: As the global economy appears to at least be bottoming out, questions still remain as to why so many people worldwide were blindsided by the severity of the crisis…the general consensus among consumers across much of the world is that the media did a poor job informing the public about the issues leading up to the current financial crisis.
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Ed's note: And there was us thinking it was all Gordon Brown’s fault – everything else seems to be…

Microsoft tackles Google search – again
Online Publishers Association:
At the AllThingsD Conference on May 28, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled Bing, Microsoft's newest search engine meant to replace its Live search. The site has received positive early reviews and some analysts are cautiously optimistic that it could gain search and advertising market share on industry leader Google. Like Google, the site includes search suggestions as you type in the search field and offers specialized search categories, including health, local, shopping and travels. A search in the travel category, for instance, will yield hotel and airfare prices and predict the least expensive time to purchase reservations. Microsoft is prepared to pay between $80 and $100 million to promote the Bing service.
Scott Howe, who leads monetization efforts for Microsoft’s advertising unit, said at a conference that he expects Bing's advertising to benefit from what he thinks will be an industry-wide advertising upswing in the coming months. He dodged questions, however, when asked what kind of search market share he thinks Bing could achieve. The Wall Street Journal's Jessica Hodgson reported that "it will likely win over some big advertisers, helping it push the scales on search." There had already been reports that Microsoft's Live search engine had better click conversion rates than Google, leading some to believe that Bing could still be competitive even with significantly fewer searches than its larger competitor. Qi Lu, head of search for Microsoft, told Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan that Bing is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Microsoft's search plans, but did not reveal what future projects would entail.

Newspapers execs meet to discuss pay walls
OPA: Representatives of two dozen newspapers met in Chicago last Thursday for a closed-door discussion on whether charging for online content is a viable option. The event, organized by the Newspaper Association of America, was attended by the Associated Press, McClatchy, The New York Times Co, Gannett, Advance Publications, Hearst Newspapers, and several others. Though the meeting was off the record, a few reports indicated that the execs discussed a range of methods newspapers could use to charge their readers for content, including micropayments and offering a mixture of free and subscription content.
One of the presenters at the meeting was Steve Brill, who told a reporter that Journalism Online, his pay-for-news startup, would soon announce deals made with several newspapers to charge for content. Brill claims that Journalism Online can get 5% to 10% of a newspaper's readership to pay for select content while only sacrificing a minimal number of the page views that the newspaper would be getting if all its content were free. In a slideshow presentation, Brill ran numbers for three hypothetical newspapers and claimed that 95 per cent of paying customers will choose subscriptions rather than micropayments. However, many critics continue to be skeptical as to whether a pay-for-content model would work. They point out that previous pay-to-read strategies for major newspapers -- most notably the New York Times' TimesSelect -- have failed. Scott Rosenberg, a former editor for Salon, a site that offers paid premium memberships, wrote, "when you put up a pay wall around a website you are asking people to pay more for access to material that you are simultaneously devaluing by cordoning it off from the rest of the Web. This makes no sense and is never going to work to support general-interest newsgathering (though it can be a perfectly good plan for specialty niches)."

Sharp advertising growth on mobile devices
OPA: A new quarterly Mobile Advertising Report by Brightkite and GfK Technology predicts that mobile marketing will grow by 26 per cent this year. It states that approximately 38 per cent of mobile users have seen some kind of advertising on their cell phones in the first quarter of 2009, and it found that men showed the biggest increase in mobile ad awareness, up to 43 per cent in Q1 from 33 per cent the quarter before. Meanwhile, a report from Jupiter Research predicts that mobile advertising will reach $5.7 billion by the year 2014. It claims that the fact that people have cell phones on them at all times makes the medium ideal for targeted advertising. This growth in mobile marketing has led to multiple start-ups trying to capitalize on this market, including several developers of iPhone apps; the phone's apps are ideal for advertisers because of the great web browsing experience on the phone.

NAA: newspaper online ads down in Q1
OPA: It has long been believed that while print advertising continues to plummet, one bright spot for publishers is that online advertising would continue to rise. But a recent report from the Newspaper Association of America states that online advertising in the first quarter of 2009 fell by 13.4 per cent, totaling $696.3 million. This isn't nearly as bad as the decline of print advertising, which fell by 29.7 per cent to $5.9 billion. In the first quarter of 2008, online advertising for newspapers was at $804 million. Not only are the online ad dollars falling, but they're decreasing at a quicker rate than in Q4 of 2008, which saw a drop of 8 per cent in online advertising. This drop in online advertising has added fuel to the idea for some who believe that newspapers should begin charging their readers for online content.

Is Facebook worth $10 billion?
OPA: A Russian Internet-investment group, Digital Sky Technologies, is putting up US$200 million for a 2 per cent stake in the social-networking web site. The investment implies a value for Facebook of US$10 billion.

Wikipedia bans Scientology Church’s edits
OPA: Wikipedia’s arbitration committee ruled to permanently block contributions and edits to Scientology articles from Internet addresses originating from the Church of Scientology’s headquarters.
“Wikipedia has more power over speech than many governments... We have to make sure that they're being reasonable,” Tim Wu, professor of Internet law, Columbia Law School, Chairman, Free Press

Stop it at once – Bloomberg
Gawker: Bloomberg has distributed a policy to newsroom staff on blogging, Twittering and Facebook updating. And in keeping with the company's tyrannical management culture, the rules are far more authoritarian than similar admonitions recently dispensed at the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and elsewhere.
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June 3

General Motors failure to hit media hard
Thedeal.com, via Benton: Advertising agencies, newspapers and magazines, television and radio stations, and Web sites will lose hundreds of millions in GM advertising dollars from the fallen American industrial icon. Those losses will likely translate into more corporate restructuring in the form of possible layoffs or divestments to protect the bottom lines of these media companies. In fact, GM's largest unsecured creditor claiming trade debt is not an auto parts maker, but an advertising company. Chicago-based diversified advertising group Starcom MediaVest Group Inc is listed as the sixth-largest unsecured creditor with a claim of $121.5 million.
In order to understand the impact on media companies, you must look at the crumbs left in news stories and SEC filings. Look for media stocks with heavy newspaper investments to feel more pain from a loss of GM auto advertising dollars in their already slowing ad revenues. In the first quarter, classified ad revenue fell 39% at Gannett, 42% at New York Times and 43% at EW Scripps. The GM bankruptcy is possibly going to force a shakeout in the industry with some smaller companies that relied on auto-related revenue to seek a merger to survive and bigger players to become more creative to fill the GM loss.
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Innovate or die
Forbes.com (op-ed): The old ways of doing business in traditional media no longer apply. Media companies that resist change are doomed to fail. Legacy models have been overturned by digital technology. But traditional media companies are clinging ever more desperately to what they know. Just when they should be taking advantage of a chaotic marketplace to justify aggressive restructuring aimed at opening ancillary revenue streams, many are going the other way. They are huddled in the corner, trying to preserve old business models and protect their paychecks.
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The local take
From the ABC’s 7.30 Report: The past year has been an ominous time for the global newspaper industry. In the United States, mastheads that have published the news for more than a century are falling into bankruptcy, going online or closing down altogether. While the global financial meltdown has hit newspapers hard, some argue the rise of the internet and the subsequent collapse of classified ad revenue poses a fundamental threat to the viability of the business model which has sustained big city newspapers for centuries.
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Commentary from the Australian Newsagency Blog

Net metering by stealth?
In the US, it’s an issue that refuses to go away – the possibility of tiered internet access, something which you’ll find much more on with a search of our Benton archives.
Broadbandcensus.com reports: Consumer advocacy groups are gearing up for another fight with Time Warner Cable after the Internet provider quietly updated its terms of service with language that critics have pounced on as a harbinger of future metering and usage caps. Time Warner subscribers received an updated copy of the terms of service on their most recent bills - which contained the changes. But the offending provisions came to light Monday after circulating through the blogosphere over the weekend. The new changes come only months after Time Warner scrapped plans to institute bandwidth caps on customers, reportedly after pressure from Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY). In addition to representing the company's home state, Sen Schumer sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission should investigate Time Warner's practices, Public Knowledge Founder Gigi Sohn said in a statement. Inquiries would determine "the extent to which [the policies] hamper the free flow of information online, and to which they are anticompetitive," she said.
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Twitter goes to war
Reuters via Benton: US commanders launched their "social networking strategy" for Afghanistan Tuesday, using the hugely popular website Twitter to release information about some of their operations. The decision to use the latest Internet fad was meant to "engage non-traditional audiences directly with news, videos, pictures and other information from Operation Enduring Freedom," the US military said, and to "preempt extremist propaganda."
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Twitter versus the great firewall
Reuters, again: Access to the popular social networking service Twitter and email service Hotmail was blocked across mainland China late on Tuesday afternoon, two days before the twentieth anniversary of a bloody crackdown on Tiananmen Square.
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Say what?
USA Today via Benton: A study released Monday finds that parents and children virtually stop talking to each other when the TV is on, even if they're in the same room. For every hour in front of the TV, parents spoke 770 fewer words to children, according to a study of 329 children, ages two months to four years, in the June issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Adults usually speak about 941 words an hour. Children vocalized less, too, says author Dimitri Christakis of the Seattle Children's Research Institute. That may help explain earlier studies finding that babies who watch a lot of TV know fewer words, although they catch up to their peers by 16 months, Christakis says. "Babies learn language from hearing it spoken," he says.
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