The media goes where audience’s interests are right? Doing a research for my previous post here is what I found for “sarkozy”:
As long as this guy’s wife, divorce or drink habits will interest the public more than his work, we will have tabloids and cheap reporting.
One thing struck me while listening to yesterday’s interview at the radio: I am still using the “traditional media” expression to refer to newspapers and TVs, and “new media” to define Youtube and blogs.
It was the last time. This distinction does not make sense anymore. Things are way too embedded now. The BBC is on Youtube, user generated videos on cable TV (current.tv), blogs publish magazines, newspapers write blogs. Media. Not new, not traditional. “The media”.
From a recent presentation at the Seoul Digital Forum by Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press:
“As we consider the digital future though, let’s be very clear about one thing: Technology may change how journalists work, but it has never changed what journalists do. […]
The clear imperative today is that we have to go where the users are, and fit our content and interactivity to the screen they happen to be using. Consumers are consuming more content than ever, but we have to provide it in new ways and under different terms from those that drove our business through the 20th century,”
Great to hear the big execs sing that tune. Now is the time for journalists still feeling threatened by new technologies to realize they are their future, opening unprecedented opportunities for those who embrace them.
I found the little quote below very revealing of the strong inertia we tend to have when it comes to handle new technologies. A (brilliant) fifty something sports-writer who started his career in paper writes the following despite the fact his articles are now only published on a dot-com website:
“Do not worry about any hysterical dot-com reports” […] Link
His value system is still built around something that was true a few years ago, when paper was the only source of credible information, and information’s credibility was first and foremost identifiable by the container it was in.
Today it’s not anymore about the way you transport information; it is about who is creating it in the first place. We put the same level of trust in a New York Times article, whether we read in on paper or on an iphone.
Credibility has moved out of supports. It is exclusively in the source now. And reports can be hysterical on any support. Call that progress.
How long can the Wii continue out-selling PS3 six to one?
My bet is “not too long”. PS3 is about to take off with announcements like this upcoming TV tuner.
Nicolas Nova was on the RSR to analyse the twitter phenomena a few days ago (mp3 here). It seems the media are again getting very interested in new technologies. We are receiving many questions around themes like communities, 3D or entrepreneurship these days. Good sign.
Nielsen refines their research on TV audiences, comes up with surprising results:
A portion of a new study by Nielsen Media Research from 1,750 homes with DVRs shows that while TV networks have observed that the number of people watching shows have gone down, those numbers jump back up when time-shifted DVR viewing is accounted for.
What about time spent watching ads?
Commercial ad viewership increased when DVR viewing was accounted for as well. In homes with DVRs, ad viewership jumped 32 percent when shows were viewed within three days of live broadcast. Considering that viewership of TV shows in general jumped by 73 percent during that time period, however, it’s clear that about half of all DVR users are happy to make use of their DVRs’ ad-skipping abilities.
Euan is a quote machine these days.
When I learned, via twitter, of the car bomb that didn’t go off in London last night my first thought was “oh well”.When I heard of the Glasgow car attack my first thought was “If I’d been them I’d have checked with a tape measure the night before”
When I watch the television I am being told that “Britain is under attack” and my first thought is how sad journalists are these days.
The twitter user has no paper to sell, that might be the difference.
Steve Rubel points that the world’s most famous video blog is realizing that advertising alone won’t sustain its future growth and I wonder if these guys are 1) simply too early on the market 2) suffering from having totally unreliable metrics to work with. As I wrote earlier, views are inflated and can’t be taken seriously.
Advertisers kind of have a double leap of faith to do with video blogs, first getting out of the comfort zone of working with the good ol’ TV folks, then having no real way of measuring the number of eyeballs they are reaching.
There is an urgent need for statistical standards to measure internet traffic, and finally have numbers that can be trusted and compared. It is time for the W3C step up? Is there already something in that field?
The latest Project for excellence in journalism report examines one of the most challenged domain of the moment: news media under all its forms, from newspaper to radio, from internet sites to network TV. It is an interesting look into the potential scenarios this industry will HAVE to take in the coming years.
For some, the new brand is what Wall Street calls “hyper localism” (consider the end of foreign bureaus at the Boston Globe or the narrowing of the coverage area at the Atlanta Journal Constitution). For others, it is personality and opinion […]. For still others it is personal involvement […]. For an emerging cohort of Web sites it is the involvement of everyday people (some alternative news sites now come closer than ever to the promise of authentic citizen media).
It’s a great time to be in this business. Everything will be reinvented in the next few years. Buckle up!
Links:
• Report index
• Editorial Overview chapter
• Major trends
