Teachingmedia

Pew Internet: Online Video

Online Video: 57% of internet users have watched videos online and most of them share what they find with others

7/25/2007 | MemoReport | Mary Madden

The growing adoption of broadband combined with a dramatic push by content providers to promote online video has helped to pave the way for mainstream audiences to embrace online video viewing. Fifty-seven percent of online adults have used the internet to watch or download video, and 19% do so on a typical day. Three-quarters of broadband users (74%) who enjoy high-speed connections at both home and work watch or download video online.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project's first major report on online video also shows how many video viewers have contributed to the viral and social nature of online video. More than half of online video viewers (57%) share links to the video they find with others, and three in four (75%) say they receive links to watch video that others have sent to them.

Video viewers who actively exploit the participatory features of online video, such as rating content, posting feedback or uploading video, make up the motivated minority of the online video audience. Young adults are the most active participants in this realm.

Posted by Richard Beach at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hungry for younger readers, newspapers should embrace their voices | csmonitor.com

Hungry for younger readers, newspapers should embrace their voices
Declining newspaper readership, especially among the young, is forcing editors to reexamine their focus.
By Larry Atkins

Philadelphia - Why is it that every time an issue concerning young people arises, the newspaper op-eds commenting on those issues are almost always written by people in their 40s, 50s, or 60s? Whether it's a columnist or a parent talking about their child's college graduation or how kids in the 1950s settled disputes with their fists instead of guns, it's a tired old paradigm.

If newspapers want to reach out to younger readers, they need to include their voices.

For the past few years, many people and publishers have lamented that young adults tend not to read newspapers.

A report released July 10 by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University showed that young people do not follow the news closely. Only 16 percent of 18- to 30-year-olds surveyed in the study said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did.

Circulation is declining for most major American daily newspapers, including 8 percent for the Los Angeles Times, 6.7 percent for The Boston Globe, and 5.3 percent for the San Francisco Chronicle, according to the semiannual Audit Bureau of Circulations' Fall 2006 report.

The declines in newspaper readership are greatest among young adults and the younger segment of baby boomers, reports the Columbia Journalism Review.

Most young people tend to get their news from the Internet or television shows such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I teach journalism as an adjunct professor at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa., and Temple University in Philadelphia. Each semester, when I go around the room to see where my students get their news, hardly anyone mentions daily newspapers.

In the past few years, some newspapers have attempted to reach out to this younger group. In November 2002, The Chicago Tribune started a special tabloid geared toward younger readers called RedEye, which has 280,000 daily readers. Newsday has a weekly "New Voices" feature, which encourages college, high school, and middle school students to submit op-eds. The Boston Globe just started a teen publication called Boston Teens in Print, or TiP, which is written by teens.

Posted by Richard Beach at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

New Global Study From MTV, Nickelodeon and Microsoft Challenges Assumptions About Relationship Between Kids, Youth & Digital Technology

New Global Study From MTV, Nickelodeon and Microsoft Challenges Assumptions About Relationship Between Kids, Youth & Digital Technology
PR Newswire

LARGEST-EVER STUDY SURVEYED 18,000 KIDS AND YOUTH FROM 16 COUNTRIESREPORT HIGHLIGHTS DIFFERENCES IN HOW TECHNOLOGY IS USED ACROSS CULTURES
July 24, 2007: 12:23 PM EST

NEW YORK and LONDON, July 24 /PRNewswire/ -- The average Chinese young person has 37 online friends he or she has never met, Indian youth are most likely to see mobile phones as a status symbol, while one in three UK and US teenagers say they can't live without their games console.

Globally, the average young person connected to digital technology has 94 phone numbers in his or her mobile phone, 78 people on a messenger buddy list and 86 people in his or her social networking community. Yet despite their technological immersion, digi-kids are not geeks -- 59% of 8-14 year-old kids still prefer their TV to their PCs and only 20% of 14-24 year-old young people globally admitted to being "interested" in technology. They are, however, expert multi-taskers and able to filter different channels of information.

These are just some of the findings from the largest-ever global study undertaken by MTV and Nickelodeon, in association with Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, into how kids and young people interact with digital technology. The Circuits of Cool/Digital Playground technology and lifestyle study challenges traditional assumptions about their relationships with digital technology, and examines the impact of culture, age and gender on technology use.

Posted by Richard Beach at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For news media, transparency is a matter of trust -- chicagotribune.com

"Journalists are not only reluctant to explain what they know and how they know it," the report said, "their news organizations are also often loath to admit mistakes and loath to publicly state their policies regarding their internal journalistic and ethical guidelines."

The University of Maryland-based group looked at five categories to rate a news outlet's transparency: willingness to correct mistakes, receptivity to reader criticisms, and openness about ownership, editorial policies and conflicts of interest.

Overall, print tended to be more transparent than broadcast, but there were exceptions. Tops in transparency were The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC News, CBS News, The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio.

The worst? Time magazine, CNN, ITN, Sky News and Al Jazeera (English).

"Transparency is essential because it's inextricably tied to credibility," said Susan Moeller, director of the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda. "Transparency doesn't ensure accuracy. But it does ensure that when a news outlet makes a mistake ... its audience can be assured that the news outlet is going to admit to it and correct it and will have policies in place for following it up."

The report also found that only seven of the 25 news outlets have an ombudsman who acts as a liaison with the public -- five newspapers, NPR and CBS.

Posted by Richard Beach at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Advertising Age - How to Stop Them From Skipping: TiVo Tells All

How to Stop Them From Skipping: TiVo Tells All
Data Show Direct-Response Ads Hold Their Own in DVR Homes

By Brian Steinberg

Published: July 16, 2007
Can advertisers craft TV ads that will make viewers less eager to zap through them with a digital-video recorder? New data from TiVo seem to indicate two approaches that keep viewers' fingers off the fast forward are at opposite ends of the spectrum: either a bare-bones, direct-response model or the entertaining, high-production-value approach of movie ads.

Posted by Richard Beach at 12:47 PM | Permalink

Gender Ads.Com

Gender Ads.com was begun a number of years ago to provide gender studies educators and students with a resource for analyzing the advertising images that relate to gender. Its founder, Dr. Scott A. Lukas, had produced a PowerPoint that focused on gender and advertising, and because students had requested copies of the presentation, he decided to produce a website to host the images and interpretations. Since the PowerPoint was produced with 100 images, the website has grown to over 2,500 advertising images, and it is one of the largest collections of gender-related advertising materials on the Internet.

Posted by Richard Beach at 12:22 PM | Permalink

Food companies yanking some ads aimed at children

Food companies yanking some ads aimed at children

Trix are no longer for kids -- at least not on children's television shows. But Cocoa Puffs are another matter.

By Brooks Barnes, New York Times

Last update: July 17, 2007 – 10:23 PM

Trix are no longer for kids -- at least not on children's television shows. But Cocoa Puffs are another matter.

Trying to convince critics they don't need government regulation, 11 food companies, including McDonald's, Campbell Soup and PepsiCo, have agreed to stop advertising products that do not meet certain nutritional standards for children younger than 12.

Some of the companies, such as Coca-Cola, have already pulled all such commercials or are in the process of doing so. Others, such as General Mills, said they would pull them over the next year or so.

Still, the agreements will likely amount to a ripple rather than a sea change in terms of what foods children see pitched on their favorite television shows and websites. For example, while General Mills will no longer be advertising Trix to the 12-and-under crowd, it will continue to peddle Cocoa Puffs, which have one less gram of sugar per serving. And it will be able to continue advertising Trix on TV shows and other venues that are considered to cater to "families" rather than just children.

That qualifier amounts to a major loophole, given the media-watching habits of children. An episode of Nickelodeon's "SpongeBob SquarePants," for instance, is viewed by an average audience of 876,000 children ages 6 to 11, according to Nielsen Media Research, and falls in the category of shows that are off-limits to ads for junk food. But Fox's "American Idol," which qualifies as a family show, attracts 2.1 million children in the age group.

Posted by Richard Beach at 2:01 PM | Permalink

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

danah boyd
June 24, 2007

Citation: boyd, danah. 2007. "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace ." Apophenia Blog Essay. June 24 . http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.htm

Over the last six months, I've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Who goes where gets kinda sticky... probably because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.

Posted by Richard Beach at 8:58 PM | Permalink

81 Million People in U.S. Watch Broadband Video at Home or Work, According to Nielsen and CTAM

81 Million People in U.S. Watch Broadband Video at Home or Work, According to Nielsen and CTAM

Little Impact on Traditional Television Viewing From Broadband Video Use

ALEXANDRIA, Va. and NEW YORK, July 17 /PRNewswire/ -- An estimated 81
million people, or 63% of the 129 million people who access the Internet
over broadband in the U.S., watch broadband video at home or at work,
according to new research conducted by The Nielsen Company for The Cable &
Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM). This number increased
from 70 million in September 2006 to 81 million in March 2007, a jump of
16% in just six months.
The analysis also showed that traditional home television ratings are
minimally, if at all, affected by broadband video viewing over the
Internet, because broadband viewing was found largely to be incremental new
viewing rather than a substitute for traditional television viewing.

Posted by Richard Beach at 8:55 PM | Permalink