Teachingmedia

PC World - 'Citizen Media' Gains on Pros

The Internet is a threat to traditional news organizations, which no longer have the advantage of being the first to report breaking news online, according to a Harvard University study released Thursday.

Researchers at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy found that nontraditional media Web sites, including aggregators, bloggers, search engines and service providers, were growing faster than Web sites connected to traditional news media outlets, such as newspapers. The researchers studied the traffic of 160 news sites for one year, from April 2006 to April 2007.

The Web sites of Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and AOL LLC, as well as MSN and smaller sites such as topix.net, digg.com and reddit.com experienced large increases in traffic.

"Between April 2006 and April 2007, Digg's unique monthly visitors grew from under 2 million to more than 15 million," the study said, adding that Reddit and Topix grew from less than 50,000 visitors a month to more than 700,000.

However, news organizations can still prosper on the Web if they can adapt, the study said.

"Local news organizations are 'brand names' within their communities, which can be used to their advantage," according to the study. "Their offline reach can also be used to drive traffic to their sites. Most important, they have a product -- the news -- that people want. Ironically, some news organizations do not feature the day's news prominently on their Web sites, forgoing their natural advantage."

While traffic to the Web sites of nationally known newspapers grew by 10 percent, traffic to the Web sites of lesser-known newspapers decreased by varying percentages, according to the study.

Posted by Richard Beach at 8:56 AM | Permalink

MercatorNet - Focus on media: Magazines faking the feminine by Selena Ewing

Magazine images of women and girls have changed over recent decades, perhaps reflecting the changes in women's status. It's not all good news, though. In the 1970s and 1980s, magazine advertisements stereotyped women by showing them smaller and taking up less space than men, being controlled by or dependent on men, and in less prestigious occupations. Now, women are more often shown as independent and professional.

But they are also shown wearing a lot less. They now more often appear staring vacantly or seeming disoriented, being psychologically removed from their situation. There are many more sexualised images of women - that is, images which focus on a woman's sexual features or capacity, rather than any other aspect of herself such as her work personality.

Posted by Richard Beach at 4:48 PM | Permalink

When it comes to slant, newspaper readers rule

In a fascinating study last year, University of Chicago researchers Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro built a statistical construct to study the forces that determine political content in the news. What they learned is that readers, not owners, play the largest role in determining the slant of newspapers. Consumer political attitudes were found to be responsible for about 20 per cent of the variation in slant. Nothing else came close.

In their study, What Drives Media Slant, the researchers examined partisan phrases used by members of the U.S. Congress in the 2005 Congressional Record, identified 1,000 used more frequently by one party over the other, and then indexed 400 daily newspapers according to how closely the use of phrases in political news coverage resembled the phrases in the speech of Republicans or Democrats.

For example, "tax relief" and "global war on terror" were identified as Republican; "tax break for the wealthy" and "war in Iraq" were deemed Democrat. From a Canadian perspective, of course, both U.S. parties lean to the right of the federal Conservatives, but that is not germane to the veracity of the study's findings.

The researchers applied their index to measure the impact of market forces on slant. Using zip-code data on newspaper circulation, they established that newspapers with a right-wing slant, not surprisingly, circulated more in heavily Republican zip codes. With this information, they were able to compute the slant that would maximize readership for each paper and estimated that even a small deviation from what they describe as the profit-maximizing slant would result in a loss of circulation of 3.4 per cent. Indeed, an owner would have to be prepared to pay between 68 cents US and $4.20 per reader per year to reduce the gap between the actual slant to a preferred slant by one standard deviation.

Posted by Richard Beach at 9:55 AM | Permalink

Summary of Findings: Internet News Audience Highly Critical of News Organizations

The American public continues to fault news organizations for a number of perceived failures, with solid majorities criticizing them for political bias, inaccuracy and failing to acknowledge mistakes. But some of the harshest indictments of the press now come from the growing segment that relies on the internet as its main source for national and international news.

The internet news audience – roughly a quarter of all Americans – tends to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole. People who rely on the internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance. As many as 38% of those who rely mostly on the internet for news say they have an unfavorable opinion of cable news networks such as CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, compared with 25% of the public overall, and just 17% of television news viewers.

The internet news audience is particularly likely to criticize news organizations for their lack of empathy, their failure to "stand up for America," and political bias. Roughly two-thirds (68%) of those who get most of their news from the internet say that news organizations do not care about the people they report on, and 53% believe that news organizations are too critical of America. By comparison, smaller percentages of the general public fault the press for not caring about people they report on (53%), and being too critical of America (43%).

Posted by Richard Beach at 6:28 PM | Permalink

Center for Media Research - Daily Brief

The Internet Seen As An Opportunity for Newspapers

A recent study of America's top 100 newspaper websites, entitled "American Newspapers and the Internet; Threat or Opportunity?" by Bivings Research, noting that using the Internet to expand a newspaper's reach is becoming more and more important, reports that ninety-two percent of America's top 100 papers now offer video on their websites... a significant jump from 2006, where just 61 percent offered video. In this group:

* Thirty-nine papers offer original content
* 26 use AP video streams
* 13 offer video content from local news outlets
* Four use all three technologies
* Ten papers use a mixture of two different types of video

Erin Teeling, New Media Associate, The Bivings Group, says "While many industry experts fear that the Internet will spell the end of newspapers as we know them, ... (the team at) TBG feels that the Internet presents newspapers with a unique opportunity to make up for lost circulation and readership. (The) study explores... the difficulties facing newspapers regarding online advertising, shrinking staffs, and reaching out to consumers."

Some additional key findings:

* 93 papers offer RSS partial text feeds, while three offer full text RSS feeds. No papers have begun embedding advertisements in their RSS feeds.
* 95 percent of papers offer at least one reporter blog. Ninety-three percent of these blogs allow comments. In 2006, 80 percent of the papers offered blogs, with 83 percent allowing comments.
* 67 percent of newspapers now allow comments on articles. This represents a 14% improvement on 2006 statistics, when only 19 percent of papers allowed comments on articles.
* 29 percent of the nation's top 100 papers now require users to register before gaining full access to their website, up 6 percent from last year. Three papers required a paid subscription, while 26 papers required free registration.

Posted by Richard Beach at 8:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Under the influence - Los Angeles Times

Under the influence
Savvy marketing whets our appetite for prescription pharmaceuticals. Consumers, doctors, researchers -- no one is immune
By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 6, 2007

FOR many Americans, a doctor's decision to prescribe medication is something of a sacred transaction. A physician considers the patient and symptoms and chooses the best drug for the job, drawing upon years of training and clinical experience. It is an exchange conducted in a hushed sanctuary, far from the heat and noise of the marketplace -- a place where cool judgment reigns.

That sanctuary has been breached. Today, drug manufacturers do everything in their considerable power to ensure that their brand-name prescription medications are on the lips of patients and in the minds of physicians every time the two meet across an exam table. A growing chorus of critics says their efforts have begun to rewrite the dialogue between patient and doctor, influence physicians' judgments and open the act of prescribing to forces more profit-minded than sacred.

In 2006, drug-makers spent almost $5 billion to reach out to consumers with direct advertising. But the glossy magazine ads and buzz-generating TV spots are just the most visible parts of a campaign to build and nourish markets for brand-name prescription products. The world's pharmaceutical companies spend an estimated $19 billion annually to woo doctors. They sponsor teaching programs and research at universities across the country, gaining goodwill along the way. They give money to patient groups. They hire public relations firms to share patient stories of illness and triumph.

In a nation that consumed $279-billion worth of prescription medications in 2006 -- spending 80% of that on brand-name products -- their efforts appear to be paying off. Americans filling a prescription choose brand-name products 37% of the time, even though three-quarters of all prescription drugs in the U.S. are available in cheaper generics.

Posted by Richard Beach at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Study: News is scandalous

Too much emphasis on celebrities
By Paul J. Gough

Aug 3, 2007
NEW YORK -- Americans say the media is to blame for the saturation of celebrity coverage on TV, a new survey finds.

The Pew Research Center for People & the Press said Thursday that 87% of respondents said celebrity scandals get way too much ink and airtime. Only 8% think the media gets the balance between celebrity and serious news right, while 2% told the surveyors that there wasn't enough celebrity scandal coverage.

There's been no shortage of scandals to report on in 2007, from the death of Anna Nicole Smith and the subsequent custody battle over her infant daughter to the jail saga of heiress Paris Hilton. Despite the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a presidential campaign already under way, celebrity stories oftentimes have taken over the news. Pew found that 24% of all news was devoted to Smith at the time of her death, while 12% of all Americans said in early June that Hilton's incarceration was their most-followed news story of the week.

The survey found that cable news is most to blame for the ongoing celebrity coverage, with 34% of respondents saying cable news had the most celebrity coverage, followed by network TV news (27%), Internet news sites (15%) and newspapers (8%).

Posted by Richard Beach at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

ONLINE NEWSPAPER AUDIENCE SETS RECORDS IN SECOND QUARTER

ONLINE NEWSPAPER AUDIENCE SETS RECORDS IN SECOND QUARTER

Unique Audience, Page Views and Time Spent Jump in Second Quarter

Arlington, Va. – More than 59 million people (37.3 percent of all active Internet users) visited newspaper Web sites on average during the second quarter of 2007, a record number that represents a 7.7 percent increase over the same period a year ago, according to custom analysis provided by Nielsen//NetRatings for the Newspaper Association of America. In addition, newspaper Web site visitors generated nearly 2.7 billion page views per month throughout the quarter, compared to slightly more than 2.5 billion during the same period last year. The second quarter figures are the highest for any quarter since NAA began tracking these numbers in 2004.

May 2007 also was a record-breaking month for the industry; more than 60 million people visited newspaper Web sites that month, more than any month on record. This figure represents a 6.7 percent increase from the same period a year ago.

Posted by Richard Beach at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)