Teuters Institute reporting:
Reports of the death of print have been greatly accelerated, judging by research from UK telecoms watchdog Ofcom.
The research has found that in the UK digital news, consumed via apps
or websites, has only just reached parity with news consumed via ink
and dead trees.
Yep those old media newspaper thingies are surprisingly sticky — and
not just in the way their column inches adhere to one’s fingers.
Ofcom found that around 41% of people say they now access news on
websites and apps — up significantly from around a third (32%) last
year.
But despite digital news’ rising popularity, rates of newspaper usage
are remaining steady overall — unchanged at four in 10 people (40%),
year on year. However Ofcom’s report does note a decline in print readership “particular among the under-35s” over the past year.
Both newspapers and apps still massively trail the UK’s main source
of news: the TV, although once you segment Brits by age then digital
platforms come out as the primary news source for the younger age
group (16 to 24).
Overall, Ofcom found that 75% of respondents identified the TV as
their primary news source, down slightly from 78% in 2013. The
research also notes a fall in people saying a particular TV channel is
their most important source for news (down to 54% from 62% in 2013). http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/25/print-vs-digital/?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=92b82d9026-Need_to_Know_June_26_20146_26_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-92b82d9026-31701933
CyberAlert reporting:
PR and marketing writers who need guidance on writing sponsored
content: look no further than a recent paid post in The New York Times.
The post, titled, Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work,
is a superb example of how to write sponsored content that informs and
entertains — and still sells. In the article, author Melanie Deziel
examines a large-scale but little-known issue experienced by
incarcerated women nationwide: prisons and their amenities, treatment
options, job-training programs and cultures are designed for men.
The post is sponsored by none other than the popular Netflix
original, “Orange is the New Black,” (OITNB) which recently released its
second season.
The article serves as a noteworthy case study for those in PR and
marketing who are tasked with writing sponsored content (also called
advertorials) for their companies and clients. Here are five major
reasons why Deziel’s article is so great:
baekdal reporting:
By now you have probably already read the leaked Innovation Report from The New York Times.
And if you haven't, you should. It provides a great overview of the
challenges and thinking that are happening in the industry, not just for
The New York Times, but for every newspaper and magazine.
To very
quickly summarize it, The New York Times has had a ton of success with
its digital subscriptions, but despite that, is facing a continual
decline in digital traffic. And like all other media companies, they blame this on the transformation of formats and a failure to engage digital readers.
They
say the solution to this is to develop more digitally focused 'growth'
tactics, like asking all journalists to submit tweets with every
article, be smarter about how the content is presented and featured, and
generally focus on optimizing the format for digital.
...
But let me ask you this. If The NYT is 'winning at journalism', why is its readership falling significantly? If their daily report is smart and engaging, why are they failing to get its journalism to its readers?
If its product is 'the world's best journalism', why does it have a problem growing its audience?
...
What if the real problem isn't digital? What if the problem is the journalistic work itself?
digiday reporting:
Hearst Magazines is building a centralized news desk to supply digital content to its 18 glossy magazines.
The desk is small for now, considering the size and diversity of
Hearst’s portfolio — it consists of two photo editors, one editor and
one writer — but Kate Lewis, vp of content operations and editorial
director for Hearst Digital, hopes to add more writers over time. The
idea is to cover the stories that have applicability to multiple titles,
cutting down on duplication and freeing them to do stories that are
more unique to them, she said.
“It is something we are building as we think about our competition and what our pure-play brethren are doing,” she said.
Legacy publishers have for years unified certain editorial functions
like copy editing and photo and graphics services. Newspaper chains have
long shared stories across their local papers. But as print fortunes
continue to wane, more centralization looks inevitable (Digital First Media’s closing its Thunderdome project notwithstanding).
...
Still, a centralized desk is potentially fraught with issues for
Hearst, with titles ranging from fashion and beauty (Elle, Cosmopolitan)
to shelter (House Beautiful, Country Living) to men’s (Esquire, Car and
Driver). Centralizing content production sounds good in theory but
raises questions for the individual brands, which may worry about a loss
of control or that the desk will come at the expense of dedicated
staff. Will the quality of the articles from the centralized desk be
better than what they could do themselves?
Lewis said that the news desk won’t replace but will augment what the
individual titles are doing and that titles will be expected to tailor
the desk’s stories to their sites.
“When Taylor Swift cuts her hair, I do not need six editors writing
that story,” she said. Of the Kim-Kanye wedding, she said, “We don’t
need 50 people writing about the first photos that come out.” http://digiday.com/publishers/hearst-magazines-building-centralized-news-desk/
API reporting:
Every print newspaper article goes through a process of reporting,
editing and design to optimize how it appears in print. And most
publishers have gotten comfortable with customization of online stories
for things like SEO and adding additional content or updates.
But content customization for mobile is scant, the participants at
our summit said–even at some of the most advanced publishing outlets.
“Your highly
motivated readers are bound to read content regardless of form. To
reach new, larger audiences, you need to make the content an ideal
mobile experience. ”
Rather than just letting content flow “downstream” unchanged from web
to mobile, publishers to thrive in the new era have to begin delivering
new forms of news tailored to the unique mobile reading experience.
There’s a different screen size (smaller), user interface (swiping
and tapping), and surrounding environment (may be things going on around
them). So stories for mobile could be different. More scannable. More
summarized information. Paragraphs limited in length.
It probably seems a big task — yet another on a long list. And
publishers who see a growing mobile audience for what they already have
may think they’re doing just fine. But as the Boston Globe’s Damon
Kiesow pointed out, your highly motivated readers are bound to read
content regardless of form. To reach new, larger audiences, you need to
make the content an ideal mobile experience. Thus customizing for mobile
is essential for growth.
Many of the organizations represented at our summit, including For
The Win, Circa and Breaking News, are reimagining the “atomic unit” of
mobile news, or the smallest component that can stand alone. Circa breaks news into digestible pieces, consumed one at a time.
Traditionally that unit has been an article. But new mobile
publishers are imagining news chunks as simple as a paragraph, image,
sentence or fact, which can be chained together with others or consumed
by itself.
Circa, a mobile-first news publisher founded in late 2011, has its
journalists build “atoms” of news that can be used in different ways or
repurposed, Editor in Chief Anthony De Rosa explained. Pieces that first
appeared in a live blog can then be used in a full article... http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/white-papers/mobile-news-presentation/
API reporting:
...
The ideas, and in some cases the words themselves, are drawn from the
few dozen participants of our summit. We don’t imply that every summit
participant endorses every idea or view expressed in this white paper,
but collectively they deserve credit for any wisdom you find useful in
the chapters that follow.
The nine concepts are these:
Maybe it’s not quite as big a change as
the rise of the web — but the rise of the smartphone deserves to be in
the conversation. And traditional news companies are falling behind.
There’s lots of great stuff in there as usual, with articles on the
state of journalism education, citizen journalism in Turkey, comics
journalism, epic poetry (!), and more.
I write a column for the print edition of the magazine. Here’s mine from the new issue.
It almost seems unfair — a case of double jeopardy.
Traditional news organizations have spent the past decade responding
to an enormously disruptive piece of technology: the web browser. Their
old monopolies, their old claims on the audience’s attention, were
broken by a platform that let anyone publish — no printing press or
broadcast tower required. The impact on their business models,
particularly at newspapers…well, you know all about that.
But just when news organizations were starting to feel more at home
on the web — just when, in many newsrooms, digital was no longer being
treated as a sad sister to print — along comes another blow-up-the-model
moment: mobile.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the rise of the smartphone is
a shift on par with the rise of the web. But it wouldn’t be that much
of one. Seven years after the iPhone, smartphones have moved from a tool
of the tech elite to a handheld computer in everyone’s pocket. They’re
radically changing how people are getting their news. And I fear that
many news outlets still haven’t wrestled with how big a change they
represent. New data from eMarketer
estimates that, in the United States, about 23 percent of Americans’
total media consumption in 2014 will come on mobile devices. That’s
counting all media formats, including television, radio and print.
Mobile’s already ahead of the total for laptops and desktops, 18
percent. And its share will keep growing as networks get faster and
devices get cheaper.It’s
not uncommon for major news organizations to see 40 percent of their
online audience on mobile devices, most of them smartphones. http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/06/the-mobile-majority-engaging-people-on-smartphones-is-the-next-big-challenge-to-the-news/
Reuters Institute reporting:
Richard E, Picard:
There is a growing impetus toward paid digital content in print news
providers. Many newspapers are now starting to follow early movers into
paid services, with the Sun and Telegraph in UK following the path of the Financial Times and Times. In Germany, Bild
became the first large-scale tabloid to require payment, and the
majority of large dailies in Canada and Australia now require payments
for digital access. News and public affairs magazines are taking a mixed
approach, with some pursuing paid strategies and others trying more
open ones. News organisations that employ collaborative, networked
strategies relying on significant contributions from experts and the
public are tending to pursue open or mixed-access approaches.
These differing approaches are representative of distinctive shifts
in thinking about digital strategies and a growing sophistication of
strategy involving news content.
New strategies for paid content
Four major strategic approaches to the question whether or not
consumers should pay have emerged: (1) open sites for which consumers do
not pay for access (although many sites have been free for the past two
decades, the movement towards paid content is changing this from a
default strategy to a deliberate choice designed to serve specific
strategic functions), (2) a mixed approach, with some content available
without payment and some paid, (3) a soft paywall requiring paid access,
but with ability to share stories and limited access for search engines
and links, and (4) a hard paywall necessitating paid access but without
the ability to share and denial of access for search engines and
linkages.
The questions of which approach to use are multifaceted and
differential access pricing models are proliferating. Underlying this
trend is increasing acceptance of view that the digital platforms
provide different value and need to be conceived as different products.
Differences in visual and presentational styles, storytelling, and
experience are producing varying pay approaches as consumers show a
greater willingness to pay for tablet and smartphone news content.
BILDplus, for example, offers three different price packages
providing access via web, smartphone, and tablet apps for €4.99 monthly,
web, smartphone, tablet apps, and epaper editions for €9.99 monthly,
and BILDplus Komplett for €14.99 monthly that includes web, smartphone,
tablet apps, epaper editions, and the printed paper.
Elsewhere, digital channels are also being used to offer special content apps and editions. In Spain, El Mundo has introduced an evening app edition and a daily gossip app. O Globo and O Estado de S. Paulo in Brazil have also created special new evening products for tablets and mobiles.
A major emerging strategy is the acquisition of video rights to help
drive acceptance of paid tablet and smartphone services. The general
press are producing more distinctive video content using their own
journalists as well as offering news clips, while tabloids have focused
their attention on sports and soap opera highlights. http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/essays/2014/new-approaches-to-paid-digital-content/
Reuters Institute reporting:
Having shaken up the comfortable old world of news, the social media revolution is now itself fragmenting, with different players dominating different countries. Reuters Institute experts say it is too early to say whether the new ways in which younger populations encounter, absorb and share new information about their worlds will have deep-rooted social effects, but there is already noticeable divergence in how successful different sources are. One source, Facebook, has established a powerful position in all 10 countries where YouGov surveyed news consumption habits for the 2014 Digital News Report. But the battle for attention among other social media has thrown up a variety of winners. WhatsApp is emerging as a key network for news in some countries, while Twitter turns out not to be as popular as British and American journalists often assume. YouTube is a vital conduit for some societies, but almost unused for news in others. The fragmentation of social media is one of the key findings of the 2014 Reuters Institute Digital News Report. Despite Twitter’s reputation for breaking and distributing news, the survey find that overall Facebook is by far the biggest network with 60% of our online sample using it for any purpose and over a third (35%) saying they used it for news. (see Charts 1/2) Twitter is widely used for news in the UK (12%), in the US (8%) and especially in Spain (21%) – in part because leading broadcasters (BBC, CNN) and newspapers (El Pais, New York Times, Guardian) have promoted its use in wider coverage. By contrast it is used much less in Germany (3%) and Finland (6%) where Google+ is twice as popular for news. (see Chart 3) In Finland, a domestic aggregation service called Ampparit, seems to be surprisingly popular (12 %)... https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/report2014/DNR_2014_WhatsApp_emerges_as_key_social_network_for_news___FINAL.pdf
digiday reporting:
The Christian Science Monitor, a 106-year-old news organization that
boasts a serious, civic-minded audience, would seem well poised to crack
the engagement code. A digital-focused publication since 2008, the
Monitor ought to be ahead of its competitors in keeping readers on its
site and engaged. Yet the audience isn’t as committed as one might
think; csmonitor.com has a high bounce rate (70 percent leave after
viewing one page) and low pages per visit (4 on average).
The Monitor is betting that it can reverse those numbers, though,
through a so-simple-it’s-brilliant tactic: simply asking for more
engagement. Among a raft of new features coming to the site starting
today, the most prominent is a “take action” link in articles that
eventually will lead to a page with related stories, conversation
starters and links to relevant outside organizations and elected
representatives...
Similarly, the Monitor has begun asking readers at the bottom of stories
for feedback or suggestions for follow-up stories. The Monitor had
tested this approach on its politics channel, DC Decoder, and in
addition to getting readers’ feedback, it asked for their email, which
also provided a way to contact readers after the polling. http://digiday.com/publishers/christian-science-monitor-going-maximum-engagement/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Digiday%20Daily%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=temporary%20daily
In 2014, Finland’s marketers—like so many in Western Europe—are
no strangers to the idea of content marketing, according to a report
from creative agency Kubo. The firm surveyed 200 marketing
professionals in March 2014 to learn how Finnish companies
currently employed content in their marketing, as well as what had
worked best for them. Some 38% of respondents belonged to top
management, 16% were entrepreneurs, 20% were managers and 26%
were industry experts.
Overall, 80% of those
polled said they produced
content aimed at existing or
potential customers—
somewhat below the levels
recorded by studies in the
US (93%) and Great Britain
(88%). But that gap looks
set to narrow within a year.
Over half (54%) of
respondents in Finland who
didn’t already create
content planned to do so
during the next 12 months.
For many marketers,
content activities weren’t underpinned by a definite program. Less
than one-quarter (23%) said they had a documented content strategy.
Again this was a lower proportion than in the US (43%) and Great
Britain (42%).
The main objectives of content marketing were clear: 72% of
respondents said they wanted to grow sales, while 64% were looking
to acquire new customers. A similar share aimed to increase brand
awareness (63%) or boost the engagement of current customers
(61%).
The metrics used to gauge success weren’t always closely aligned with
those aims, however. The most commonly used measure, cited by
68% of those polled, was traffic to the company’s own website, while
more than half mentioned sharing on social media (55%) and
customer feedback (53%). Unambiguous measures of sales, such as
cross-selling and direct sales, were cited by just 11% and 8%,
respectively.
The content types judged most effective were digital newsletters,
videos and blogs, all mentioned by about 80% of the sample.
Facebook and YouTube were the favorite sites for distributing
content, used by 62% and 59%, respectively. http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Content-Marketing-Gains-Momentum-Finland/1010912/2
In
2014, Finland’s marketers—like so many in Western Europe—are no
strangers to the idea of content marketing, according to a report from
creative agency Kubo.
The firm surveyed 200 marketing professionals in March 2014 to learn how
Finnish companies currently employed content in their marketing, as
well as what had worked best for them. Some 38% of respondents belonged
to top management, 16% were entrepreneurs, 20% were managers and 26%
were industry experts.
SHARE THIS
0
1
0
0
Overall, 80% of those polled said they produced content aimed at
existing or potential customers—somewhat below the levels recorded by
studies in the US (93%) and Great Britain (88%). But that gap looks set
to narrow within a year. Over half (54%) of respondents in Finland who
didn’t already create content planned to do so during the next 12
months. For many marketers, content activities weren’t underpinned by a
definite program. Less than one-quarter (23%) said they had a documented
content strategy. Again this was a lower proportion than in the US
(43%) and Great Britain (42%). The main objectives of content marketing were clear: 72% of
respondents said they wanted to grow sales, while 64% were looking to
acquire new customers. A similar share aimed to increase brand awareness
(63%) or boost the engagement of current customers (61%). The metrics used to gauge success weren’t always closely aligned with
those aims, however. The most commonly used measure, cited by 68% of
those polled, was traffic to the company’s own website, while more than
half mentioned sharing on social media (55%) and customer feedback
(53%). Unambiguous measures of sales, such as cross-selling and direct
sales, were cited by just 11% and 8%, respectively. The content types judged most effective were digital newsletters,
videos and blogs, all mentioned by about 80% of the sample. Facebook and
YouTube were the favorite sites for distributing content, used by 62%
and 59%, respectively. - See more at: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Content-Marketing-Gains-Momentum-Finland/1010912/2#sthash.iP0WW53C.dpuf
themediabriefing reporting:
The New York Times' launch of its fourth new paid-for digital offering today – NYT Opinion – has been coming for a while.
CEO Mark Thompson announced at the FT Digital Media Conference in March
the launch of NYT Premier and NYT Now and mentioned a cooking package
and a paid opinion product would also be released in the coming weeks.
For some the NYT’s recent approach to its digital subscription offerings represents a clever slicing and dicing of NYT content, answering segmented audiences with segmented products. For others it represents the fact the publisher isn’t innovating as intelligently as it needs to and is finding as many ways to skin the same cat as possible.
NYT Opinion allows access to the “Grey Lady’s” opinion pages alone
for $6 a month. That means the variety of digital subscriptions
available to would-be readers is as follows:
$6 /month for NYT Opinion
$8 /month for NYT Top Stories including the NYT Now app
$15 /month for NYTimes.com unlimited access + smartphone apps + NYT Now
$20 /month for NYTimes.com unlimited access + tablet apps + NYT Now
$35 /month for NYTimes.com unlimited access + smartphone and tablet apps + NYT Now
$45 /month for NYTimes.com unlimited access + smartphone and tablet apps + NYT Now + behind-the-scenes look at NYT journalism
And like all other media companies, they blame this on the transformation of formats and a failure to engage digital readers.
New data from eMarketer
estimates that, in the United States, about 23 percent of Americans’
total media consumption in 2014 will come on mobile devices. That’s
counting all media formats, including television, radio and print.
Mobile’s already ahead of the total for laptops and desktops, 18
percent. And its share will keep growing as networks get faster and
devices get cheaper.It’s
not uncommon for major news organizations to see 40 percent of their
online audience on mobile devices, most of them smartphones.
Overall, 80% of those polled said they produced content aimed at
existing or potential customers—somewhat below the levels recorded by
studies in the US (93%) and Great Britain (88%). But that gap looks set
to narrow within a year. Over half (54%) of respondents in Finland who
didn’t already create content planned to do so during the next 12
months.