|
(Still more extra stuff from Brussels.)
There we were, sitting outside the beautiful St. Michael and St. Gudula Cathedral.
People have been worshipping perhaps as far back as the ninth century. This building went up between the 13th and 16th centuries. The stained glass windows and confessionals are that old. Just think of it. That place was old when the U.S. was new.
Don’t worry. We went inside. I produced a little video. You can see it here.
Once more, with pastiche.
Here’s the incredible weekly feature that is going to throw a lot of important information at you. Some of it we’ll try to elaborate on or hint about what it means. Other things will be placed next to key messages that should let the reader draw individual conclusions. But that will be within subgroups, of course. These are organized so that if the topic isn’t of a specific interest, you can skip around a bit. Today the groups are journalism and media in general.
All of this is important. All of it is contemporary. It is by no means exhaustive or authoritative, but simply things to read.
We’ll start today with the journalism stuff, because the latest read from Pew is always of interest.
Call it a mobile majority. At the start of 2015, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites have more traffic to their sites and associated applications coming from mobile devices than from desktop computers, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of comScore data.
That’s telling enough, but there is so much to unpack from the Pew report and you can do it all at that link. Or you could follow the following.
The thing about this data, and how it is being rolled out in various ways, is that it would be great if we could understand it in the whole, but failing that, remember that any one point is not the end-all-be-all. Take, for example, the above in the context of Newspapers: Fact Sheet:
After a year of slight gains, newspaper circulation fell again in 2014 (though tracking these data is becoming more complicated each year due to measurement changes). Revenue from circulation rose, but ad revenue continued to fall, with gains in digital ad revenue failing to make up for falls in print ad revenue. Despite widespread talk of a shift to digital, most newspaper readership continues to be in print. Online, more traffic to the top newspaper websites and associated apps comes from mobile than from desktop users, and the average visitor only stays on the site for three minutes per visit. And several larger media conglomerates spun off their newspaper divisions as separate companies in an attempt to prevent the newspaper industry’s woes from affecting the health of their broadcast divisions.
Here’s a slightly different read off the same report, The State of the News Media 2015: Newspapers ↓, smartphones ↑:
Newspaper print ad revenue dropped again in 2014 to $16.4 billion, a 4% drop from 2013, the report said. Though newspaper digital ad revenue increased last year slightly — to $3.5 billion from $3.4 billion — it hasn’t been anywhere near enough to make up for the loss in print revenue.
“For the past five years, newspaper ad revenue has maintained a consistent trajectory: Print ads have produced less revenue (down 5%), while digital ads have produced more revenue (up 3%) — but not enough to make up for the fall in print revenue,” the report said.
Print ads are going to digital, specifically mobile and, this part should be the scariest, elsewhere.
USA Today on the Pew report, Mobile news on the rise as print decline continues:
Unless you’re big, digital revenue remains an elusive target for many publishers, even though the amount of money paid by advertisers to get their brand on video and display ads across all media grew 18% in 2014 to $50.7 billion, Pew said, citing research firm eMarketer. Five companies — Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL — captured 61% of domestic digital ad revenue in 2014, it said. Digital ads make up about a quarter of all media advertising spending.
While newspaper circulation is falling, the appeal of print still holds sway for many readers. More than half of readers — 56% — still read newspaper content in print only, the study said. Newspaper publishers have a reason to hold onto their ink barrels as well, with $16.4 billion still spent on print ads. But that’s down from $17.3 billion a year ago. Their digital ad revenue totaled $3.5 billion, flat from a year ago.
As revenue declines, so does the industry’s employment. Overall newspaper newsroom employment fell 3% in 2013 — the most recent year for which figures are available — to 36,700, the report said, citing the American Society of News Editors’ Newsroom Employment Census.
And, to bring the consumer trend on home, here’s this from Dadaviz, For The Top-10 Newspapers, Mobile Overtakes Desktop Traffic.
A few links into the news on Facebook plan:
Emily Bell in CJR: Google and Facebook are our frenemy. Beware.
Facebook banned us for writing about pot
The Guardian is trying to swing Google’s pendulum back to publishers
This is about data and the publishers are going to give it away. If Facebook builds out this network and they don’t share evenly with the content providers it is going to be a disaster for publishers. Facebook has pitched this all on the idea of “news, faster” and has applied that idea to the people already there. News outlets can’t seem to build faster and they can’t capitalize on the one place they should be the strongest — local networks — so they are giving this away. Maybe it will be a long term, brilliant win for news outlets. But one hopes they’ve realized they’ve given the keys, editorial and otherwise, away to an entity who has designs on being the biggest ad market, biggest search, biggest network and biggest video provider in the world.
Let’s think again about what news outlets should do: sell ads, help people find local things, tie communities together and tell compelling stories.
And just wait until someone decides they need to report on something happening over at ol’ Ma Facebook.
This is a nice collection:
The Baltimore photo on Time’s cover was by an amateur photographer
Seven Tips for Photographers Covering Protests
App from ACLU of California aims to preserve videos of police
Cops Shut Down CNN; Reporter: “Are We Under Martial Law?”
Let’s call this section news media trends:
Drop in Discover Traffic Poses Questions for Snapchat
NPR Clips Can Now Be Embedded on Other Websites
In Nepal, the BBC is using Viber to share information and safety tips
University of Florida explores geolocation news feeds
Adopting a digital-first mindset at the University Daily Kansan
It’s Time For Every Journalist To Learn Basic Data Skills
Reuters’ mobile strategy: ‘If it has a screen, it’s fair game’
Why The New York Times apps look different
About the first one in that list, I bet it comes down to novelty, the Discover channels still tinkering with best practices and the inability to share the cool stuff. Snapchat isn’t very good at this fundamental element of social media yet.
About that last one, I just had this conversation with our new web/mobile editor last week: what about microsites and apps? And then he and I brainstormed an app that, if he develops it, might let him retire young.
I’m angling for kickbacks.
And a few general media links of interest …
If done well, and given time to breathe, this may work in Space City: Houston’s KRIV Launches Web-Only Personal Take On News. I think, if done well and given time to breathe, it could work even better elsewhere. Like Birmingham, for example. Birmingham is a destination city in broadcast for most people. Small enough to be nice, big enough to let you be successful if you have the chops, and a little something for most everyone.
The state’s largest media market has an incredible stable set of anchors and plenty of long-term reporters. Sure, people pass through, but people really stick. They like it because they can do good work and because it can be impactful and because they are important here. The Yankee’s former boss at WBRC said this at the Emmy’s as he was presenting a 50-years-in-broadcasting award to one of his colleagues. He tried to explain the market by saying there aren’t huge stars or professional sports teams or a lot of other inane attractions. The city’s faces of news are the city’s celebrities. He was write. Put this plan, from Houston, in a personality-driven market like Birmingham, and you could do some really cool things with it.
Some TV entities are wisely trying to change up their distribution models. Here’s to their success: How 7News hopes to livestream video to reach new audiences.
Meanwhile, the people trying to eat the industry’s lunch:
Yahoo Aims for Millennials With 18 New Shows, Says CEO
Report: Comcast plans YouTube-like online video service
Bloomberg’s New Publishing Platform Is ‘Like Tinder for Video’
One guess why all of that is important, Mobile Shopping: Smartphone Visits Increase 269%; Revenue Up 123%.
You wonder what things people take from their young adult years, what stories they carry into their hopefully long and prosperous lives. Someone will tell a few of these stories for a good long while, for sure. These celebrations are in the cafeteria:
Nice job @samford_sports, @SamfordTrack, @SamfordWTennis, letting everyone know about SoCon champs. @MartinNewton1 pic.twitter.com/KoVVv6KKmd
— kenny smith (@kennysmith) April 28, 2015
Pretty cool, huh? One of the tennis players has been in two of my classes. One of the track athletes has been in my class and he’ll be getting his second conference championship ring. One of his teammates is our sports editor this spring and he’s getting his first ring, as a freshman. All of that is nice, but I just thought it was a nice touch how the folks in the athletic department took steps to point out their team’s success.
Paper tonight, and a run today and a lot of time in the office working on class things. Sometimes it feels as if the grading will never stop.
You might have heard of the weekend storm in the Gulf. One sailor died in the squall, and the search is on for others still missing. Sad story:
“I’ve now sailed thousands and thousands of miles and I’ve never seen a situation come up so fast,” he said.
And yet it was on land that Creekmore got the most terrible news.
“He’s a wonderful, very brilliant, very bright young man,” Creekmore said of Beall, who owned Kris Beall Construction in Alexandria, La., and was from nearby Pineville.
Creekmore described Beall as “very passionate about sailing.”
I was downtown tonight, for pizza, and so this was a good night to also see this story, which has probably never happened here before:
As cities around the country look for ways to go green, a recent report shows Birmingham to be leading the way in terms of air quality.
Ozone and fine particulate concentrations in the Birmingham area are at their lowest-ever recorded levels, according to the Jefferson County Department of Public Health.
You don’t have to go terribly far back in time to see the city in an entirely different, cloudy light.
The air has been getting progressively better over the years. You can even see the skyline for miles. I remember days as a kid when you couldn’t say that.
This gentleman is believed to be the last surviving member of Merrill’s Marauders in Alabama:
“My biggest concern and the gravest concern of all of us was — we were surrounded there — can they keep us with enough ammunition?” the 94-year-old Kinney, who grew up in Cullman County and now lives in Calera, said about the battle.
“We had been sitting there for 13 days and the Japanese had us surrounded. We had no food and no water for five days,” he said.
Kinney, who had suffered two hits from shrapnel and a bullet across his helmet during the fighting, recalled the Nhpum Ga battle came to a halt on Easter Sunday morning in 1944 with a victory over Japanese soldiers. It was the latest of several hard-fought battles for the Marauders, named after their commander, Gen. Frank D. Merrill, but it wasn’t their last.
“When we were disbanded, there was less than 200 that were still fighting,” said Kinney.
Nothing little about that.
I tell students that obituaries aren’t about the way people died, but about how they lived. And, occasionally, that makes for a story worth telling grandly. Here’s the story of a woman who was abandoned at a train depot as a baby, who then lived for a century:
Ione’s 65-year-old daughter, Margaret Pacifici, a nurse, said, “She wanted perfection.”
Son Joe, 68, an organic chemist, said, “If you had done your best and it was not good enough, mother would tell you to do better.”
Joseph, her husband, died in 1984. After that, Ione traveled. She read. She drove a Buick until she was 92.
She drove a Buick. Whoever writes mine, a long, long time from now, I hope they remember to get in a lot of small details like that. In any kind of stories, I think, those small details are the one that make the imagery sing.
The little details make the big picture.
Before we get to long running lists and passages of recent journalism and media links, there’s this video to consider:
"Do not give them a reason."
https://t.co/tuCA0X7UKF http://t.co/aSEzjfeeFf
— Thurston (@ipadreporter) April 28, 2015
I’ve covered exactly two protests, neither of them with as much as stake as we’ve seen in recent months in several places around the country. What I’ve learned, by watching from afar, is that the juxtaposition of thoughtful interviews playing in a two-box opposite things on fire in any city is sad and unfortunate. Here are things that people use and depend on and enjoy. And here are people destroying them. Society has a difficult time abiding by that. I suspect that, eventually, it will stop doing so. The reason is pretty simple. There are protests, and then there are those who would use protests as cover for their own unscrupulous goals. Guys like the one in the video above never get noticed, and they probably do as much as anything else to keep the balance tipped to the more peaceful side of the spectrum.
First Hurricane Katrina evacuee enrolled in Opelika schools to graduate this spring:
With relatives already living in Opelika, the family fled to Alabama to stay at Emily’s grandmother’s house. Just days after they arrived, Emily’s parents enrolled her in third grade at Opelika’s Northside Intermediate School.
Emily was one of approximately 20 Katrina evacuees who enrolled in Opelika City Schools between Sept. 1, 2005, and Sept. 5, 2005, when the Opelika-Auburn News published an article titled “Opelika schools open to evacuees.” The article featured Emily as the first of those 20 evacuees to register in the school system in that five-day time span.
Days after Emily became a student, and still 10 years later, Emily’s mother and grandmother talked about how welcoming the school system was to their tragedy-stricken family.
“I was very proud of the way the school system and everybody opened to her,” said Emily’s grandmother, Barbara Strickland, sitting on her couch in Opelika last week. “I mean the schools, the kids in the school that were in the classrooms with her, the teachers, the kids’ parents — they were totally awesome to her.” Barbara Strickland shared similar thoughts in the Opelika-Auburn News’ September 2005 article.
Cool little story, there. She’s going off to Huntingdon College in the fall.
A small handful of carefully cultivated online stories:
Google’s ‘mobilegeddon’: ways you can respond to the algorithm shake-up
Google to websites: Be mobile-friendly or get buried in search results
13 Instagram tools brands should be using
Before and After Pictures of the Earthquake in Nepal
Scenes from the Nepal earthquake zone
Digital Commerce Is the Norm as Germany’s Internet Culture Matures
Such widespread adoption and penetration in Germany’s private culture is very telling.
And now a big handful of journalism links, starting with a few useful reads. As you may know, the Pulitzer Prizes were announced last week. Here’s a judge’s thought process, The winner for the best Pulitzer Prize lead is…:
There may be more than 300 candidates in a category, and your job is to find three finalists. Your default position is to reject, reject, reject (in Pulitzer parlance to throw it under the table). To have a chance, your prose has to grab a juror by the throat. Leads matter. And your first lead in a series or a collection matters most of all.
With that theory in mind, I have sifted through the Pulitzer Prize winners of 2015. I am about to award an ancillary prize for best lead. In addition to the winner, I will honor two finalists and three honorable mentions. The prize is lunch with me – their treat.
My rules:
I will only consider the lead of the first story in any entry.
Categories compete against each other. Leads are leads.
Long leads are not punished, but shorter ones get extra points.
If I don’t get the point of the story in three paragraphs, you’re under the table.
Unusual elements get extra points, as long as they don’t distract from the focus of the story.
Great analysis follows, and if you’re a writer, thats worth reading.
Journalist-turned academic John L. Robinson on one of his darkest newsroom days, Laying off journalists:
When I left, I went straight to a reception for one of my daughters’ soccer teams. I could have skipped it, but I wanted to be around people and I knew there was beer there. I told the host how I’d spent the day. He briefly commiserated, then put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, “I’ve been on the other side. Your people had it much tougher today than you.”
He was right, of course. I still had a job.
I wept when I got home. Wept from guilt, from regret, from stress. Wept because I knew this was the beginning of the end for me and the paper.
In the ensuing days, it was clear that a bond between the company and the employee was broken. The deal had been this:
They would work hard, do good work, miss family dinners, have coworkers critique their work, hear from readers that they were stupid and biased and worse.
We would give them a place to do what they loved, a paycheck and job security. We could no longer provide the security.
After that day, that covenant wasn’t ever fully restored.
Last month, I told a student who interviewed me for a school project that that day had traumatized me.
Which one of these do you think is more interesting?:
Virginia Cop Detains Television News Videographer, Fearing Camera Vest Could be Tactical Gear
Police body cams: The new FOIA fight
Politico plans to double its reporting staff to about 500
Peter Hamby leaving CNN for Snapchat
‘Traditional TV viewing for teens and tweens is dead. Not dying. Dead.’
The correct answer is they are all interesting. The officer involved in the first link is clearly at odds with the law. The FOIA issues around police cameras are going to be reoccurring stories for the next several years. Politico growth is an interesting note, but how and where they will grow is the most telling. That political reporting vet Peter Hamby, meanwhile, is jumping from CNN to be the director of news at Snapchat is an incredibly telling move. This one came up in class today. We left it with the observation that this are, indeed, interesting, transitory times. That’s the second time I’ve made that point in class this semester. The first one is about the last link in that group, that young people don’t watch television as you and I did. The numbers are so stark that I’ve all but stopped making live television references in class.
A few more strictly journalism-related links:
WH Press Corps Developing Demands For More Access To The President
The president and the press
Why The New York Times apps look different
Getting it Right: Fact-Checking in the Digital Age
The unstoppable rise of social media as a source for news
News about Facebook and news:
Andy Mitchell and Facebook’s weird state of denial about news
Facebook is making 3 big changes to its NewsFeed algorithm, and publishers should be worried
Facebook Tweaks Cause Concern, but Not Necessarily Panic
We’re not even reading tea leaves here. This stuff is pretty obvious, and Mitchell’s speech should be off-putting to everyone who values the role news place in local society.
Facebook is about 15 minutes away from dominating online video, however. Will Facebook Pass YouTube for Video Ads?:
It’s go time for Facebook autoplay video ads, and according to December 2014 research by Mixpo, the social network is set to pass YouTube in video ad usage this year.
Nearly nine in 10 US advertising executives polled said they planned to run a video ad campaign on Facebook in the coming year—the highest response rate out of all networks studied and up from fewer than two-thirds who had done so in the past year. Despite usage intent rising 3.7 percentage points, YouTube fell to second place, trailing Facebook by 5.5 points.
The Wall Street Journal rolled out a new version of their site today. Check it out. And then follow up with a few on-topic links:
After the launch of its long-awaited web redesign, The Wall Street Journal hopes to spur innovation
The Wall Street Journal is playing a game of digital catchup
Wall Street Journal’s digital revamp: Q&A with Emily Banks, news editor for mobile
Every newsroom should probably start seeking out a person to fill the mobile editor role. Why wouldn’t you have someone in that position, when so much of your audience is mobile, anyway?
Finally, this is a thoughtful and attractive effort from Esquire. They’re taking some of their great pieces from over time and sharing them in a modern style — and they could do this in almost every presentation evolution that comes down the line. It looks really handsome and demonstrates some of the great, timeless storytelling that Esquire has had over the years. There are eight great pieces there so far. They call it Esquire Classics.
When we did the half Ironman in Augusta last year I realized one place where those races do a disservice to the athletes. They shut down the relief area too early. That’s not a knock on the support staff there, some person has stretched or massaged 100s of sweaty people in an endurance sport of their own and probably wants to go home. But those people that come in slow, and late, they’ve been on the course for a long time, and they deserve that support too.
That’s about the third thing I thought of when I learned of Maickel Melamed, who knocked down the Boston Marathon over the course of 20 hours. Also, he has muscular dystrophy, and he was out to prove something about Boston, and also about his spirit:
So the rest of us really are running out of excuses, aren’t we?
If, like me, you’ve been feeling a bit older than normal later, let’s take one more item away. 76-year-old man running 8 marathons in 8 days across Alabama:
“You meet a bunch of interesting people and you see a bunch of interesting things,” he said. “That’s what keeps me doing it.”
I should really stop looking up excuse antidotes.
I’m going to spend the next little while thinking about creating a job like this:
What does your role as lead news editor for mobile entail? Are you in charge of news about mobile developments? Or are you responsible for news content delivered on mobile?
Banks: I was hired to help reporters and editors think about how they could create unique content for mobile and content that’s optimized for mobile. So no news about mobile, but rather creating and optimizing news delivered on mobile platforms. That includes everything from working with designers and developers to building new templates for content on mobile, then teaching editors how to use those templates, to working toward making sure, for example, graphics that we publish work on mobile. I also will jump in and pitch ideas aimed at mobile — like an interactive about smartphone ergonomics that readers access on their phone, and by playing a little game and performing tests in this interactive could determine whether their phone is too big or too small for their hand.
I could see that being a fun position for the right journalist. One of the really neat things about it would be that, in many newsrooms, the person in that position would be blazing their own trail.
More and more content is going that way, no matter how fast or slow the rest of us move.
