State of the News Media in 2010-Newspapers

Last night I had the privilege of attending the DC chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators meeting headlined by Amy Mitchell of the Pew Center on the State of the News Media in 2010.

In our 2007 report covering America’s Newspapers and the Internet, we argued that the Internet does not necessarily have to be a threatening competitor for newspapers. In 2007 the most glaring shortcomings of newspaper websites largely stemmed from a failure to see the benefits of not only allowing, but actually encouraging reader participation and the sharing of content across the web. Rather than worrying about attracting visitors, we sought to establish that newspapers needed to take steps to: 1. Lengthen the amount of time users spend on their websites. 2. Expand the purpose behind website visits. 3. Convert page views and stickiness into revenue. 4. Improve advertiser incentives for purchasing online ads. To achieve these objectives, we argued that newspaper websites needed to become strategically and visually better than that of their competitors.

Some of the key findings from The Pew Research Center’s “State of the News Media 2010” analysis concerning newspapers include:

Digital Audience

“Online audience continued to be a positive counterpoint for the industry. Monthly unique visitors to newspapers rose 14% in 2009, according to Nielsen Online to roughly 74 million."

Economics

“Advertising during the year declined for the first time since 2002, according to data from eMarketer. The firm’s updated August projections put the declines at 4.6%, to $22.4 billion in total revenues."     

"But some categories fared better than others. Search, which flows mostly to aggregators like Google, was projected to grow 3% in 2009 to $10.8 billion, But display advertising revenue, which news sites rely on, was expected to fall 2% to $4.8 billion. Classified revenue was projected to plummet 31% to $2.2 billion in 2009. Accounting for 17% of online ad spending in 2003, classified are now just 9%.”

Are Users Willing to Pay for Their Favorite News Sites?

“A new survey by PEJ and Pew Internet and American Life Project suggests there is a difficult hill to climb in putting content behind a pay wall. Of those that have a favorite Web site (just a third of online news users), only 19% said they would continue to visit if that site put up a pay wall."     

"The prospects for growth in conventional display advertising also look difficult. The vast majority of Internet users, 79%, say they never or rarely had clicked on an online advertisement. They don’t mind them. They simply ignore them.”

News Investment

"Of the top roughly 200 sites analyzed by PEJ, fully 67% are tied to a legacy media outlet, meaning that they are at least partly funded by another platform such as cable TV or newspapers.”

Tricking Your Customers with Interstitial Ads

Like them or not, interstitial ads, which are advertisements that appear before visitors arrive at the expected site content, have become a part of our day-to-day web browsing experience.  I personally don’t mind interstitial ads all that much, as I’ve gotten used to them and have gotten pretty good at locating the skip button as a way of quickly getting to the content I’m actually looking for.

With all online ads, there is sort of a battle between publishers and site visitors.  As site visitors get better and better at tuning out advertisements, publishers get more and more creative (and desperate) in their efforts to grab readers attention.  An interstitial ad campaign ESPN.com ran yesterday is a good example of the push/pull between visitors and publishers. 

ESPN is a site I’ve visited on just about a daily basis for as long as I can remember, so I’m pretty familiar with how its design has evolved over the years.  Yesterday, when I visited to the site I was taken to a page that looked like the homepage of the site from 5 years ago.  Indeed, the top story on the page referenced a 2004 MVP race.  Below is a screen grab.

I immediately recognized this as an old ESPN.com homepage design, and later confirmed this by poking around the Wayback machine (see here and here).  I was honestly confused, wondering if ESPN was having some sort of technical problem.  Then I noticed the Lexus ad at the top of the page, and a split second later the ad expanded to show a full page ad promoting Lexus as the first company to launch a luxury hybrid.  See below.

At this point I opt out of the ad and move on to the main ESPN homepage. 

Honestly though, the whole situation left a bad taste in my mouth.  I understand that ESPN.com needs to pay its bills, and that as a reader of their site I’m obligated to view my fair share of ads.  That’s fine.  But I think ESPN is hurting its brand by allowing advertisers to essentially trick visitors into thinking they are viewing editorial content when they aren’t. 

Ranking the Twitter IQ of Newspapers

In our newspaper study, released earlier today, we developed a formula we call the Twitter Interactivity Quotient (or Twitter IQ for short) as a way of measuring how newspapers were using their accounts.   If tweeting, which consists of original tweets, responses to tweets, and retweeting others’ tweets, is viewed as a conversation, then the tweeting is effectively “talking”, while responses and retweets are evidence of “listening”. And, while not every conversation is equally balanced for a variety of good reasons, it seems reasonable to propose that the best conversationalists are those who cultivate balance over time.

Working off that premise, we combined the percentage of replies and retweets (listening) and subtracted it from 50 percent (a perfect balance). We then subtracted that number from 100% and translated it into a real number between .5 and 1.5, establishing “1” as the ideal balance. Accounts registering a .5 only tweet, accounts registering a 1.5 only reply and retweet, but they are equally out of balance in different directions. The Twitter IQ is the difference between an account’s “balance” and “1”. As such, in an ironic flourish, the lower one’s Twitter IQ, the better. The combined Twitter IQ employed in ranking the newspapers’ is simply the sum of the three applicable accounts. Below is a list of the newspapers who had the best aggregate Twitter IQ scores, meaning the three accounts we examined had the best overall balance between listening and talking. Please note that these results should be taken with a grain of salt, as we didn’t look at every single Twitter account for each newspaper.

Here is the list of the specific accounts we looked at that have the best Twitter IQ scores.

See our full rankings of the newspapers in aggregate, and the individual accounts themselves, at the link below.

• Newspaper Twitter IQ Rankings
• Newspaper Accounts Twitter IQ Rankings

Update: We decided to remove the list of the lowest ranking accounts, since it wasn’t our intention to bring negative attention to those with low scores.

The Use of Twitter by America’s Newspapers

Twitter was seemingly everywhere in 2009, with sports stars, celebrities, politicians and journalists using the micro blogging platform to promote everything from themselves to their employers to the issues they advocate for.    After several years of assessing the general online presence of the top 100 U.S. newspapers, this year we decided to produce a study specifically about how newspapers and journalists are utilizing Twitter as a way of promoting their content and interacting with readers. Frankly, this was a daunting task.  There are thousands of newspaper-related Twitter profiles, from official accounts of the paper overall to more personal profiles maintained by individual journalists.  Given the pure volume of accounts, we decided to closely analyze 300 profiles from the top 100 newspapers in the country as a way of getting a sense, in aggregate, of how the media is utilizing Twitter.  Among the things we look at in the study are whether newspapers link to their Twitter accounts from their website, how often, and in what manner, the accounts are updated, and whether newspapers are using their Twitter profiles to interact with readers or to simply promote their site content. While the study isn’t perfect, the results provide a compelling jumping-off point for additional thought and discussion.  Following are some key findings and a link to the full study. Top Line Stats

• We were able to find multiple Twitter accounts for all of the top 100 newspapers using common sense searching techniques. However, only 62% of the newspapers included links to at least one of their accounts from their website. In many cases, these links were buried on the site and difficult to track down. In addition, this means 38% of the newspapers are actively using Twitter, but haven’t yet integrated their presence with their website in even a minimal way.
• 56% of newspapers maintained a directory of their Twitter accounts on their website. This directory from the Los Angeles Times is a good example of the form these listings usually took. Many of these directories were quite extensive, listing dozens of accounts.
• Of the 300 Twitter profiles we looked at in depth, the average account had 17,717 followers and followed back 1,470 other users. However, if you remove the four accounts we looked at that had over 100,000 followers, the average number of followers drops to a much more modest 3,447 users.
• The Twitter profiles of the newspapers send out an average of 11 tweets per day. Tweet frequency varies from 1.1 (The Boston Globe's Big Picture, The Denver Post's Woody Paige, and The Akron Beacon Journal) to 95.5 tweets/day (The Boston Herald).
• 51% of Twitter accounts were updated primarily through Twitter’s web interface. The next most popular method with 28% was Twitterfeed, which is a service that automatically posts updates to Twitter accounts via RSS feeds. The remaining 21% of accounts were updated via a variety of other Twitter tools such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. This indicates that the vast majority of Twitter accounts (around 70%) are updated by staff members as opposed to a simply being an automated feed.

Replies and Retweets While these core statistics are interesting, we wanted to take things further and see how exactly the Twitter accounts were being used. Were the accounts simply linkbots highlighting newspaper content, or were they being used to by the paper to hold a conversation with its readers? Were newspapers simply talking, or were they listening, too? Some key findings on this front:

• Many of the accounts we looked at rarely if ever interacted with other users by replying to tweets. Indeed, 33% of the accounts we looked at replied to users in less than 1% of their tweets. 15% of the accounts we looked at had never replied to another users tweets. This suggests that these papers are rarely reading or reacting to the updates of people they follow.
• On the positive side, 37% of newspaper accounts we looked at replied to users in more than 10% of their tweets. 5% of accounts replied to other Twitter users in over 50% of their tweets.
• Similarly, many of the accounts we looked at rarely retweeted other users. 43% of the accounts we looked at retweeted others in less than 1% of their tweets. 23% of the accounts we looked at never retweeted another user during the time period we considered.
• 16% of the Twitter accounts we looked at retweeted other users in more than 10% of their tweets.

Please also check out this post, which goes into detail about Twitter IQ, our ranking of the level of interactivity of the Twitter accounts. The Full Study The full study is available for download here and is also embedded below for your convenience.  You can also view the back up data for the study at the URLs below:

• Raw data
• Newspaper Twitter IQ Rankings
• Newspaper Accounts Twitter IQ Rankings

We would love for readers to use the data as a jumping off point for additional analysis, and just ask that you reference The Bivings Group in whatever you produce. The Use of Twitter by America's Newspapers

The CIO and Journalism

In the past we have profiled the innovative work of people like Adrian Holovaty who does some exciting things through programming that allow data to tell their own stories.  For instance, he set up the Campaign Tracker for the Washington Post, and he is now running his own site Everyblock – the database driven hyperlocal news site.  Further, in our newspaper studies we have examined how news organizations use the Internet.

While at the CIO Perspectives Forum here in Washington, DC last week, I was wondering about what kind of role CIOs should play at news organizations.  Their organizations may already use them as I am thinking (at least I hope).  However, it is important to note that in an October 2008 white paper titled “The CIO Profession: Leaders of change, drivers of innovation” IBM reports that most organizations mainly view and use CIOs as implementers and not as strategists.  Hopefully, news organizations turn to CIOs for planning and strategy and not just technical execution.  Of course, a CIO with a journalism background could help even more; Adrian Holovaty is so innovatively partly since he has a background in both programming and journalism.

If CIOs are involved in strategic planning, they can help the business and editorial staffers not only understand what is realistic, but they can also introduce them to new ideas that someone without technical expertise would know.  Further, a CIO could also identify potential problems and other issues in advance and help either avoid them or prepare other organizational stakeholders in advance. 

Here are a few examples of how a CIO can help news organizations strategically plan: 

• Broadcast journalists are now going out to the field with recording and editing equipment with fewer producers and camera people accompanying them.  Before such equipment and software is purchased, the CIO could help determine the requirements for such equipment and software and then help identify applicable products.
• A CIO with a decent understanding of database management could help find new application ideas like the ones that Adrian Holovaty has developed.
• During our newspaper studies we look at the website features that news organizations use by examining the different features (i.e. blogs, RSS feeds, video sections, etc.) they harness.  A CIO would have a valuable perspective on helping developing a strategic plan on what the organization’s website should do. Further, he or she she can help evaluate content management systems (CMS), applications, and vendors to determine how well they meet the organization’s needs and desires.
• A CIO can help an organization envision and deploy an API – like NPR’s API — which allows members of the public to use its data in interesting ways that the organizations itself did not image.  This is one way that a CIO can work with the business and editorial people at a news organization to help them find ways to profitably exploit an API.
• The CIO could help find ways to organize content for the public in many different ways.  For instance, tagging enables people to find information in ways other than the traditional divisions like News, Sports, International, etc.  In fact, The Guardian newspaper wanted a tag editor back in October 2007.  This would help make the news organization’s site more easy for the public to use.

These are just a few examples of aspects of journalism in which news organizations can turn to their CIOs for strategic planning, and considering the dire state of media companies, they can use all of the help that they can get.

How else can news organizations harness their CIOs to help strategically plan?