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The Price of Credibility
Posted by Rukhshona Nazhmidinova in Marketing / Advertising on August 30, 2010
The need to be present in social networks leads more companies to desert traditional media and head for the Internet.
Yet the game might not be worth the candle, when the medium lacks credibility to the point where it actually makes TV advertising look trustworthy. Louise Kelly, Gayle Kerr, and Judy Drennan from the Queensland University of Technology conducted a study, published in the Journal of Interactive Advertising, assessing the attitudes of younger audiences with regard to advertising on social networking websites. The results indicate that participants Read the rest of this entry »
Guardians of Truth
Posted by Kate Nacy in New Media, Political Journalism on August 23, 2010
The Guardian creates governmental truth-tracking tool.
Emerging as leaders in “data journalism” and celebrated for launching a sharp bunch of free, simplified analysis tools, The Guardian releases its latest creation: The Pledge Tracker. As Britain’s new coalition government (a Conservative/Liberal Democrat mashup) came to office, a great number of promises were made to the public. Four hundred and thirty-three promises, in fact. The Guardian’s pledge tracker, a sortable database of the coalition’s pledges, monitors the promises according to their fulfillment statuses (i.e. “Kept,” “Not Kept,” “In Trouble,” “Wait and See”). Pledges can be sorted by metrics such as party, topic and difficulty level. Simon Jeffrey, The Guardian’s story producer, Read the rest of this entry »
Framing Gay Marriage
Posted by Kate Nacy in Ethics, Media Politics on August 16, 2010
New research tracks coverage of gay marriage debate.
Are you for “family values” or “human equality”? Not that you actually have to choose one over the other, despite the prevalent belief that the two are mutually exclusive. If you’re a Family Values reader, you might look to the Chicago Tribune for your latest in gay marriage info, whereas if you’re of the Human Equality variety, you’d better go for the New York Times. A new study published in the Social Science Journal takes a look at coverage of gay marriage in Read the rest of this entry »
Goodbye, Cockaigne!
Posted by Stephan Russ-Mohl in Media Economics on August 12, 2010
“Fair Trade” in the news business: What journalists and publishers might learn from behavioral economics.
Rupert Murdoch’s London Times is the front-runner in attempting to introduce payments for its online content since early July. Others will follow, like Le Monde and Figaro, and Axel Springer AG in Germany announced similar plans. In America, the New York Times spent a year preparing its readers with reports about the newspaper branch, later acknowledging that it would reconstruct the very paywall it eliminated only a Read the rest of this entry »
Lessons from Wikileaks
Posted by Marcello Foa in Crises and Scandals, Ethics, Media Effects on August 1, 2010
Reflections on Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary.
Swaying the media is much easier than academics and reporters are willing to admit. Knowing that 80 percent of the news comes from institutional sources, the transparency of information depends, above all, on the integrity of the people who work in such institutions.
If the government, or in this specific case the White House and Pentagon, select a line to follow and demand discipline from staff (avoiding unwelcome leaks), they are able to control not just a newspaper, but the media as a whole.
Unfortunately, as demonstrated in the book Gli Stregoni della Notizia (Witch Doctors of the News), scoops are often deceptive as they tend to be deliberately planted Read the rest of this entry »
The Ghosts of Users Past
In this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes.
The cyberworld, it seems, is condemned to the same ineludible limitations. Facebook users are dying. So are Twitterers, MySpacers, Flickrers and Tumblrers. But as social media users eventually pass on to the great unknown, what are companies to do with carefully crafted online personas and profiles? Facebook, as explained in a recent NYT article written by Jenna Wortham, occasionally suggests users “reconnect” with deceased friends and relatives who’ve created accounts. This is, for lack of gentler terms, totally creepy.
Yet with people over 65 converting to Facebook at a greater pace than any other age group, the issue of cyber life-after-death will surely become more pressing. According to the article, Facebook’s original strategy was to simply delete profiles of anyone Read the rest of this entry »
The Deal with the Daily Mail
Posted by Kate Nacy in Media Economics, New Media on July 21, 2010
The Daily Mail’s website is a humongous success. And it’s free.
Let’s skip the pros and cons of the somewhat tired ‘to paywall or not to paywall’ argument for a moment and focus on a website which is quite virtually rolling in the dough: MailOnline, Web version of the UK’s Daily Mail. According to Peter Preston of The Guardian, 1.9 million folks are still buying copies of the printed version, while online growth increased from basically nill four years ago to 40,500,00 unique visitors per month (up 72 percent year by year). Pretty impressive.
Yet a quick visit to the site’s homepage will assault the eyes with celebrity images (LiLo in prison garb, Kate Winslet in Rome, someone called Katie Price who appears to have had a plastic surgery misfire). Addressing critics who don’t believe MailOnline to be a true news site, Preston says, Read the rest of this entry »
The Journalism Firm?
Posted by Kate Nacy in Media Economics on July 18, 2010
A recommendation for journalists: follow the lawyers.
While journalists occasionally serve as the butt of a bad joke or two (ex: What do you get if you cross a sports reporter with a vegetable? A common tater), they’re victimized far less other professionals, namely lawyers. Even your own sweet grandmother can pull off a “How many lawyers does it take to screw in a lightbulb” zinger. But don’t get too comfortable, warns Michael Rosenblum, video-journalism expert, because soon journalists may have to start taking notes from their Bluetooth-and-briefcase toting colleagues. Read the rest of this entry »
Clergy Coverage
Posted by Kate Nacy in Crises and Scandals on July 2, 2010
PEJ and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life release study on Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandal.
Analysis dealt with media coverage of the Catholic Church scandal in Europe and the U.S. from 2002 – 2010, with a particular emphasis on coverage in March and April of 2010. According to the study, reportage on the issue swelled during the last spring, drawing more attention from news outlets than at any time since 2002 (when the story about Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston broke) with the European press covering the Catholic Church even more fervently than the U.S.
The study found that the Church’s heavy press rotation in Europe this year proved to be a reversal of reportage patterns from 2002, when the U.S. was bombarded with stories of sexual abuse committed by U.S. priests while Europe saw considerably less of such stories. Read the rest of this entry »
Supported by
Bad Marks for Citizen Journalists
Posted by Susanne Fengler in New Media, Quality Management on July 15, 2010
Concerning interactivity, “old” forms of media function better than their reputations suggest, while new media like blogs and social networks have a lot of catching up to do in the quality department. This consensus came as the result of several international studies presented in Singapore at the world congress of the International Communication Association (ICA). Read the rest of this entry »
Citizen Blogs, Citizen Journalists, Commentary Functions, Daily Newspapers, Interactivity, Letters to the Editor, New media, Political Blogging, Political Discourse, Singapore, Traditional Media. International Communication Association
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