About 55 per cent of the news published by Australian newspapers was fed to them by PR and marketing sources, according to a study of 10 newspapers conducted by local university students, the Australian news website Crikey and the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism. More than 2200 stories from a five-day period were analyzed. A story was categorized as PR-dependent if it originated from a press…
The sand in the hourglass is slipping away for original journalism. That’s the sombre message at the core of this year’s State of the Media Report by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. While many exciting new experiments in journalism have launched, particularly in non-profit and citizen journalism, the revenue they’ve attracted to invest in…
Many magazines exempt their own websites from the editorial standards applied to their traditional print product, reports a study of editorial practices at 665 magazines by the Columbia Journalism Review. The study found 11 per cent do not copy edit web-only content at all while 48 per cent copy edit it less rigorously than print…
I feel it in my fingers. I feel it in my toes. News is all around me … With apologies to the Troggs (and a liberal use of poetic licence), that, in essence, is how the latest Pew Internet survey describes the way news is distributed and consumed today. Using multiple platforms and often portable devices, people…
I feel it in my fingers. I feel it in my toes. News is all around me … With apologies to the Troggs (and some poetic licence), that, in essence, is how the latest Pew Internet survey describes the new reality of how news is distributed and consumed. Using multiple devices, increasingly including smart-phones, people plug…
Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook are commonly used by journalists as sources of information, according to a survey by Cision and George Washington University. More than half (56 per cent) of 371 respondents said social media was important or somewhat important for researching and producing stories. Although Google (100 per cent), corporate websites…
News organization that haven’t yet incorporated Facebook into their news distribution strategy might want to change course, and soon. According to research from Hitwise, Facebook is now the fourth-ranked source of visits to news and media sites, behind Google, Yahoo and MSN. Facebook overtook Google News as a source of news site visits last year and is miles ahead of Google Reader. Some are already…
An editorial study conducted by the Seattle Times looked at how contextual advertising (affinity to content determines ad placement) impacted readers’ perceptions of online news content. It found most readers were comfortable with contextual ads in sections focused on softer news – like sports, travel and entertainment – but were not happy to see them next to hard news stories about…
As part of a newly launched study into the future of media, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has posted a lengthy, hyperlinked collection of recent studies and articles on media’s future from a wide range of (American) sources.
Complaints by media proprietors like Rupert Murdoch that Google News is “stealing” their content has always been countered by the argument that Google and other news aggregators actually direct web traffic back to orignating news sites. However, a survey of news consumers by Outsell Inc. found 44 per cent of Google News visitors scan headlines without ever clicking…