Amazon Expected to Make Gains on Google in Advertising
By Michael K. Spencer
12 October 2018
The battle for the future of the smart home might also be the end game for the future of advertising. With Facebook all but irrelevant there, the likely scenario is Amazon vs. Google. This is what we are seeing with Alexa devices vs. Google Home (Google Assistant) smart speakers. More
As Publishers Pump out Repetitive Content, Quality Reporting Suffers
By Ravi Somaiya
28 June 2018
It’s an instructive exercise to think of the news media as a friend who tells you things. In the years before 2007—before smartphones and social media—she or he showed up once or twice a day, and declared with great seriousness and certainty what she or he thought the most important stories of the last 24 hours were.
In 2018 she or he has become a constant chorus. According to figures provided by media analytics company Newswhip, The Washington Post published 10,580 individual things in May of this year, including wire stories, graphics, and other miscellania. CNN published 9,430, The New York Times 5,984, The Wall Street Journal 4,898, and NPR 2,254.
The Hidden Costs of Losing Your City’s Newspaper
By Kriston Capps
4 June 2018
When local newspapers shut their doors, communities lose out. People and their stories can’t find coverage. Politicos take liberties when it’s nobody’s job to hold them accountable. What the public doesn’t know winds up hurting them. The city feels poorer, politically and culturally.
According to a new working paper, local news deserts lose out financially, too. Cities where newspapers closed up shop saw increases in government costs as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals, say researchers who tracked the decline of local news outlets between 1996 and 2015.
The Internet Sent the Press in a Tailspin
By Nathan Bomey
11 April 2018
After moving to Arlington, Va., in 2015, I quickly discovered that two of the seminal events of the information age occurred within steps of each other about a mile from my new home.
Just north of Wilson Boulevard in the Rosslyn neighborhood near the Potomac River is the parking garage where Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward famously met in the early 1970s with Deep Throat, the secret source who helped to expose the Watergate scandal.
Beyond “Live at Five”: What’s Next for Local TV News?
By Karen Rundlet and Sam Gill
6 April 2018
Some would argue the local television news industry sits in an enviable position. It still reaches large audiences and brings in considerable revenue, thanks to political advertising and the retransmission fees that cable and satellite systems pay to carry local channels. But television news leaders are well aware of the shifting landscape.
Broadcast ratings have declined and TV news leaders, like those working in other media, know, that in the digital age, audiences find their news on mobile devices and social streams. That’s led to television newsrooms accelerating their efforts to serve viewers across websites, social and next generation platforms that promise to deliver ultra-high definition TV anywhere, anytime. TV now means much more than producing stories for the 5 o’clock news.
Can Public Funding for Local News Increase Trust in Media?
By Joe Amditis
12 September 2018
In August a Poynter Media Trust Survey found that 76 percent of respondents have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in their local TV news, and 73 percent have confidence in their local newspaper. In fact, almost every study, poll, and survey shows that most people trust their local news providers at much higher rates than their national counterparts. More
Emerging Technologies Pave the Way for Profitable Journalism Through Personalization
By Alana Rudder
28 May 2018
In the mind of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s mission is only 1 percent done. What started as a student platform in 2003 soon became a cutting-edge emerging platform in 2006. Today, made possible by highly-personal data collection, highly-personalized Facebook news feeds capture the hearts of content consumers — rendering news providers old school — via not just the adoption of futuristic emerging technology but the pioneering of it.
Rise of Subscriptions and the Fall of Advertising
By Bob Gilbreath
20 May 2018
We talk a lot about how individual startups disrupt existing business models — such as Airbnb vs. hotels or Craigslist vs. newspaper classifieds — but we sometimes fail to appreciate the more massive disruptions that cut across many industries at once. Ecommerce is one example: People increasingly choose to purchase everything from airplane tickets to underwear via digital storefronts. Consumer habits are slow to change, but when they do change they cut across categories — and even iconic companies with hundreds of years of history can fall away.
How Much Is a Word Worth?
By Malcolm Harris
1 May 2018
When people who read magazines read an article in a magazine, I don’t imagine they know how much the writer was paid. As consumers, we aren’t responsible for what workers make; market competition and minimum wage laws take care of that. So, as long as we pay for our purchases and we pay our taxes, we’ve done our part. We assume there’s some rationale to the pricing of labor, with industries coalescing around sensible rates that increase over time according to inflation and productivity.
Why Recent Business Models of Turkey’s Independent Digital Media Outlets Mostly Tend to Fail?
By Sarphan Uzunoglu
30 April 2018
There are 4 main topics to be careful about in order to discuss in a rational way about the online news media models in Turkey. First of all, we have to bravely discuss the status of journalistic labor both in Turkey and in the world. Then, we have to be honest to ourselves regarding death of traditional media outlets in Turkey. Thirdly, we should focus on how new media outlets may survive in this new media era in terms of their reader engagement, content production and content dissemination strategies. Last of all, we have to be critical about our existing perspectives of income models and we have to be clear about our journalistic aims and ethical position, we should never forget that Turkey’s media outlets can not act free from global trends and discussions and we shouldn’t isolate ourselves from global crisis of journalism.