In his new book, co-author Alfred Hermida (disclosure: he is a colleague at UBC, where he teaches journalism) examines the changing relationship between newspapers and the audience. He posts today on his Reportr.net site a summary of his recent presentation on the topic at a conference in Australia.
Hermida notes that the practice of opening content to public comments isn't new, but he notes the digital age's swift impact on the evolution of the relationship.
He surveyed more than a dozen newspapers and their attitudes about the involvement of the public in their content. He was looking for change.
Some took a "conventional" stance that kept some distance with the audience, some were "dialogical" open to audience participation, but most fell into the "ambivalent journalist" category: They recognized the value of audience involvement, but also expressed reservations about users as participants. Even in that regard, though, it amounts to some change in recent years.
Hermida observes that the public is involved at the beginning and end of the journalistic process, but that the crucial and central processes of deciding and presenting are the domains of the journalist. To date, he concludes, journalists have found ways to preserve that role.
The New York Times looks today at the new benefits of online audience tracking in helping a newsroom shift coverage to be more appealing.
It looks at such operations as The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post to help gauge the degree to which they use audience analytics at their sites to influence the print edition. Editors there, and at the Times itself, are cautionary about creating a newspaper based on Web results.
But for the first time print news organizations have some tools to give them real-time understanding of what is and isn't consumed. (Television has had similar overnight ratings to help them for some time.)
The challenge is to understand what content works best in what format. Some online content is popular because it has a limited shelf life --- a traffic snarl, a weather story, a breaking news item all might be irrelevant by the morning --- while other stories might be populist but not necessary of the character a newspaper is trying to curate. Clearly, too, some newspaper content isn't consumed similarly online.
But the Times piece indicates the opportunities that exist and the importance of using audience data to help fashion a stronger paper.
A year ago, Matrin Langeveld provided a startling number: Only three per cent of a U.S. newspaper's content consumption was online. It is time to update the numbers, he suggests.
If the American industry believes it is pushing its readers to the online operations, it should think again. As it loses readership in print, it is not gaining online. The proportion of newspaper content read online remains in the low single digits, but the overall attrition is considerable --- considering the decline in print readership in the U.S.
He calculates a rate of about 70 billion print page views and about 3 billion onlien page views a month. Those nearly 74 billion page views are down from about 90 billion a year ago --- a decline of nearly one-fifth. It's a higher proportion of online views --- 4.5 per cent instead of 3 per cent --- but hardly encouraging because of the overall drop.
Langeveld also calculated a decline in time spent, engagement and the market share of news sites among overall Web users.
"Meanwhile at newspapers, much effort and much dialogue continues to focus on getting readers to pay for content and battling aggregators — energy that might better be spent figuring out how not to lose the sizeable remaining audience for newspaper content, not by “protecting print” but by keeping the current print readers in the fold as they, too, gradually migrate to reading news online," he writes.
The Daily Telegraph of London is one of Britain's most respected dailies, but when its telegraph.co.uk Web site suddenly gained 6.3 million unique visitors in two months and overtook The Guardian Unlimited in popularity, even its most ardent believers had to wonder. Media need accurate audience measurement online to attract and capture fledgling digital advertising. The challenge is acute for conventional media looking for a healthy bridge to the digital sphere. At the moment there are varying sources of measurement, some of them real-time and some of them poll-related that deliver delayed information. The two systems offer variances in audience totals, but each has certain attributes that help media explain their reach. In Britain, though, the spurt has set off alarm bells and prompted the joint industry committee for Internet standards to review the matter. Out of this should come a clearer and consistent form of measurement to make sure everyone is comparing apples to apples.
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