Mary Nesbitt's posting on the Readership Institute site points to its latest wave of newspaper tracking research. The every-other-year survey examined 100 communities and their local newspaper and online sites.
What it makes clear is that readers aren't fleeing at the same rate --- not nearly --- as are advertisers in the U.S.
The local paper's reach is still there, a large part of the paper is being consumed and at some length, and while there are not good signs that young people are acquiring the newspaper habit, the data involving those aged 45 and older indicate a stability in the audience.
Interestingly, a large number of those surveyed had not gone to their newspaper's Web site. The penetration rate in the market of those sites remains very low, which doesn't mirror developments north of the border, where newspaper Web sites are actually faring better in terms of traffic and reach.
Two of Canada's largest telecom companies, BCE Inc. and Telus Corp., announced yesterday they are proposing to charge cellular customers 15 cents for each incoming text message. Wanted or unwanted.
The implications for consumers are clear, but the implications for journalism are not far behind in being clear, either. If anyone wants to launch an underwritten text service or a for-a-fee text service, life is about to get much harder.
The Canadian Industry Minister, Jim Prentice, has weighed in today, saying the idea was "ill-thought" and stands to penalize consumers who are spammed or sent unsolicited content. He wants a meeting with the telcos to explain the matter, and one has to believe this will be a major regulatory matter quite soon. Canadian consumers have already been noisy about the arrival of the iPhone and the associated fees, and today the telecom carrying the iPhone, Rogers Inc., has altered its proposed data charges to permit a lower-cost plan.
Certain mobile technologies with journalistic applications have not caught on in Canada because the country has among the highest cellular fees for industrialized countries.
This latest text issue is far from over.
Most likely we all come from households that tacked things on a corkboard or magnetically attached them to the fridge. Which is the principle behind some of the initiatives at newspapers: Create clippable, useful guides to life that bear enough importance to be kept in a prominent place in the home or office.
Follow The Media suggests this so-called hyperlocalism is part of the shift in newsrooms away from far-flung coverage. I'd prefer to echo folks like Jeff Jarvis, who say newsrooms should do what they do best and link to the rest.
From former Philadelphia Inquirer editor Rich Heidorn Jr. comes TreeHouse Media, a turn-on-its-head approach to the contemporary angry journalist. The site is striving to give journalists the tools to self-soothe. It's discursive, but not looking for gripes and grievances. Rather, it has a collaborative, let's-get-out-of-this-morass-together tone. Mainly it seems to say the newsroom is morphing into a batch of self-employed service providers, so join the club.
It is a treat to see the revival of Interactive Narratives, which had long ago aggregated the traditional media's bravest work in new media.
The new incarnation is still dazzling but less futuristic. It is mainly a collection of the best and brightest of today's work by conventional media in the digital sphere.
Original showcaser Andrew DeVigal and two others relaunched the site under the auspices and sponsorship of the Online News Association. Already on the site today are recent multimedia packages from the Washington Post on an earthquake in China and Las Vegas Sun on prescription drug consumption. Each offers a different twist on conventional storytelling.
Ad-supported widgets and social media will boom in the coming year.
Search is slowing, but will still experience strong growth.
Traditional online display advertising will grow, but not at the same clip.
Traditional media will grow at a much smaller rate.
Those are the highlights of a new forecast out today from Interpublic's Magna Global unit. Universal McCann, a unit of Interpublic, also released an outlook on traditional media.
The forecast suggests the "hyper-acceleration" of many online media forms will slow in the year ahead ---- still in healthy numbers (31.1 per cent for emerging media), but not quite at the same clip as this and last year.
Traditional media, much larger but much slower to grow, will experience only a four-per-cent increase in 2009, Universal McCann predicts.
Internet display will grow 12 per cent, but it's a fast-fading growth. Search will grow 24 per cent, but that's down from 26 per cent this year and 29.5 per cent last year.
The social media spend will increase more than 30 per cent in 2009. But that, too, is down from the more than 60-per-cent growth in the last year (albeit on a much, much smaller base).
There once was a notion that the arrival of the computer screen would somehow rob the television screen, that the activity of the consumer was a zero-sum game.
Today's release of the first of the so-called "three-screen" reports from Nielsen indicates not merely that the pie is being divided differently, but that the pie is bigger. The market expands as new forms arrive.
New video platforms aren't eroding television's take. If anything, TV is being watched even more (127 hours-plus a month), followed by Internet (26 hours-plus) and cellular phones (three hours-plus).
More than 282 million Americans watched TV, and more than 162 million watched the Internet. What's clear from the report is that online video remains a field with immense potential; as a nascent form of viewing, it's attracting only about two hours and 19 minutes of viewing monthly. Compare that to time-shifted TV (five hours and 15 minutes) and you can see where the growth will come in the time ahead.
Media reports suggest Microsoft's five-month on-again, off-again quest for Yahoo might be on again --- if Yahoo dumps the board. Which makes for a spectacle August 1 at the annual shareholders meeting.
Sites spend significant resources on tagging and trying to understand the algorithms that yield search results so they rank more highly, have more of what we know as Googlejuice, even have more value as companies. Paid search is still coveted as icing on that cake.
But in a geo-targeted world with vastly more information on the user, what value will there be in building search engine optimization for a site? If you're not relevant, will there be any value at all in SEO?
In his latest post at Buzzmachine, Jeff Jarvis rolls this notion around and raises a point: Our searches yield the same results at the moment. But with more data on our patterns and practices bound to be stored --- the definition of our so-called personal relevance --- might that be the more valuable commodity? If so, when will that happen?
We all like getting the unmarked brown envelope, sealed by someone who has had enough with the subterfuge or the disinformation or the misguided media. We can only imagine what it feels like to have that brown envelope contain a secret we kept from the public.
Which is why Wikileaks has been such an adventure online since its inception a year ago. It has been fearless --- almost dangerous --- in taking documents that weren't destined for the public domain and putting them up for all to see.
In the early days of the Internet, there was criticism that roughshod sites might elude accountability by placing servers and domain registration in jurisdictions indifferent or averse to prosecution. Wikileaks has revived that concern, and many groups that seek to take it down have been thwarted in part by its mirrored addresses and vaguely organized operation.
But it hasn't pratfalled over the tripwires. Large news organizations have cited its findings. Large companies, groups and governments have descended at times to shut the site --- all of them unsuccessfully. And somehow Wikileaks has adhered to a discipline of verification.
Wired's profile this month does well in examining its challenges of securing content in a very security-conscious information environment.
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