Only three per cent of newspaper reading occurs online.
Your jaw has dropped or you are in disbelief.
But the finding comes from data on newspaper Web site and print readership, and on the surface it adds up. (I'll await a statistician to challenge the mathematician who worked it out.)
John Duncan concludes at his Inksniffer blog that online metrics for newspaper readership have been greatly exaggerated.
It goes like this: Newspaper print readership is about 87.1 billion pages a month (readers times an average of 24 pages read). Online newspaper readership is about 3.2 billion a month (page views).
And time spent is also significantly tilted to the print product. Interestingly, even though it appears the advertising rate online is lower, the amount per view (given there are several ads on a page) is relatively higher than that of a print product, it seems.
In assessing the study at the Nieman Journalism Lab, Martin Langeveld concludes that neither the online nor the print models are sustainable. A hybrid is needed to make journalism economically viable.
In my assessment, I think the 24 pages would be high, as would the assumption that every article is perused. But, even in cutting in half the pages, and cutting in half the articles, the dominant position easily remains.
Journalism involves dozens of techniques, practices and principles, but digital access has changed the dynamics of how journalism is produced and consumed --- as a result, the processes themselves have altered. The New York Times gets around to examining the hyperlocal journalism successes of such sites as Everyblock and Outside.in, and it largely finds the phenomenon positive and encouraging. This is the truly intriguing period of the development of Twitter, mainly because it's broadening its function from a combination text messaging/microblogging service to, well, whatever someone ingeniously devises. John Morton, a former newspaper reporter now working as a consultant, thinks he has the answer to what ails the newspaper --- namely, it's time to charge for what papers give away online. The search for a new business model to generate high-quality journalism in the digital age continues. A new offering, True/Slant, proposes to test a dynamic of social media, individual expertise, advertising-as-content, and regular journalism in its model. Leonard Witt, scholar at Kenneshaw State University and blogger for PJNet, argues people will pay for high-quality journalism. From Alan Murray, the Wall Street Journal's executive editor, come five ideas he feels offer the best options for charging for online content. In his latest Buzzmachine post, Jeff Jarvis minces nothing on the Associated Press' attempts to fend off use of its material online by others: You're the problem, you homogenized the content, and now that you can't take advantage of the link economy, you're suggesting you're Don Quixote. Paul Carr starts his lengthy Guardian post with a rather cruel party analogy, but once you get past that, you get on to a much more interesting sense of his ideas for newspapers. |
I am the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at Self-Counsel Press, an Adjunct Professor and Executive-in-Residence at the Graduate School of Journalism at University of British Columbia, and the
Executive Director of the Organization of News Ombudsmen. In 2008 I launched themediamanager.com to chronicle media change, then media ethics, standards and freedom. I was recently the mayoralty candidate in Vancouver for the Non-Partisan Association. I am the former CBC Ombudsman of English Services and have held the senior editorial roles at CTV News, The Hamilton Spectator and Southam News. I was the founding Executive Editor of National Post, Managing Editor of The Vancouver Sun, Ottawa Bureau Chief and General News Editor at The Canadian Press, and host on CBC Newsworld, among other media roles. My social networking includes activity on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. I also write for a for-fun-only music site, rockzombies.us Archives
January 2015
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The Canadian analytics firm Sysomos has published new data on nearly 100 million posts it reviewed and it shows
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