Media stories for Friday:
This week's online/offline sponsored feature on The Atlantic Online from the Church of Scientology reprised questions about the viability of sponsored content in harmony with editorial standards. The Poynter Institute's Jeff Sonderman takes a crack at identifying the sweet spot in a lengthy feature on how the two concepts can coexist. The features need to be honest, serve the reader, be congruent with the editorial style, be independently created and reviewed, and be such that a news organization might very well run it if it weren't sponsored.
The Columbia Journalism Review confirms in an audit what many have suspected: The number of longform stories at major news organizations is in decline. Reporter Dean Starkman acknowledges that length does not equal quality necessarily, but that the decline suggests news organizations are devoting less of their resources to complex stories.
Earlier this week, Alan Mutter wrote that newspaper readers were aging considerably --- that three-quarters of them were over 45. But Tom Rosenstiel, the American Press Institue chief and former news executive who oversaw the study Mutter cited, asserts that the conclusion isn't necessarily accurate. The readership across platforms is considerably more diverse and the data suggest there is a migration to new platforms and not a drift away from legacy media.
This week's online/offline sponsored feature on The Atlantic Online from the Church of Scientology reprised questions about the viability of sponsored content in harmony with editorial standards. The Poynter Institute's Jeff Sonderman takes a crack at identifying the sweet spot in a lengthy feature on how the two concepts can coexist. The features need to be honest, serve the reader, be congruent with the editorial style, be independently created and reviewed, and be such that a news organization might very well run it if it weren't sponsored.
The Columbia Journalism Review confirms in an audit what many have suspected: The number of longform stories at major news organizations is in decline. Reporter Dean Starkman acknowledges that length does not equal quality necessarily, but that the decline suggests news organizations are devoting less of their resources to complex stories.
Earlier this week, Alan Mutter wrote that newspaper readers were aging considerably --- that three-quarters of them were over 45. But Tom Rosenstiel, the American Press Institue chief and former news executive who oversaw the study Mutter cited, asserts that the conclusion isn't necessarily accurate. The readership across platforms is considerably more diverse and the data suggest there is a migration to new platforms and not a drift away from legacy media.
