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Annotated Bibliography
American Press Institute. (2008). Newspaper Next 2.0: Making the Leap Beyond
"Newspaper Companies." Reston, Va.: Gray, Stephen T.
Benkoil, D. (2010, February 12). Thoora shows how publishers can use real-time
audience data for editorial decisions. Message posted to http://www.poynter.org
Poynter's E-Media Tidbits profiles audience sentiment startup Thoora. The Canadian
company seeks to differentiate itself within this growing field by tracking only news, by
tracking individual articles instead of topics and by making an earnest attempt to measure
quality in addition to popularity. Thoora, which had yet to sign up any clients, sees its
product objectifying a number of subjective editorial decisions including story placement
and how resources are allocated to cover a breaking event. Thoora's algorithms,
supplemented by human editors, measure more than 100 variables for each story as the
story or mentions of it spreads across mainstream sites, the blogosphere and social
networks. Grammar, spelling and sites' authority are among the factors that influence an
article's perceived quality. Thoora's CEO, Mike Lee, suggested his product could help
news organizations spot differences between what the news cycle deems important and
what consumers do.
Curtain, P. A., Dougall, E., Mersey, R. D. (2007). Study compares Yahoo! News story
preferences. Newspaper Research Journal, 28(4), 22-35. Retrieved from
EBSCOhost.
Although somewhat dated, this 2007 report, detailing a study that began in Dec. 2005,
addresses a question at the heart of my research: Can a news Web site "[support] a
flourishing democracy while garnering user numbers and demographics attractive to
advertisers?" To try to answer this, researchers studied what stories users flocked to on
the Yahoo! News portal, then the Web's top news site. Their conclusion? Maybe. The
authors determined that, given the choice, users selected more soft stories, especially
entertainment and odd news, than they would find in their daily newspaper. At the same
time, when it came to serious topics, users displayed a strong preference for hard news.
This, and that the Web allows for a virtually unlimited newshole, the researchers suggest,
leaves open the possibility that news Web sites can serve both publishers' bottom line and
the public good. Yahoo! users' preferences weren't dissimilar from those manifested in
earlier, pre-Web readership studies, the article points out. Editors tended to ignore this
data, however, making "news judgments based not on research but on industry trends or
'truisms.' As the researchers astutely highlight, Internet users, unlike newspaper readers
or broadcast television viewers, "access only content in which they are interested." This,
combined with the speed and specificity of Web analytics tools, are perhaps merely
making users' long-held preferences harder to ignore.
The trade journal's editorial board urges its readers to "think before they post," pointing
to editorial stumbles by a digital journalism leader to back up its point that popular Web
traffic generation strategies erode journalistic quality. In the battle for eyeballs, the
crowded, microtargeted Web exacerbates publishers' worst tendencies, especially pushing
scoops and sensationalism, the editorial states. CJR could have picked on virtually
anyone publishing online, but highlighting that a Web news luminary like The
Bakersfield Californian is vulnerable to missteps makes its argument stronger. The
editorial suggests the paper shouldn't have been surprised when, after asking its court
reporter to, on top of her regular trial coverage, note potential video edit points and
publish — without a second person editing — blog posts as frequently as every 10
minutes, grammatical, spelling and factual errors began creeping in. Less measurable, the
editorial adds, was whether the reporter's divided attention resulted in less nuanced
reporting. "It isn't at all clear to us that it is always better to simply be in the conversation,
for better or worse, than to wait until you have something worth saying," the editorial
board concluded.
Davenport, C. (2010, March 4). Blowback: Do comments scare off source. Message
posted to http://voices.washingtonpost.com/story-lab
Comments were among the first interactive elements to appear on news Web sites and
they're probably not going anywhere soon. They bring more voices into a story, extend
the life of a story, even lead to new stories — not unlike newspaper opinion pages have
for decades. Unlike opinion pages, however, the available space for comments is virtually
infinite, removing a convenient excuse for not publishing vile, combative, off-topic or
just plain uninteresting viewpoints. Different papers deal with this differently. Many do
something similar to the Washington Post, which combines computer, staff and audience
intelligence to scan for libelous, defamatory, obscene or sexually explicit postings.
Otherwise, no matter their level of appropriateness, comments go live, appearing in
reverse chronological order. Many a reader is perturbed by the inane, sometimes vile
posts that have become a fact of life in comment threads this lightly moderated. In most
case though, this is not enough to keep them from reading. What do sources think,
however? A recent Washington Post blog post explained how reader comments can in a
few clicks burn bridges reporters spent weeks building. A reluctant source, a debt
collector, one of the few in his industry to even consider speaking on the record, and his
colleagues were vilified in comments, leading the source to swear off ever speaking to a
reporter again. The reporter for this story blogged about how journalists feel obligated to
protect sources from "any outfall that might result from agreeing to go on the record" and
how online comments make this harder to do. "These days, opening up to a reporter
sometimes means getting beat up on the web site's comment boards," the author wrote.
Will sources become more reluctant to talk to reporter because they fear what the posters
will say about them? The writer and commenters detail moderation systems more
aggressive than the Post's, including The New York Times’, which lets users rank
comments according to their perceived value.
This briefing on outlets' early steps into the mobile news market inspires a number of
questions about how the emerging platform might affect content and how it’s presented.
In her conclusion, author Arielle Emmett says simply: "It may be that traditional
journalistic storytelling won't work on a tiny screen." Strategies employed by mobile
news's earlier adopters suggest that for this reason and others mobile journalism will
indeed be its own animal. Most broadly, news organizations, eager to redeem themselves
for dozing off at the birth of the Web, may overact to perceived audience preferences, a
dangerous prospect given mobile's youth. Mobile audiences are growing too quickly for
news organizations to draw conclusions about their tastes. Case in point, BlackBerry
users issued devices and service plans by their employers comprise a disproportionate
percentage of the current mobile market. What business people want isn't necessarily
what everybody else wants. Another byproduct of mobile's youth is the wide variety of
technological formats — in hardware, in software, in programming languages. The steep
learning curve of accommodating them all has already led some outlets to outsource their
mobile sites to tech firms, whose lack of journalistic training, even with guidance from
their clients, may lead to design and development decisions that compromise news
presentation. Going back to the tiny screen, strong headline writing will be important as
ever. Both headlines that are too long and headlines that are too vague are unlikely to get
clicked. Visuals will be crucial, too. Stories without visuals or without visuals that will
render well on tiny screens are probably going to receive less prominent play. The
Arizona Republic's mobile home page, the author wrote, seeks to engage users with a
single "provocative" picture. A recent example, she said, was a photo of race car driver
Danica Patrick under the headline "Sex, athleticism melds into Danica Inc."
Fitzgerald, M. (2010, February 26). New AP Gateway business unit will develop mobile,
tablet products. Editor & Publisher. Retrieved from http://www.
editorandpublisher.com
Included in the trade magazine's article about AP Gateway, a new business unit within
The Associated Press cooperative to "identify and develop new products for the Web,
mobile devices, tablets and other multimedia platforms,” are details about News Registry,
an AP service moving out of beta that could represent a breakthrough for news
organizations to promote and monetize their content as it organically spreads across the
Web. If it's successful, it could encourage alternative forms of online storytelling
completely independent of an outlet's traditional Web site. According to Editor &
Publisher, News Registry tags news content with usage rights and source attribution.
Publishers can opt-in to different ways they would like there content used. AP Gateway,
meanwhile, is to focus on making products and applications for proprietary devices like
the new Apple iPad and potentially developing made-to-order apps for its members.
These innovations promise to offer newsrooms more ways to meet consumers where they
are instead of politicking customers to come to them.
Gladney, G. A., Shapiro, I., Castaldo, J. (2007). Online editors rate Web news quality
criteria. Newspaper Research Journal, 28(1), 55-69. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Kramer, J. (2009). The new front page: The digital revolution. Nieman Reports, 63(1), 5-
8. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
MinnPost Editor Joel Kramer's dispatch "from the frontline of this digital journalism
revolution" talks extensively about how pressure to maximize page views — the
nonprofit’s advertising currency — shapes editorial decisions. Instant, article-specific
analytics, "makes us want to do more of what gets read, and less of what doesn't,"
Kramer writes. The site acts on these wants, Kramer continues, but only up to a certain
point. MinnPost does not run entertainment, sex, crime or advice articles, he says, "even
though we know that such content would bulk up our page views." This attracts more
serious-minded users, but even they, the editor acknowledges, prefer several shorter
stories over one longer, more in-depth one. Because of this, Kramer says, MinnPost does
fewer investigative articles than he would like, but he offers that just because a story is
short does not mean it is not thoroughly reported. The pursuit of page views likewise
discourages video documentaries, according to Kramer, which, per capita, are excessively
costly for the amount of traffic they produce, as well as social networking and other more
sophisticated forms of interactivity, which he says "have been more difficult for us to
figure out for our site and audience."
MacMillan, D. (2010, February 21). AOL moves to build tech 'newsroom of the future'.
BusinessWeek. Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com
Few news divisions are embracing analytics like American Online's, which,
BusinessWeek reports, better known as a content aggregator than as a content producer,
has quietly amassed a staff of more than 500 full-time reporters and editors. Metrics-
driven news is a huge part of the former dial-up king's turnaround strategy, so much so
that CEO and former Googler Tim Armstrong insulated journalists when the company
axed 1,400 jobs last winter. Seeking to leverage its technological background to deliver
consumers more relevant news, AOL developed custom software that suggests story
subjects based on what's popular within AOL’s own network and elsewhere, including on
social media. To reinforce the approach, the company all but wallpapered the newsroom
with analytics data and is considering profit sharing for reporters whose stories generate a
lot of page views. All this worries journalism purists, who contend the model won't
produce enough hard, investigative pieces.
Maier, S.R. (2010). Newspapers offer more news than do major online sites. Newspaper
Research Journal, 31(1), 6-19.
Maier's content analysis comparing the print front pages of a broad cross-section of U.S.
daily newspapers with five leading online counterparts — MSNBC.com, CNN.com,
Google News, Yahoo! News and AOL — revealed broad agreement over 2007's top 10
stories but differences in the broader categories the mediums focused on. Perhaps not
surprising, given their World Wide Web audience, sites carried more international stories.
The sharpest differences, however, were in story type and thoroughness. More than 80
percent of newspapers' top stories were bylined, straight news pieces compared with just
under 4 percent of Web sites'. Newspapers also produced more in-depth pieces. They
averaged 1,288-word articles compared with online’s 664 words. And papers followed up
on stories with greater regularity. Though online news may be presented differently,
much of it is originally produced by print journalists. Wire copy — which, especially in
the case of Associated Press stories, usually stems from newspaper reporting —
comprised 60 percent of Web sites’ top stories. In addition, most news discussed or
linked to on blogs and social media uses mainstream media as its original source. Modern
news audiences inarguably receive news in a more fragmented and participatory manner
than their predecessors, AP Vice President Jim Kennedy said, but this does not
necessarily mean their cumulative news diet has less breadth or depth. "News gets split
apart into atomic pieces for today's digital consumption as audiences select headlines, 25-
word summaries, clips and material to be shared outside their original packaging,"
Kennedy said. Spreading out the responsibility for informing, properly managed, can help
overstretched news organizations keep their heads above water, but it also reduces
accountability, perhaps increasing the risk audiences won’t get all the information they
need.
Nguyen, A. (2008). Facing "The fabulous monster": The traditional media's fear-driven
innovation culture in the development of online news. Journalism Studies, 9(1),
91-104. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Focusing on American and Australian outlets, Nguyen's 14-page critical review takes
legacy news organizations to task for what he suggests is an embarrassing lack of
innovation on their Web sites. Traditional media isn't innovating, he says, because it
views new technology as a threat, not an opportunity, leading it to focus on either on how
to retard it or on how to shape it to fit old models. "This dilemma happens in many
industries," another scholar, Clayton Christensen, observed, "especially during the early
phases, when the old is still profitable while the new is still losing revenues and offers an
uncertain future." As a result, Nguyen continues, online news presentations have
underutilized the continuous information, interactive and multimedia capabilities of the
Web. Decision makers' dependence on quantifying their audience may partially explain
their hesitance. For newspapers especially, this used to be comically simple. They had to
report only one number — circulation — and they could report it themselves. Online,
advertisers and partners expect many different numbers — not necessarily agreeing on
their meaning or significance — and they want to track numbers themselves, using tools
like Google Analytics. This underscores the influence that data might have on news
decisions. There are signs news companies are becoming more innovative, Nguyen
concludes, pointing to organizations' adoption of pieces of the American Press Institute's
Newspaper Next plan, which envisions newspapers reinventing themselves as portfolio
businesses producing "a suite of products and services" — revolving around "content
manufacturing," as one outlet characterized its rebirth — "in addition to the newspaper to
intersect the population on a variety of planes."
Pérez-Peña, R. (2009, December 8). Google unveils news-by-topic service. The New
York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com
This news article announces the launch of Google's now-completed Living Stories news
topic page experiment with The Washington Post and The New York Times. The
experiment was ostensibly successful as Google has released the source code as an open
source product. Living stories, the article says, is an "enhanced" version of the topic
pages used, without much success, by many news organizations. "Looking for a lot on
one subject," on news sites, via topic pages or otherwise, one media analyst told the
Times, "is awful." The Times' topic pages number in the thousands. Proportionate traffic,
the article notes, hasn't followed. News industry frenemy Google, which, amid
complaints from Rupert Murdoch and others that it's exploiting outlets' journalism by
selling ads next to summaries of news organizations' content, says Living Stories can
drive traffic to organizations' sites. This is in part because a Living Stories page — which
allows users to access several articles at a single url — will appear higher in search
engine results than if the articles were housed on separate pages. The thought is that users
will return to the topic page for updates as the story develops. To accommodate users
regardless of when they pick up a story or how far back they want to track it, Living
Stories pages include a summary, timeline of major events, reverse chronological listing
of linked headlines and summaries and buttons to drill down to more specific subtopics.
During the experiment, which ran December to February and included topics such as
health care reform, The NFL playoffs, and Washington, D.C.'s school chancellor, Google
hosted Living Stories pages ad-free. Going forward, users of the open source code are to
host the pages on their own sites, with advertising if they wish.
Pew Internet & American Life Project. (2010). Understanding the Participatory News
Consumer. Washington, D.C.: Purcell, K., Rainie, L., Mitchell, A., Rosentiel, T.,
Olmstead, K.
Pew's well-circulated study made headlines for revealing that the Web had surpassed
newspapers as Amercians' No. 3 news source and that "the days of loyalty to a particular
news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone." Few
respondents reported having a favorite news site and nine out of every 10 get their news
from multiple platforms, Pew's survey found. As audiences become more fragmented,
pressures to ease editorial norms to draw users might increase as well. Another
illuminating finding was that for all the effort news organizations put into getting users to
come to them, users often access news in a serendipitous manner, being forwarded it,
linked to it, or tweeted about it by a subclass of active users Pew calls "participators."
Successful news organizations, this suggests, will target these diehards, move out of their
push communication comfort zone and leverage the Web's powers of spreadability.
Ceding this much control to non-news professionals clearly raises concerns as to whether
the final presentation of content to the end users is consistent with traditional editorial
values.
This section from the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual state of the industry
survey reveals that online journalists, despite being more optimistic than their print
counterparts about journalism’s future, share legacy journalists' concerns that "the Web is
changing the fundamental values of journalism — mostly for the worse." Loosening of
standards lead their concerns, followed by an increased emphasis on speed. One positive
change about the Web, online journalists said, is that it embraces outside voices. That
advertising will probably still be sites' primary source of revenue three years out, a belief
held by most of the Web news practitioners, at least sustains threats to news values. It
may increase them if other trends hold, like the fragmentation of audiences and
advertisers' appetite for analytics micro-data to prove they're getting their money's worth.
The survey was the first ever of members of the Online News Association, the largest
association representing digital journalists.
Reinardy, S. (2010). Need for speed onto Internet clashes with journalistic values.
Newspaper Research Journal, 31(1), 69-83.
Schonfeld, E. (2010, March 9). Google's chief economist: "Newspapers Have Never
Made Much Money From News". Message posted to http://www.techcrunch.com
Coming from the data king itself, Google, are some instructive data about how
newspapers get their money and how people read them online. Google, vilified by many
in the news industry for selling advertising next to publishers’ content, has an agenda, of
course. It would like the data to say legacy media's woes aren't Google's fault. And the
numbers TechCrunch cites from a presentation by Google's chief economist support that
argument. But, by pulling data from authoritative sources and by tracing trends back to
before Google was even an idea, the search giant makes a strong case. At the heart of this
is that "newspapers have never made much money from news," the Google economist,
Hal Varian, said, instead making money from "special interest sections on topics such as
Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink, and so on." The difference today,
TechCrunch notes, is that niche sites not burdened by general readership obligations are
just a click away. Illustrating the haptic tendencies of online news consumers, Varian
pointed out that users spend about 70 seconds a day on news sites — usually at work,
where their attention is divided — compared with the 25 minutes readers spend with the
print edition. This attention deficit, if you will, is one reason Web ads are so much
cheaper. Additionally, up to 40 percent of papers' Web traffic comes from search engines.
Because search-referred users are less likely than direct visitors to fit into neat geographic
and demographic profiles, landing page advertisements need to be customized based on
users' keywords to maximize value for advertisers.
Shields, M. (2009, November 9). MTV Web news goes shorter, traffic pops up.
Mediaweek, 19(40), 4. Retrieved from Proquest.
The trade magazine's blurb relates an example of how blog-like formats are creeping into
more traditional kinds of reporting. Traffic on MTV News’s Web site surged —
increasing by more than 1 million unique video streams over the course of a year after the
site shortened stories, spiced up headlines and broke apart videos into more easily
digestible snippets. Gaining traction generally, the blog approach, is especially popular
among MTV's younger demographic, as the site's success suggests. Under the new
format, a "fascinating nugget" from a big-name interview that might have previously
gotten buried in an 1,000-word piece runs as an individual story. "Our users live in a
search and social universe," MTV News Vice President Ben Wagner told Mediaweek.
"So this is about more, shorter and faster."
Usher, N. (2009, July 21). Staking out newspaper survival in Analytics . Message posted
to http://www.ojr.org
The second of two parts, this blog post on the Knight Digital Media Center's and USC's
Online Journalism Review looks broadly at Web analytics, the measurements replacing
circulation by which advertisers, and by extension news organizations, will make future
decisions. It covers the oft-cited flaws of commonly used metrics, such as how unique
visitors track computers, not people, over-representing someone who visits a site from
three different computers and under-representing those who visit sites on public
computers; and such as how interactions with Flash content can't be easily tracked. The
metric advertisers and news organizations are moving to, the post says, is engagement, or
how users are interacting and spending time with content. There's no agreed upon way to
measure this. Usually a combination of variables, what exactly engagement is depends on
a site's unique content. What is certain, the author says, is that news organizations will no
longer be able to rely on a single number to attract advertisers, as they did with
circulation, and, for the near-term at least, they're going to have to measure and report
this data themselves.
Wise, K., Bolls, P., Myers, J., Sternadori, M. (2009). When worlds collide online: How
writing style and video intensity affect cognitive processing of online news.
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 53(4), 532-546. Retrieved from
Proquest.
The researchers' experiment examining how Web users process text and video news and
the supporting literature review offer valuable insights for managers to consider when
deciding how to allocate resources and present news. The experiment measured how well
subjects retained information in a video's voiceover track after reading an accompanying
text story written in either narrative or inverted pyramid form. Linear and contextual,
narrative form more closely resembles the way humans naturally perceive and
communicate information about events. Past research suggests stories told in this way are
easier to process, and their content therefore easier to retain. Non-linear and
compartmental, inverted pyramid form, one scholar offered, is "one of the most unstable
architectural forms the mind can conceive." Past research suggests stories told in this way
are more difficult to process, and their content therefore more difficult to retain. This
jibes with research showing that mentally constructing sequential storylines aids
information processing. The researchers consequently hypothesized that users would
have a harder time recalling information presented in a supporting video after reading an
inverted pyramid text article than after reading a narrative text article. The experiment
involving 47 undergraduate students confirmed their hypothesis, revealing that
"recognition of details presented in the video was more accurate when it was attached to
the stories written in narrative style." A journalism mainstay, inverted pyramid stories,
typically quicker to write, are as in style now as ever as journalists face pressure to
produce more news faster in more kinds of ways with fewer resources. Fortunately, then,
this form can support supplemental videos, the authors wrote, as long as the videos are
intended to provide only audiovisual context and not new information essential to the
story. Given the significant amount of resources video requires, in training, equipment
and production, knowing how to manage it efficiently is an important lesson for new
media managers. To maximize the impact of a text-video package, the authors' research
suggests, editors should pair crime or human interest narratives with emotionally
arousing, perhaps graphic video. Unchecked, these suggestions might lead to
sensationalism.
Update on external and internal deliverables / Preliminary plan for class session
In addition, plenty of the information gleaned from my research on its face is ripe
for blog post fodder:
• AP Vice President Jim Kennedy’s quote that "News gets split apart into atomic
pieces for today's digital consumption as audiences select headlines, 25-word
summaries, clips and material to be shared outside their original packaging,”
which he suggested doesn’t necessarily deplete the breadth and depth of a news
consumer’s diet.
AOL developed custom software that suggests story subjects based on what's
popular within AOL’s own network and elsewhere, including on social media. To
reinforce the approach, the company all but wallpapered the newsroom with
analytics data and is considering profit sharing for reporters whose stories
generate a lot of page views.
• That historically, young workers absorbed the norms manifested by their older
colleagues. That's less likely today. Like most industries, journalism was already
due for an exodus of baby boomer workers. That's being exacerbated by
downsizing, which disproportionately pushes out older employees. Confounding
that, many of the veterans still around enjoy less influence than their predecessors
because of their technological illiteracy.
The worksheet will likely present students with a list of traditional news values
such as timeliness, objectivity, strong writing, balance and diversity of voices and ask
them to rate how well different elements like breaking news, reader comments,
interactive features and blog posts uphold these values. If there’s a deviation, they’ll be
invited to explain whether they think it’s good or bad and why.
During the second 10 minutes, I will lead a discussion about the students’
findings, relating their observations back to mine from my research, including points
covered in the following two sources I plan to ask students to read ahead of my class
session:
Reinardy, S. (2010). Need for speed onto Internet clashes with journalistic values.
Newspaper Research Journal, 31(1), 69-83.
MacMillan, D. (2010, February 21). AOL moves to build tech 'newsroom of the
future'. BusinessWeek. Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com