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Digital publishers may be pouring time and energy into cranking up their video operations, but for a lot of their potential viewers, text is still the way to go. New data from Pew Research finds that, when it comes to the news, younger adults still prefer words over moving images. While 46 percent of Americans overall say they prefer to watch the news over reading it, that number is far lower for Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 — only 38 percent of that group named video as their preferred news consumption format. In contrast, 42 percent said that they actually prefer text (which they prefer to read online, of course). Just 19 percent of young adults named listening as their preference. (“Smelling the news” was not an option.) Those preferences put young people at odds with those between 50 and 64 and those over 65, of which 52 percent and 58 percent, respectively, said they prefer to watch the news. Less than thirty percent of people in both those age groups said the same for text.These generational gaps in news consumption preferences join similar findings from back in July, when Pew reported that 54 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said that they prefer to get their news online — significantly higher than, say, the 38 percent of those ages 30 to 49, or the 15 percent of those ages 50 to 64 who said the same....
The Washington Post is enjoying a “remarkable” revenue picture, the paper said in a leaked memo. The Post’s financial picture has been shrouded in secrecy since Amazon founder Jeff Bezos took it private three years ago. So when figures do slip out, they often don’t tell the whole story. Still, they’re interesting because the Post is a rare legacy media outlet that, with Bezos’ deep pockets and patience, would seem to have the best shot at creating a sustainable online news model. Now an internal memo got out that sheds a little more light on that financial picture. Yesterday’s memo, from Post chief revenue officer Jed Hartman, painted a rosy picture, saying, “We are a growing business.” The Post wouldn’t elaborate on the memo. Hartman wrote that the Post’s annual digital ad revenue is a “nine-figure” business, which stands in contrast to the $60 million that New York magazine estimated in a recent profile. He wrote that total ad revenue is up year over year, led by a 48 percent increase in digital sales through August. Within digital, Hartman wrote that the biggest increase is in native advertising, up 275 percent; followed by programmatic, up 92 percent; and video, up 82 percent....
Minutes after Apple released its record-breaking quarterly earnings this week, the Associated Press published (by way of CNBC, Yahoo, and others) "Apple tops Street 1Q forecasts." It's a story without a byline, or rather, without a human byline — a financial story written and published by an automated system well-versed in the AP Style Guide. The AP implemented the system six months ago and now publishes 3,000 such stories every quarter — and that number is poised to grow.
Quarterly earnings are a necessity for business reporting — and it can be both monotonous and stressful, demanding a combination of accuracy and speed. That's one of the reasons why last summer the AP partnered with Automated Insights to begin automating quarterly earnings reports using their Wordsmith platform.
You wouldn't necessarily know it at first blush. Sure, maybe reading it in the context of this story it's apparent, but otherwise it feels like a pretty standard, if a tad dry, AP news item. The obvious tell doesn't come until the end of an article: "This story was generated by Automated Insights." According to AI's public relations manager James Kotecki, the Wordsmith platform generates millions of articles per week; other partners include Allstate, Comcast, and Yahoo, whose fantasy football reports are automated. Kotecki estimates the company's system can produce 2,000 articles per second if need be....
Journalism + Design, the latest program at the The New School in New York City is teaching journalists how to think like designers, and designers how to think like journalists. With a curriculum co-developed by Ideo, the undergraduate program kicked off this semester teaching students how to harness design and design thinking in news.
This interdisciplinary collaboration between Parsons, the New School’s design college, and the liberal-arts-focused Eugene Lang College, will be the first-ever undergrad journalism program at the New School. “The idea was to combine the rigorous critical thinking of a great liberal arts college with the creative design thinking of a great design school,” Program Director Heather Chaplin tells Co.Design. The experimental new program was funded in part by a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, which funds innovation in journalism.
The program--which the creators refer to as being in beta--launched with six classes on topics like “Visualizing Data,” though for the time being, students can also take applicable classes, like web design, at Parsons or at Eugene Lang. In addition to regular faculty, guest editors and designers participate in classes, and each semester more informal “pop-up classes” will taught by working journalists like John Keefe, a data news editor at WNYC who’s teaching a class--in the style of a cooking show--on how to make maps....
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A picture shows something. A photo tells a story. Anyone can put a camera to their face and press the button. It’s called taking a picture. The ability to transform a picture into something interesting – a photo – is a skill. It’s estimated that about four billion people will have the ability to put a smartphone camera to their face in 2017. One conservative estimate puts the number of images that will be taken at 1.2 trillion. Should all four billion of us average 10 photos a day, that number exceeds 14 trillion. News is driven by imagery and, while the use of video online is ever-increasing, photography will always have its place. Unlike days of old (which aren’t all that long ago), where photos were by and large taken by news photographers, photography is now everyone’s domain. Using the U.S. as a guide, just over 50,000 professional photographers were registered in 2015. The number of smartphones in the US in 2016 is expected to be just over 200 million. Allowing for some variance, the smartphone user to photographer ratio sits at about 4,000:1....
No need to seek out the news. Today, we can just click around on cat videos and find it by accident. A poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans (62%) now get news from social media. That includes 66% of Facebook FB -0.10% users — a big deal because more than two-thirds of Americans are on Facebook. The math works out to about 44% of all Americans getting news from Facebook. It’s a number that could scare users angered by the recent censorship controversy. In early May, a staffer accused Facebook of preventing conservative stories from appearing in the small Trending Topics section that appears to the right of the main News Feed column. Facebook has denied it has a bias, but that hasn’t stopped the conservative backlash. Liberals, too, have complained about the power that Facebook has over the news media. Well, it turns out that that social media does have a lot of influence when it comes to how people get their news. It’s not just Facebook. On Reddit and Twitter TWTR +5.59%, 70% and 59% of users, respectively, say they use their networks to find news....
The growth of social media has changed the way news organisations cover conflicts around the world, but traditional journalistic values are still vital.
These, at least, were the main conclusions from a panel at the Web Summit conference in Dublin this morning, featuring representatives from Time, Vice News and News Corporation-owned social curation service Storyful.
“I’m not sure that the task of journalism has changed that much: we still send journalists to unearth stories and break news. But Twitter is our competition, and we have faced up to that reality,” said Matt McAllester, Europe editor for Time....
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Thinking video news only for millennials? Not so fast!