International Public & Corporate Communications Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News Issue # 1 - 2013
FOREWORD This newsletter is aimed at providing Public Affairs practitioners with a short selection of recently published stories, papers, etc. which may be useful to remain abreast of new trends or to stimulate a debate. External sources are linked and any copyright remains with the authors.
PR versus Marketing: another case of convergence? I am following an interesting discussion on LinkedIn. Several colleagues are debating about whether PR should be considered part of marketing. It is common understanding that Marketing is the overarching umbrella, with PR being a tool, along with advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing and others. PR plays a critical role in framing the marketing environment. While Marketing focuses on increasing sales, PR is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics. Indeed – it was noted - how do we explain "public relations degree" programs being offered at universities all over the world which do not consider "PR" simply a marketing function? PR develops understanding and engagement inside and outside the organization and is not just a single part of an organizational process. PR can be a part of the marketing mix, but only in the same way marketing can now be a part of a PR-dominant approach. That’s why I open this issue with two combined stories that maintain that Marketing tends to look more and more like PR.
In this issue: PR versus Advertising p. 2 Mobile market is booming: Are you missing this secret weapon? p. 5 Essential tips: - What does a # sign actually mean in Social Media? p. 7 - Dealing with the press in a social media crisis p. 9 - Talking too much: How to avoid a common syndrome p.11 - Public Speakers: Are handouts your friend or foe? p.12 - HOW TO: Write articles that go viral on social media p.13 - 10 Ways to stay fully focused when speaking p.16 The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B p.17 The state of US News Media – 2013 p.19
The editor
edited by ComIPI http://www.comipi.it/indexEng.html 1
PR versus Advertising by Frank Strong. http://www.swordandthescript.com/2013/03/no-pr-does-not-lookmore-likeadvertising/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_cam paign=Feed%3A+swordandthescript%2FTVuH+%28Sword+and+the +Script%29 and at http://www.swordandthescript.com/2013/01/prembrace-content-marketin/)
No, PR Does Not Look More Like Advertising
shares information — is a form of validation. Individually, these may not make an enormous difference, but over time the aggregate of voices definitely matter. This is why Yelp reviews rank so well in local search. This is why content marketing is the new branding. It is good old fashioned word of mouth marketing, done online and that answers that important question: I’m thinking about buying X, do you have any recommendations? Advertising today is engineered to look, feel and function more like PR than advertising. To the contrary, marketing looks more like PR Marketing looks more like PR — and that includes advertising.
Photo credit: Flickr
Why does it look like this, according to the author? Because, he says, with social media, blogs and even press releases, PR is going straight to the audience and bypassing the traditional media. According to the post, “It doesn’t matter whether they’re selling information, clothes, or coupons—they are selling it direct to the audience. So are they advertising or PR-ing?” What the author is getting after is third-party validation: by skipping the media and publishing to reach audiences directly, PR is missing the credibility that is earned through the media. But he’s wrong. Sometimes the press release is the story. Indeed, PR is defined by third-party party validation, but the media is not the only source of credibility. Every link, tweet, like, +1, stumble, bookmark — any web connection that
Did you hear about that stunt Oreo did during the Superbowl? Sure, everybody did. Was it a paid placement? Nope. The Oreo social media plug was the brainchild of 360i, a digital marketing firm, that features the fact it made AdAge’s 2013 “Agency A-List” and was also named as a best place to work by AdAge in 2011 and 2012 on its website. Remember the Old Spice campaign? That work of genius blended advertising, PR and social media and drove sales, was created by Wieden + Kennedy, which by its own description is a “creatively driven advertising agency.” Native advertising, the latest new hot thing in advertising is pointedly designed to disguise advertisements as news stories. Advertising today is engineered to look, feel and function more like PR than advertising… because PR works. Talking to people, engaging people, and reaching out works. Fostering trust, forming relationships and building brands moves content and sells things.
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there’s one other key point: media and blogger relations. Joe Pulizzi, who founded the Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as “a marketing process to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating content in order to change or enhance a consumer behavior.”
Image Credit: Flickr Why is this happening? Marketing has to shift to function more like PR because consumers tired of interruption marketing – and technology has given us the means to do that — DVRs, pop-up blockers, email spam filters to name a few. For many, advertising on the web is like swatting flies — we bat down the advertisements to get to the good stuff, while marketers continuously try to force feed us paid promotions.
He simplifies the definition in a subsequent paragraph by stating, “In short, instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent.” Isn’t that also what bloggers and media strive to do? Crossing a Threshold
The paradigm shift of new media, as Mitch Joel said on a SpinSuck Webinar, was that in the traditional world, the period at the end of the last sentence was the end of the story. Today, with comments, that are often equally Promoted posts, click through news stories, and interesting, if not more informative than the those annoying mini-pop ups that follow you as story itself, it’s just the beginning. you scroll a page are among the latest Likewise, in an era of pageview journalism, interruptions. People hate this stuff — they pitching a story doesn’t end when the story don’t hate marketing — they hate the published. Consequently, Shift’s Chris Penn interruption because these are obstacles that suggests social promotion in your own are intentionally placed between us and the channels, after a story is published, should be information we are seeking. part of the initial pitch. On the web, attention is a form of currency — For the traditional media relations professional, and I contend it is better to earn it than try to buy it — which is what PR has always done. This this concept it enough to make them as is why marketing, and indeed advertising, looks uncomfortable as using paid media to earn a lot more like PR. It is a change I embrace, and media, but it’s sage advice. I’d recommend other PR pros do as well. Just as a pitch doesn’t end with a story — it doesn’t begin with Why PR Should Embrace Content Marketing an email either. If there’s one trend that has reached a tipping With fewer members on staff and point in PR — it is content marketing. Content uncontrollable email inboxes, earning the marketing is a perfect blend of SEO and social media for the online marketing mix. But for PR, attention of the media has never been harder. 3
Every day, there are thousands of good ideas competing for a mention and a voice in the marketplace. Content marketing is the key to breaking the threshold of limited attention.
The media uses search for research and content marketing is sound a way to gain rank in search for key ideas.
The applicability in media relations is multifaceted:
The media is on social networks and observe hot links that zip around the web just like anyone else.
Inbound PR
Good content allows you to reach your audience directly.
It fosters a community because people naturally gravitate to good ideas.
It demonstrates that our ideas matter.
It is the last point that counts the most from a PR perspective and it’s the culmination of the previous two. Content marketing is a slow building, but powerful measure of social proof, that the ideas we are advocating are important: it has a following, it stimulates interest and more importantly, discussion. A primary function the business media plays, in which I also classify blogs like TechCrunch and Masahble because in many ways they operate like a traditional media outlet, is identifying and reporting on trends.
I strongly believe that content marketing will grow to account for more and more of the media relations professional’s time. I’d go as far as to say it will replace the traditional processes of media relations, with the exception of hard earned relationships. However, increasingly, those relationships get started with good content and the demonstration that we know, and have proven, what content will resonate with an audience. Content marketing is a means for reporters and bloggers, just like customers, to find us and our ideas, rather than the other way around. It is in many ways, a model for inbound PR; content marketing is the new branding, it may also be the new PR. A glimpse of searches for PR services?
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Are you missing this communications secret weapon? by PR Coach on March 12, 2013 http://www.theprcoach.com/are-you-missing-thiscommunications-secret-weapon/
What do people use their mobile phones for? A phone call? You mean actually use my iPhone to call somebody? Oh, well, um… I guess I could. Where we used to say “call you later.” Now we’re just as likely to text you, Facebook you, tweet you or IM you right now or later. Even if we’re doing something else. I wonder if we’re not missing something really important about communication? With all our shiny new social tools, it’s not surprising that young people are using Facebook less. They’re looking for shorter, faster, more visual ways to connect and communicate.
Mobile market is booming. Calls? Not so much. The impact of mobile social media on our daily business and personal lives is huge. Because of social media, and the growth of mobile, we’ve forgotten one of the most vital communication secret weapons available. The phone call. It’s almost quaint to call it a “telephone” call anymore. At the risk of sounding low-tech to my geeky friends and colleagues, I think we’ve forgotten something very important in our communications toolbox. A personal phone call is powerful. In fact, most of us rarely use our smartphones for calls with another person. We’re too busy checking email, texting, searching, browsing, blogging, tweeting, navigating and buying on our phones.
Think Pinterest, Twitter, instant messaging as well as some of the newest channels, apps or tools you may not have used yet. You’ll soon be adding one or more of them to your smartphone and tablet including Pheed, Vine, Thumb, Medium, Conversations, Chirpify, Flayvr and Chirp. Bonus points if you know what each of these eight new platforms does and how it might benefit you. Here’s a good overview of them by Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes in case you need some help. The BIG Telephone Experiment I thought I’d do a phone call experiment. I made 15 impromptu phone calls to see what happens. I called a mix of colleagues, clients, people whose company or ideas I enjoy and a 5
couple of random calls thrown in just to make things interesting.
The results were thought-provoking. Out of 15 calls, only four reached someone in person. The others? No answer or voice mail Hell! Even better were the delight of those I called. We had great conversations even though I’m in contact “socially.” I know that had I IM’d, messaged or tweeted, I may have received faster responses from the majority. By the time I finished this post, four more calls have been returned. And, I answered them before they went to voice mail! Mobile Phone Stats Going Through the Roof
We’re just not using our phones for phone calls as often anymore. Think apps, photos, IMs, e-books, video games, movies, music and many other practical uses. Consider these mobile phone stats from a recent post by Danyl Bosomworth:
30% of smartphone owners access social networks from mobile devices Device preferences during the day: mobiles in the morning; computers during the workday; tablets at night Mobile browsing: 10% of worldwide traffic in 2012, up 192.5% since 2010 Preferred retail purchases online: 23% by smartphone and tablet (and these are 2011 stats) Of 4 billion mobile phones in the world, more than 1 billion are smartphones By 2014, mobile internet use will overtake desktop internet access
86% of mobile users use their phone while watching TV Americans spend more than 2.7 hours per day socializing on their mobile phone On social media: 1/3 of Facebook’s 600 million members use Facebook mobile; 50% of Twitter’s 165 million users use Twitter mobile; 200 million videos are viewed on YouTube on mobile devices daily.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Mobile matters. But so do personal calls and engagement. PR and Marketing Implications of Mobile I’ve written before about the implications of mobile on PR and marketing. We’re way down the road using our phones for critical parts of our daily business. My point today is simple. Don’t forget the importance of a personal phone call. Got a crisis? Need to respond quickly to correct wrong information? Trying to pitch an important story idea? Need to ensure your CEO has the correct message for an upcoming interview? You got it. Use the phone. Here’s a powerful stat. You’ll be 100% certain You know where things are at with a phone call. Assuming the person you’re calling isn’t using their smartphone for some other purpose than taking your call. Well, I gotta run. My phone’s ringing and it could be important! I promised myself I wouldn’t screen my calls. I’m making an extra effort to make at least five calls a day, every day, instead of resorting to social media when I can call instead. Just so I don’t get rusty. After all, we are communicators!
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What does a # / Hashtag / pound sign actually mean in Social Media? Posted by Nick Lewis on Mar 21, 2013 in Blog The pound sign or hashtag is visually represented by the symbol ‘#’, and by placing the symbol in front of a word (or series of words), it will turn that word into a metadata tag. In simple English, the # symbol turns the word(s) immediately following it into a searchable term that can be used on that website or social network, which is activated by someone clicking on that hashtag.
Once clicked, the viewer will be presented with a series of posts by others (and possibly yourself) that feature the word which has been turned into a hashtag. As you can imagine, this can be a very powerful marketing or lobbying tool, and can be used by the typical user of Social Media to highlight their post to others who may be commentating on the same thing. So, for example, if I wanted to comment on the UK Budget of 2013 on Social Media, I would see what hashtags others are using to highlight their posts on various social networks, and then use it myself. Therefore, my post would be something along the lines of “The Chancellor is looking nervous in the House of Commons #UKBudget2013”. Anyone clicking on #UKBudget2013 in either my post or another’s would see a stream of posts on that social network that have also utilised, thereby creating an open thread or conversation on that platform. Did you notice that the multiple words and numbers within #UKBudget2013 had been concertinaed together? If you don’t do this, only the first word of the phrase will be turned into a hashtag. Also make sure that the first letter of each word in the phrase is capitalised, as there have been some embarrassing
instances of another unintended phrase emerging from the collision of words… The following series of words #ThisIsAHashtag is, in itself, an example of a Hashtag within a Tweet. Hashtags are supported by Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest or Google+, but is culturally most associated with Twitter. Others use hashtags on other Social Media platforms such as Facebook to emphasise a point or to be ironically humorous, but this is technically pointless as the metadata tag function does not work on these other platforms. Some get quite annoyed at their use, deeming them unsightly, and get especially annoyed when they are used on platforms that don’t support the search function. Recently, however, Facebook has expressed an interest in using the hashtag on its own platform so it soon could become even more prevalent. Hashtags have also crossed over into other media, such as Text and e-mail language, again solely for humourous or slang purposes. A popular one is #Fail, which is used to indicate in derogatory fashion a public event, statement or action. TV companies and consumer brands also create and market their own hashtags in the hope that people will use them on Social Media, to create viral awareness of programmes or products, although this can be a double-edged sword used by the viewer or consumer to register their displeasure with what they are being sold. Going back to the example of using the UK Budget of 2013 as a hashtag (#UKBudget2012), in his response to the Budget Statement itself, the Leader of the Opposition Ed Miliband even tried to get a hashtag, #DowngradedChancellor, into common usage: Hashtags are obviously now here to stay, and it is advised that everyone who professionally uses Social Media should learn how to use them, and use them well.
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Dealing With The Press In A Social Media Crisis by Melissa Agnes. http://www.mrmediatraining.com/2013/03/25/dealingwith-the-press-in-a-social-media-crisis-part-1/
I was recently asked the following question by a reader: “I’d be interested in hearing how you would deal with the press/media in a social media crisis. In particular, how do you deal with the press when they start tweeting and Facebooking as well as blogging their story about a brand in crisis.” The truth is, the press have and will always be around in a crisis. The difference that social media brings to the table is that anybody and everybody with a blog or a big following can be considered “the press.” We’re all publishers and content curators today. We all have questions and write about the issues that intrigue and matter to us.
as a spokesperson for that crisis. As for those who have not been titled as such, they should know where and to whom to refer the inquirer(s) for answers to their questions. But even the most trained employees can get confused when it comes to social media. We’re so used to receiving @mentions on Twitter today that a simple question may seem harmless—until it gets published and extra damage control is needed by the brand. This is a common and innocent error in judgment that can cause your brand some major repercussions. Especially when said “interview” begins to go viral. For this reason, it’s very important that each and every member of your team be trained on how to handle the press. As my friend and colleague Jonathan Bernstein says: “Every employee is a public relations representative and crisis manager for your organization, whether you want them to be or not.” That said, it’s very important that every single member of your staff clearly understands the following, before a crisis strikes your brand: 1. What they are and are NOT allowed to say to the press, during a crisis. This goes for traditional and social media.
So, in order to fully answer this question, there are two areas that I would like to address: communicating with the press through your employees (today), and communicating with the press through social media .
2. Under what circumstances they are allowed to respond to inquiries and what types of questions they are permitted to answer—even when the inquiries come from a member of their own social graph or inner circle (friends, family, etc.). 3. Where they should refer incoming inquiries that they are not permitted to respond to. Should they be referred to an official member of the crisis communications team, to a dedicated web page (which you will have provided them a link to), etc.
If you’ve developed a crisis communications plan and trained your staff on the proper ways to execute it, than you know that it’s important to educate each member of your team on how to properly deal with the press when they come knocking. 4. What are the consequences for breaching these terms, both for the corporation and for A well-trained employee will know not to the individual culprit. answer any questions posed by the press regarding a crisis unless they have been titled
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Remember that your employees may be approached by the press in a crisis, and unless you want to have to do some additional damage control, it’s up to you to make sure that every single one of them understands what their particular role is within a crisis, as well as what is expected of them.
The first thing I want to address is time. Make no mistake about it. Today, it’s all about speed with the majority of reporters—and people in general. Unfortunately, often, if you don’t meet their need for speed, they’ll turn to get their answers elsewhere. Again unfortunately, that elsewhere will most likely be a place that you have little to no control over.
can expect to hear directly from YOU the second you know more. Also known as your first response strategy, this will help in buying you time to grasp the situation. Update the press and public on all channels seeking info or talking about the crisis in regular intervals. Even if you have no new news to report, let them know this. Every 30 to 60 minutes is a good time-interval for consistent updates. Monitor the online discussions and respond where necessary. Refer people to your channels for updates and do your best to intercept the rumors or speculations before they escalate or begin to go viral.
However, even with this in mind, it is NOT in your best interest to start shouting out answers to questions, or commenting on events taking place before your crisis team has had the chance to establish the real answers to those questions. Although this needs to be done in the least amount of time possible, releasing important information before it has fully been assessed can come back to bite you.
But what about when the press begins to actually tweet, Facebook and/or blog about your crisis?
Mistakes such as declaring a wrong total number of deaths, or worse, declaring the names of deceased who are not actually deceased, are extreme examples of what mistakes have been made when brands feel rushed into releasing important news or updates to the public or the press in a crisis, before they’re truly ready to do so. Not a fun mistake to be made.
3. Refer them and their audience to the channels on which you are dedicated to releasing timely updates
So, that said, it’s important to be aware of the timeline pressures the press imposes on you in a crisis and to be careful not to succumb to them by sticking your own foot in your mouth. A good way to buy your team (a short amount of) time is by releasing your “first response.”
1. Monitor their reports to make sure they’re accurate 2. Offer them an interview with the spokesperson assigned to the crisis
4. Comment on their blog and Facebook posts, with the right tone, and provide links to more detailed explanations or official statements published by your brand 5. When possible, move the discussion back to a platform that you have control over, i.e. your Facebook page, your blog, etc. 6. Keep the discussion two-way and keep providing real-time updates in consistent intervals so as to keep audiences coming back to YOU.
Here are some guidelines to follow when dealing with the press in a social media crisis:
As soon as you become aware of the crisis, clearly state on your channels that you’re aware of the situation, that you’re looking into it and that everyone 9
How to avoid a common syndrome among PR people By Brad Phillips | Posted: March 18, 2013 http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/14075.aspx#
My firm has offices in New York City and Washington, DC, so I frequently take the train between the two cities. On one such trip, I overheard a PR professional speaking to a colleague. “The reporter from the Philadelphia Daily News completely blew the story,” she said, clearly infuriated. “I talked to him forever, and he totally missed the point!” I immediately wondered whether the problem was that she had said too much—and by doing so, might have obscured her message. Too often, media spokespersons fall victim to the “tell them everything you know” syndrome. They wrongly believe that their primary role in an interview is to provide the reporter with an in-depth education instead of remembering that their main goal is to influence the story and get the quotes they want. Sure, providing reporters with the information they need in order to file a story is an important part of your job as a spokesperson. But the more detail you provide, the more likely a secondary or tertiary point will make its way into the story instead of a primary one. Put another way, a media interview isn’t about downloading your knowledge—it’s about prioritizing your knowledge. As we tell our clients, the more you say, the more you stray.
I’ll be even a bit more provocative here: Your main task as a spokesperson isn’t to give the reporter facts. If you merely spout facts, you’ll be no more valuable than a Wikipedia entry. Your job is to give those facts context and meaning. When speaking to print reporters in person, you’ll probably observe them furiously scribbling notes in a small notepad. In order to capture everything, they usually write in big, barely legible characters and flip the pages at an almost manic pace. By the end of the interview, reporters may have dozens of pages of notes. If you remain focused on your most critical points, you will help reporters prioritize. They may walk away with 12 pages of notes, but your clarity will make it easy for them to immediately identify your three most important themes. That doesn’t guarantee they’ll use them—but it dramatically increases the probability they will. Alternatively, if you’re not focused enough, you will give the reporter 12 pages’ worth of random, unprioritized thoughts from which to choose. If you’re fortunate enough to get the quote you wanted, it would be due more to luck than design. There’s an easy way to know if you’re abandoning your main messages. If you ever say the following phrases during an interview (or anything similar), you’ve probably wandered pretty far off message: • “Oh, by the way…” • “Incidentally…” • “As an aside…” • “That reminds me of something else…”
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I suspect that’s where the woman on the train went wrong. As she said, she “talked to him forever,” almost certainly meaning her answers were not prioritized. She likely gave the reporter 12 pages’ worth of unfocused notes, forcing him to choose what to include. And, as usually happens in that circumstance, she was unhappy with the result. She forgot that her primary job was not to educate but to prioritize. This is an excerpt from the new book “The Media Training Bible: 101 Things You Absolutely, Positively Need to Know Before Your Next Interview” by Brad Phillips.
Public Speakers Want To Know: Are Handouts Your Friend Or Foe? by Dr. Jim Anderson
you give it to them before you speak or after you speak? If you give your handout to your audience before you deliver your speech, they may spend their time reading your handout and not paying attention to you. Additionally, if like most of us you just print out the slides that you will be presenting and give it to your audience as a handout, then they’ll always be two slides ahead of you and still won’t be paying attention to what you are saying right now. If you decide to avoid this situation and distribute your handout after you are all done giving your speech, then do you really think that anyone is ever going to take the time to look at them? For that matter, where did your audience write down the notes that they took during your speech – was the information that they were trying to remember available in your handouts? One way to deal with this problem is to use a combination approach: provide your handouts to your audience as you reach that point in your presentation. Clearly this takes some effort and the rustle of papers being handed out over and over will tend to take away from your speech. However, the benefits can be enormous.
http://www.theaccidentalcommunicator.com/
How much information is there going to be in your next speech? Most of the speeches that we give are full of great information that our audiences would like to remember and followup on — your audience understands the importance of public speaking and that’s why they are there. That’s where the problem shows up: when a speaker provides his or her audience with a handout there’s a good chance that you are going to lose their attention. What’s a speaker to do? One At A Time Although the handout that you’ve created for your audience may be full of great information, you are facing a serious problem when you get ready to hand it out to your audience: should
Since each handout will show up just when you start to talk about what’s on it, your audience will have no problems making their notes on the correct handout. Limiting the handouts that they have to material that you’ve either already talked about or are just getting ready to cover prevents them from jumping ahead of you. Fill In The Blank Another way of making it so that you can use handouts with your next presentation without taking away from what you are saying is to use the fill-in-the-blank technique. This approach is a less disruptive than the one-at-a-time technique. When you use the fill-in-the-blank technique your audience will be handed a complete set of your handouts before you start to speak. 11
However, the handouts that they receive will be incomplete – information will be missing. During your presentation you will show slides and you will discuss issues that contain the information that is missing from your audience’s slides. As you do this, they can write down what you’ve just said and when your speech is over, their handouts will be full of valuable information. This approach allows you to strike a balance between making sure that your audience has the information that they’ll need in order to remember what you said while not allowing your handouts to distract from the speech that you are giving. No solution is perfect, but this technique seems to do a good job. What All Of This Means For You The benefits of public speaking include sharing the information that we have with our audience. Sometimes we have so much information that some form of a handout is called for in order to help our audience to remember everything that we’ve told them. The problem with handouts is that they can distract our audience from paying attention to what we are saying. There are several different ways to deal with this problem. The first is to hand out the different pages in the handout as you reach that point in your speech. Another approach is to remove important information from each slide and force your audience to pay attention in order to fill out the handouts. Handouts are becoming a more and more critical part of every speech that we give as we load our speeches up with additional information. Give some thought to how you want to share your information with your audience while keeping their attention throughout your speech.
HOW-TO: Write Articles That Go Viral On Social Media [10 Tips] By Daniel Zeevi | Feb 21, 2013 Posted in Best of Lists ·
What does it take for something to go viral? Have you ever written an article that got a ton of shares on social media sites? If you haven't, you're going to learn 10 tips for writing content that will increase the likelihood of your posts going viral on social media. If you have, you'll be able to review these ideas and potentially further improve your writing in order to provide yourself with even more exposure, visibility, and popularity around the subject and topics your're trying to introduce. By understanding the key concepts that will be listed below, you'll likely be a force to be reckoned with in social media! 1. Understand Market Trends in Social Media You should always check out what topics are hot on social media. You might be writing an article about a product, service, fiction or nonfiction. Regardless of what it is, it will need to be relevant today, or on the verge of being important tomorrow. Most people do not want to read about something they already know about. Quite frankly, people try to avoid this type of content because they feel it is simply rehashed in order to tell them the same thing already done before to game some search engine traffic. There are excellent tools available like Twitter Trends and Google Trends that will help you understand market buzz, and by using these resources - you can try to write relevant information based on what is popular today, or likely to be tomorrow. Also learn
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when is the best time to publish a blog post based on your target market. 2. Write Longer In-depth Content In a study of the New York Times' most emailed list, data showed that longer content is more likely to get shared. This doesn't mean you need to stuff your content with filler, but obviously the more context provided by you, the more valuable the piece becomes to others. One of the most popular ways to write a long effective article that goes viral on social media is to write a story. In fact, if you can make it a long engaging story, or how-to guide providing educational value, these always turn out to be really well liked. People simply love when a person delivers them a story they are passionate about. People also like to be presented a series of content or chapters if you will. In other words, you should deliver a part of your story once a week, or once every two weeks. This will allow those that are interested to share this interest with their friends and guide them to your blog, forum, or posting network to find out more about what your tale is all about and build up more hype. You can use a tool like Storify to bring in rich content from your articles and other reactions across social media.
into clicking on your article. This is extremely effective if you are writing about social subjects which people simply love to search for and share. 4. Understand Keyword Density Do not try to overcrowd your articles with keywords simply because you want to draw in traffic. If you practice this method, you may find out that you will have the reverse effect. Most search engines and people on social networks will do everything possible to avoid this type of content. Your content must read naturally, with feeling, and give the person reading it a reason to share it with their friends on their respective social media network (sort of taking ownership of your articles views publicly). 5. Make Your Content Interesting and Emotional Always make your content unique to help draw more people. Speak to the audience not yourself. When writing for social media, you never want to write duplicate content that people can find somewhere else. This simply gives you a bad reputation, and people will not return to read anymore of your content. In fact, they will be less likely to share your content which is what's needed to go viral in the first place. Also think about creating and mixing in interesting new content like pictures, infographics, videos or other rich media people love to see on social media. Also one of the best ways of going viral is to tap into people's emotions triggered by high energy responses caused by feelings of awe, anger and anxiety. It's like with Howard Stern where the people
3. Choose an Effective Title and Keywords Based on the information you've discovered in your market trends and tools like Google Keywords, you'll want to choose effective keywords that will help people find the articles you write. These keywords will guide targeted relevant traffic to those articles. By choosing the right type of keywords, you will effectively bring people to your articles that are willing to share them on their social networks. Also having a killer title is important to bait users
that hated him listened to him longer than his fans, just to see what he'll say next.
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6. Allow Your Content to be Easily Skimmed
9. Share That @#$&
According to Nielson, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average web page visit; where 20% is more likely. Use a thumb image at the top of your articles to make the opening passage easier to digest and encouraging your readers to continue reading further.
Get your post out there to as many relevant social networks and communities as possible. Recently we took a look at creating multiple entry points into your content by sharing on the major social networks and importantly niche communities like Social Media Today to help build buzz around your great content. You also need to make sure your articles have optimal sharing buttons and cool images attached making it easy for people to share your work.
7. Don't Stuff Your Content With Keywords Keyword stuffing and keyword density is almost considered the same thing. However, it's not. Keyword density is when the keyword is found too close to another. Keyword stuffing is when you have the same keyword mentioned over and over again in the same article. Most intelligent readers do not want to read articles that contain the same word over and over again. Pay attention to what you're writing so you can build interest which translates into your article going viral. Virality happens in an instant by sparking interest on social media, not from gaming search engines which lead to a slower accumulation of traffic anyways over a longer period of time. 8. Under Promise and Over Deliver on What You're Writing About If you are writing about issues that plague the Third World, write about issues that plague the Third World. Do not begin writing about a particular subject and then do the switch and bait and begin writing about a product or service. Let your audience know what you're going to write about and then give them 10 times the information they planned on receiving. Make your first point as strong as your last. Under promise and over deliver and your articles will go viral on social media. People crave interesting and useful content.
10. Ask For Feedback Lastly, you'll want to test your article to make sure it is worthy content. You can do this by sending your article to several individuals that you trust for a little constructive criticism. This helps to ensure that you aren't writing something that is completely boring for other people to read or with errors. Also ask your audience for feedback. One of the greatest ways to build traction and engagement with your content is to get your audience involved. You now have 10 tips to create articles that go viral on social media. By utilizing these strategies on a consistent basis, you will find that your content will not only go viral, but may even be picked up by some larger news outlets only adding fuel to your fire.
Based on rule #10, I have to end this with a question or I'd be breaking my own set of rules However, I'd be really interested to hear about what type of strategies you might be using to successfully go viral on social media?
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10 Ways to Stay Fully Focused when Speaking
humanity. Relish the sheer reality of their presence and yours, together. You will excite yourself and them. 5. Take your time. Public speaking can make you speak too rapidly because of adrenaline, the “fight or flight” hormone. Take your time to cherish this opportunity, which is only here now and in a moment will be gone forever.
This cheat sheet can be downloaded from public speaking international In today’s media-rich environment, your public speaking skills are more important than ever. Your speeches or presentations may be seen by many more people than in the past. To be at your best for these larger audiences, you need to stay fully focused and present for your listeners. Here are 10 terrific techniques we use at Public Speaking International to help clients achieve maximum presence and influence. Each of them is rooted in the theater. These tips are simple enough to grasp and practice immediately. Together, they constitute a recipe for presentation success! 1. Ground yourself. Feel your feet gripping the floor. Imagine your feet have roots that go deep into the earth. The earth gives you energy and stability. You are steadfast and powerful! 2. Stand or sit with good posture. Visually, it’s important. Overall, it makes a difference in how strongly you and your ideas are accepted. You will feel like you have more authority if you look like you should. 3. Breathe diaphragmatically. That means slowly, deeply, and calmly. “Belly breathe” by taking fuller breaths, and learn how to control your exhalation so you support the sound to the ends of phrases (where the most important words usually reside). Be aware of each delicious nourishing breath.
6. Pay attention with all of your senses. Take in sensually everything that’s going on around you. Hear with your eyes, feel the audience’s reactions as if it were tactile, taste the ideas in your mouth, etc. Respond with all your being! 7. Aim your energy outward. Your audience matters, not you. Lose yourself in your message and how it is being received. If you are a leader who isn’t used to hearing this, I will repeat it: you don’t matter. Send the best of you to the people who do matter. 8. Make eye contact as you tell the story. The story is what the audience is here for. Whatever you’re talking about, it’s a story, a narrative. In that sense you’re always involved in storytelling. Tell people about it. 9. Trust silence. Silence is one of the most powerful tools in your public speaking toolbox. It helps you pace your presentation. It gives audiences time to fully grasp what you’re saying. It also tells audiences, “I’m confident.” 10. Move! If you move while you speak, it will help you think and keep you in the moment. Strong, clean gestures amplify and bring your content to life. The body is an essential tool of human communication, and ignoring it can turn you into a block of wood. If you’re seated, simply use your arms, hands, upper body, and face. But give physical expression to the important things you say. If you don’t, we’ll miss the person behind the ideas.
4. Dive into your audience. Your audience is a pool. Submerge yourself in their energy and
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The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B By Danny Hillis: Transcript of a speech filmed Feb 2013 http://www.ted.com/talks/danny_hillis_the_internet_cou ld_crash_we_need_a_plan_b.html?utm_campaign=&awe sm=on.ted.com_DannyHillis&utm_source=facebook.com &utm_content=awesmpublisher&utm_medium=on.ted.com-static
So, this book that I have in my hand is a directory of everybody who had an email address in 1982. (Laughter) Actually, it's deceptively large. There's actually only about 20 people on each page, because we have the name, address and telephone number of every single person. And, in fact, everybody's listed twice, because it's sorted once by name and once by email address. Obviously a very small community. There were only two other Dannys on the Internet then. I knew them both. We didn't all know each other, but we all kind of trusted each other, and that basic feeling of trust permeated the whole network, and there was a real sense that we could depend on each other to do things. So just to give you an idea of the level of trust in this community, let me tell you what it was like to register a domain name in the early days. Now, it just so happened that I got to register the third domain name on the Internet. So I could have anything I wanted other than bbn.com and symbolics.com. So I picked think.com, but then I thought, you know, there's a lot of really interesting names out there. Maybe I should register a few extras just in case. And then I thought, "Nah, that wouldn't be very nice." (Laughter) That attitude of only taking what you need was really what everybody had on the network in those days, and in fact, it wasn't just the people on the network, but it was actually kind of built into the protocols of the Internet itself. So the basic idea of I.P., or Internet protocol, and the way that the routing algorithm that used it, were fundamentally "from each according to
their ability, to each according to their need." And so, if you had some extra bandwidth, you'd deliver a message for someone. If they had some extra bandwidth, they would deliver a message for you. You'd kind of depend on people to do that, and that was the building block. It was actually interesting that such a communist principle was the basis of a system developed during the Cold War by the Defense Department, but it obviously worked really well, and we all saw what happened with the Internet. It was incredibly successful. In fact, it was so successful that there's no way that these days you could make a book like this. My rough calculation is it would be about 25 miles thick. But, of course, you couldn't do it, because we don't know the names of all the people with Internet or email addresses, and even if we did know their names, I'm pretty sure that they would not want their name, address and telephone number published to everyone. So the fact is that there's a lot of bad guys on the Internet these days, and so we dealt with that by making walled communities, secure sub-networks, VPNs, little things that aren't really the Internet but are made out of the same building blocks, but we're still basically building it out of those same building blocks with those same assumptions of trust. And that means that it's vulnerable to certain kinds of mistakes that can happen, or certain kinds of deliberate attacks, but even the mistakes can be bad. So, for instance, in all of Asia recently, it was impossible to get YouTube for a little while because Pakistan made some mistakes in how it was censoring YouTube in its internal network. They didn't intend to screw up Asia, but they did because of the way that the protocols work. Another example that may have affected many of you in this audience is, you may remember a couple of years ago, all the planes west of the Mississippi were grounded because a single routing card in Salt 16
Lake City had a bug in it. Now, you don't really think that our airplane system depends on the Internet, and in some sense it doesn't. I'll come back to that later. But the fact is that people couldn't take off because something was going wrong on the Internet, and the router card was down. And so, there are many of those things that start to happen. Now, there was an interesting thing that happened last April. All of a sudden, a very large percentage of the traffic on the whole Internet, including a lot of the traffic between U.S. military installations, started getting re-routed through China. So for a few hours, it all passed through China. Now, China Telecom says it was just an honest mistake, and it is actually possible that it was, the way things work, but certainly somebody could make a dishonest mistake of that sort if they wanted to, and it shows you how vulnerable the system is even to mistakes. Imagine how vulnerable the system is to deliberate attacks. So if somebody really wanted to attack the United States or Western civilization these days, they're not going to do it with tanks. That will not succeed. What they'll probably do is something very much like the attack that happened on the Iranian nuclear facility. Nobody has claimed credit for that. There was basically a factory of industrial machines. It didn't think of itself as being on the Internet. It thought of itself as being disconnected from the Internet, but it was possible for somebody to smuggle a USB drive in there, or something like that, and software got in there that causes the centrifuges ,in that case, to actually destroy themselves. Now that same kind of software could destroy an oil refinery or a pharmaceutical factory or a semiconductor plant. And so there's a lot of -- I'm sure you've read a lot in papers, about worries about cyber attacks and defenses against those. But the fact is, people are mostly focused on defending the computers on the Internet, and there's been surprisingly little attention to
defending the Internet itself as a communications medium. And I think we probably do need to pays some more attention to that, because it's actually kind of fragile. So actually, in the early days, back when it was the ARPANET, there were actually times -- there was a particular time it failed completely because one single message processor actually got a bug in it. And the way the Internet works is the routers are basically exchanging information about how they can get messages to places, and this one processor, because of a broken card, decided it could actually get a message to some place in negative time. So, in other words, it claimed it could deliver a message before you sent it. So of course, the fastest way to get a message anywhere was to send it to this guy, who would send it back in time and get it there super early, so every message in the Internet started getting switched through this one node, and of course that clogged everything up. Everything started breaking. The interesting thing was, though, that the sysadmins were able to fix it, but they had to basically turn every single thing on the Internet off. Now, of course you couldn't do that today. I mean, everything off, it's like the service call you get from the cable company, except for the whole world. Now, in fact, they couldn't do it for a lot of reasons today. One of the reasons is a lot of their telephones use IP protocol and use things like Skype and so on that go through the Internet right now, and so in fact we're becoming dependent on it for more and more different things, like when you take off from LAX, you're really not thinking you're using the Internet. When you pump gas, you really don't think you're using the Internet. What's happening increasingly, though, is these systems are beginning to use the Internet. Most of them aren't based on the Internet yet, but they're starting to use the Internet for service functions, for administrative functions, and so if you take something like the cell phone system, which is still relatively independent of the Internet for the most part, Internet pieces are 17
beginning to sneak into it in terms of some of the control and administrative functions, and it's so tempting to use these same building blocks because they work so well, they're cheap, they're repeated, and so on. So all of our systems, more and more, are starting to use the same technology and starting to depend on this technology. And so even a modern rocket ship these days actually uses Internet protocol to talk from one end of the rocket ship to the other. That's crazy. It was never designed to do things like that. So we've built this system where we understand all the parts of it, but we're using it in a very, very different way than we expected to use it, and it's gotten a very, very different scale than it was designed for. And in fact, nobody really exactly understands all the things it's being used for right now. It's turning into one of these big emergent systems like the financial system, where we've designed all the parts but nobody really exactly understands how it operates and all the little details of it and what kinds of emergent behaviors it can have. And so if you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it can do this, or it does do this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather, or something like that. They have an informed opinion, but it's changing so quickly that even the experts don't know exactly what's going on. So if you see one of these maps of the Internet, it's just somebody's guess. Nobody really knows what the Internet is right now because it's different than it was an hour ago. It's constantly changing. It's constantly reconfiguring. And the problem with it is, I think we are setting ourselves up for a kind of disaster like the disaster we had in the financial system, where we take a system that's basically built on trust, was basically built for a smaller-scale system, and we've kind of expanded it way beyond the limits of how it was meant to
operate. And so right now, I think it's literally true that we don't know what the consequences of an effective denial-of-service attack on the Internet would be, and whatever it would be is going to be worse next year, and worse next year, and so on. But so what we need is a plan B.T here is no plan B right now. There's no clear backup system that we've very carefully kept to be independent of the Internet, made out of completely different sets of building blocks. So what we need is something that doesn't necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet, but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department even without the Internet, or the hospitals have to order fuel oil. This doesn't need to be a multibillion-dollar government project. It's actually relatively simple to do, technically, because it can use existing fibers that are in the ground, existing wireless infrastructure. It's basically a matter of deciding to do it. But people won't decide to do it until they recognize the need for it, and that's the problem that we have right now. So there's been plenty of people, plenty of us have been quietly arguing that we should have this independent system for years, but it's very hard to get people focused on plan B when plan A seems to be working so well. So I think that, if people understand how much we're starting to depend on the Internet, and how vulnerable it is, we could get focused on just wanting this other system to exist, and I think if enough people say, "Yeah, I would like to use it, I'd like to have such a system," then it will get built. It's not that hard a problem. It could definitely be done by people in this room. And so I think that this is actually, of all the problems you're going to hear about at the conference ,this is probably one of the very easiest to fix. So I'm happy to get a chance to tell you about it.
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OVERVIEW In 2012, a continued erosion of news reporting resources converged with growing opportunities for those in politics, government agencies, companies and others to take their messages directly to the public.
Signs of the shrinking reporting power are documented throughout this year’s report. Estimates for newspaper newsroom cutbacks in 2012 put the industry down 30% since its peak in 2000 and below 40,000 full-time professional employees for the first time since 1978. In local TV, our special content report reveals, sports, weather and traffic now account on average for 40% of the content produced on the newscasts studied while story lengths shrink. On CNN, the cable channel that has branded itself around deep reporting, produced story packages were cut nearly in half from 2007 to 2012. Across the three cable channels, coverage of live events during the day, which often require a crew and correspondent, fell 30% from 2007 to 2012 while interview segments, which tend to take fewer resources and can be scheduled in advance, were up 31%. Time magazine, the only major print news weekly left standing, cut roughly 5% of its staff in early 2013 as a part of broader company layoffs. And in African-American news media, the Chicago Defender has winnowed its editorial staff to just four while The Afro cut back the number of pages in its papers from 2832 in 2008 to 16-20 in 2012. A growing list of media outlets, such as Forbes magazine, use
technology by a company called Narrative Science to produce content by way of algorithm, no human reporting necessary. And some of the newer nonprofit entrants into the industry, such as the Chicago News Cooperative, have, after launching with much fanfare, shut their doors. This adds up to a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands. And findings from our new public opinion survey released in this report reveal that the public is taking notice. Nearly one-third of the respondents (31%) have deserted a news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to. At the same time, newsmakers and others with information they want to put into the public arena have become more adept at using digital technology and social media to do so on their own, without any filter by the traditional media. They are also seeing more success in getting their message into the traditional media narrative. So far, this trend has emerged most clearly in the political sphere, particularly with the biggest story of 2012—the presidential election. A Pew Research Center analysis revealed that campaign reporters were acting primarily as megaphones, rather than as investigators, of the assertions put forward by the candidates and other political partisans. That meant more direct relaying of assertions made by the campaigns and less reporting by journalists to interpret and contextualize them. This is summarized in our special video report on our Election Research, only about a quarter of statements in the media about the character and records of the presidential candidates originated with journalists in the 2012 race, while twice that many came from political partisans. That is a reversal from a dozen years earlier when half the statements originated with journalists and a third came from partisans. The campaigns also found more ways than ever to connect directly with citizens. There are signs of this trend that carry beyond the political realm, as more and more entities seek, by various means, to fill the void left by 19
overstretched editorial resources. Business leaders in Detroit, MI, for example, have created an organization to serve as a kind of tour guide to journalists with the goal of injecting more favorable portrayals of the city into media coverage. The government of Malaysia was recently discovered to have bankrolled propaganda that appeared in several major U.S. outlets under columnists’ bylines. A number of news organizations, including The Associated Press, recently carried a fake press release about Google that came from a PR distribution site that promises clients it will reach “top media outlets.” And recently, journalist David Cay Johnston in writing about a pitch from one corporate marketer that included a “vacation reward” for running his stories, remarked, “Journalists get lots of pitches like this these days, which is partly a reflection of how the number of journalists has shriveled while the number of publicists has grown.” Indeed, an analysis of Census Bureau data by Robert McChesney and John Nichols found the ratio of public relations workers to
journalists grew from 1.2 to 1 in 1980 to 3.6 to 1 in 2008—and the gap has likely only widened since. In circumventing the media altogether, one company, Contently, connects thousands of journalists, many of them ex-print reporters, with commercials brands to help them produce their own content, including brand-oriented
magazines. In early March, Fortune took that step, launching a program for advertisers called Fortune TOC—Trusted Original Content—in which Fortune writers, for a fee, create original Fortune-branded editorial content for marketers to distribute exclusively on their own platforms. Efforts by political and corporate entities to get their messages into news coverage are nothing new. What is different now—adding up the data and industry developments—is that news organizations are less equipped to question what is coming to them or to uncover the stories themselves, and interest groups are better equipped and have more technological tools than ever. While traditional newsrooms have shrunk, however, there are other new players producing content that could advance citizens’ knowledge about public issues. They are covering subject areas that would have once been covered more regularly and deeply by beat reporters at traditional news outlets— areas such as health, science and education. The Kaiser Family Foundation was an early entrant with Kaiser Health News. Now others, such as Insidescience.org, supported by the American Institute of Physics and others, and the Food and Environment Reporting Network with funding from nonprofit foundations are beginning to emerge. In the last year, more news outlets have begun to carry this content with direct attribution to the source. The Washington Post, for example, regularly carries articles bylined by Kaiser Health News and NBC.com runs Insidescience.org stories with a lead-in identifying the source. For news organizations, distinguishing between high-quality information of public value and agenda-driven news has become an increasingly complicated task, made no easier in an era of economic churn. This is the tenth edition of the State of the News Media produced by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Among the features this year are a special report on changes in television news; a special video report on lessons of the 2012 election; a new public opinion survey on how people get news from friends and family—and what they 20
do next; a special survey on public awareness of the financial struggles facing the industry; a close look at African American news media, and an infographic that visually displays the overview and key trends. The chapters on each sector of the news industry contain two parts, a Summary Essay and a separate section called By the Numbers, where all the statistical information is more easily searchable. Looking across these chapters, we identify six major trends of the year: The effects of a decade of newsroom cutbacks are real – and the public is taking notice. Nearly a third of U.S. adults, 31%, have stopped turning to a news outlet because it no longer provided them with the news they were accustomed to getting. Men have left at somewhat higher rates than women, as have the more highly educated and higher-income earners—many of those, in other words, that past Pew Research data have shown to be among the heavier news consumers. With reporting resources cut to the bone and fewer specialized beats, journalists’ level of expertise in any one area and the ability to go deep into a story are compromised. Indeed, when people who had heard something about the financial struggles were asked which effect they noticed more, stories that were less complete or fewer stories over all, 48% named less complete stories while 31% mostly noticed fewer stories. Overall, awareness of the industry’s financial struggles is limited. Only 39% have heard a lot or some. But those with greater awareness are also more likely to be the ones who have abandoned a news outlet. The news industry continues to lose out on the bulk of new digital advertising. Two new areas of digital advertising that seemed to bring promise even a year ago now appear to be moving outside the reach of news: mobile devices and local digital advertising. Over all, mobile advertising grew 80% in 2012 to $2.6 billion. Of that, however, only one ad segment is available to news: display. While mobile display is growing rapidly, 72% of that market goes to just six companies—including Facebook, which didn’t even create its first mobile ad product until mid-2012. Local digital advertising, a critical ad segment for news as the majority of outlets cater to a local
audience, is also growing—22% in 2012. But improved geo-targeting is allowing many national advertisers to turn to Google, Facebook and other large networks to buy ads that once might have gone to local media. In addition, Google and Facebook are also improving their ability to sell ad space to smaller, truly local, advertisers, again taking business that once went to local media. It is hard to see how news organizations will secure anything like their traditional share. Google is now the ad leader in search, display and mobile. Once again, in key revenue areas, it appears the news industry may have been outflanked by technology giants. The long-dormant sponsorship ad category is seeing sharp growth. This is one area of growing digital ad revenue where news organizations have taken early steps to move in. Promoted tweets on Twitter account for some of the growth, along with the rise of native ads—the digital term for advertorials containing advertiser-produced stories—which often run alongside a site’s own editorial content. Though it remains small in dollars, the category’s growth rate is second only to that of video. Sponsorship ads rose 38.9%, to $1.56 billion; that followed a jump of 56.1% in 2011. Traditional publications such as The Atlantic and Forbes, as well as digital publications BuzzFeed and Gawker, have relied on native ads to quickly build digital ad revenues, and their use is expected to spread. According to tech website PandoDaily, major publishers including Hearst, Time and Condé Nast are investing in formats to run native ads, as are many newspapers. The development, however, runs the risk of confusing readers about the difference between advertising and news content. In January, The Atlantic found itself rapidly taking down from its website a vaguely identified advertorial from the Church of Scientology, explaining afterward: “We now realize that as we explored new forms of digital advertising, we failed to update the policies that must govern the decisions we make along the way. It’s safe to say that we are thinking a lot more about these policies after running this ad than we did beforehand.” The growth of paid digital content experiments may have a significant impact on both news revenue and content. 21
After years of an almost theological debate about whether digital content should be free, the newspaper industry may have reached a tipping point in 2012. Indeed, 450 of the nation’s 1,380 dailies have started or announced plans for some kind of paid content subscription or pay wall plan, in many cases opting for the metered model that allows a certain number of free visits before requiring users to pay. (The trend has also spread beyond newspapers, as highlighted by popular blogger Andrew Sullivan’s recent decision to attach a fee to his site, The Dish.) With digital ad revenue growing at an anemic 3% a year in the newspaper industry, digital subscriptions are seen as an increasingly vital component of any new business model for journalism—though, in most cases, they fall far short of actually replacing the revenue lost in advertising. Thanks in good part to its two-year-old digital subscription program, The New York Times reports that its circulation revenue now exceeds its advertising revenue, a sea change from the traditional revenue split of as much as 80% advertising dollars to 20% circulation dollars. Going forward, many news executives believe that a new business model will emerge in which the mix between advertising and circulation revenue will be close to equal, most likely with a third leg of new revenues that are not tied directly to the news product. The rise of digital paid content could also have a positive impact on the quality of journalism as news organizations strive to produce unique and high-quality content that the public believes is worth paying for. That goal is in keeping with the philosophy of Clark Gilbert, the chief executive of the Deseret News Publishing Company and digital innovator. A staunch advocate of news organizations focusing editorial muscle in key areas where they can bring real value and distinction, Gilbert told the Pew Research Center that in the digital age, news outlets have to be differentiated. “Invest where you can be the best in the world,” he explained. While the first and hardest-hit industry, newspapers, remains in the spotlight, local TV finds itself newly vulnerable. Local TV audiences were down across every key time slot and across all networks in 2012. And the off-peak news hours like 4:30 a.m. that stations
had been adding for years seem to have hit their audience ceiling. While local TV remains a top news source for Americans, the percentage is dropping—and dropping sharply among younger generations. Regular local TV viewership among adults under 30 fell from 42% in 2006 to just 28% in 2012, according to Pew Research survey data. What’s more, the topics people go there for most—weather and breaking news (and to a lesser extent traffic)— are ripe for replacement by any number of Web- and mobile-based outlets. While many stations ramped up their digital news offerings in the past year, they are late to the digital game. Advertising revenues were up for the year, but that was largely due to a windfall of $2.9 billion in political advertising revenue, something that cannot be replicated in nonelection years. Over all, average revenue for news-producing stations declined by more than a third (36%) from 2006 to 2011. Hearing about things in the news from friends and family, whether via social media or actual word of mouth, leads to deeper news consumption. A majority of Americans seek out a full news story after hearing about an event or issue from friends and family, a new Pew Research survey released here finds. For nearly three-quarters of adults (72%), the most common way to get news from friends and family is by having someone talk to them— either in person or over the phone. And among that group, close to two-thirds (63%) somewhat or very often seek out a news story about that event or issue. Social networking is now a part of this process as well: 15% of U.S. adults get most of their news from friends and family this way, and the vast majority of them (77%) follow links to full news stories. Among 18-to29 year-olds, the percentage that primarily relies on social media for this kind of news already reaches nearly one-quarter. And the growing practice of dual-screening major news events adds more opportunity to share news electronically. Friends and family are still just one part of most consumers’ news diets –and a smaller part than going directly to news outlet themselves, as an earlier Pew Research study revealed. Read more about this Study: -
Key findings Infographic 22
We’re living in the golden age of journalism March 19, 2013 By Michael Juliani (daodeqing/Flickr Creative Commons)
These are the glory days of American journalism. Never before have we had access to the variety and depth of information we have now, and never with such immediate availability. So says Matthew Yglesias of Slate in a post debunking any notion that the struggles of print media reflect a larger cancer growing in the heart of the field. His piece comes in the wake of Pew’s latest State of the Media Report, which he says “makes no mention of the Web’s speed, range, and depth, or indeed any mention at all of audience access to information as an important indicator of the health of journalism.” He writes: “[The Pew results are] a blinkered outlook that confuses the interests of producers with those of consumers, confuses inputs with outputs, and neglects the single most important driver of human welfare—productivity. Just as a tiny number of farmers now produce an agricultural bounty that would have amazed our ancestors, today’s readers have access to far more high-quality coverage than they have time to read.” Yglesias takes us through his rich process of reading up on current events, showing how readers can build on breaking news by following links and recommendations towards in-depth features and even books written on the subject. Digital media also allows journalists more tools for crafting stories and presenting complex information at a much quicker pace. “In other words, any individual journalist working today can produce much more than our predecessors could in 1978. And the audience can essentially read all of our output. Not just today’s output either. Yesterdays’s and last week’s and last month’s and last year’s and so forth. To the extent that the industry is suffering, it’s suffering from a crisis of productivity.”
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ComIPI is a no-profit study center aimed at developing and implementing advanced techniques to communicate with the public while respecting ethical principles. ComIPI uses its communications talent, skills and expertise also to help organizations to educate and to inform their target audiences; to develop communication strategies; to train their staff in communication skills; to monitor and analyze results of communication efforts; and, to assess media perceptions on matters of interest. Communications activities are also assessed taking into specific consideration inter-cultural aspects.
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