The good news & bad news about news consumption on tablets
There is some heartening data and some other data that should strike fear in the hearts of publishing executives about how people consume news on tablet devices, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center’s Project in Excellence in Journalism and the Economist Group.
Let’s get to the rosy stuff first. The survey polled about 1,200 tablet users and 900 people who use them to read the news. It turns out that consuming news — defined as skimming headlines to hunkering down and reading long-form articles – is one of the most popular tablet activities (at 53%) nearly edging out sending emails (at 54%) but definitely whopping social media activity (39%), gaming (17%), reading books (17%) and watching videos (13%).
But the apps aren’t pulling in the most readers. Interestingly, while two-thirds of those surveyed have news apps, about 40% of those polled said they get their news through web browsers compared to only 21% who get their news through apps. For newspapers this piece of information should be a wake up call to keep pricing consistent. (Magazines would fit in this category though most don’t have a decent websites.)
If a publisher is going to charge for an application — and why not? — they should also have some sort of pay strategy in place for the website. Otherwise people are going to circumvent the app and just go straight to the browser for free news. Thus the publication once again misses another potential revenue opportunity.
Now for the bad news. The study found that “revenue potential for news on the tablet may be limited.” Here’s why: Just 14 percent of tablet news users have paid to access the news. Those who have news apps said that being free or low cost was a major factor in their decision to download the app in the first place.
It could simply be that not enough news organization are charging for apps in the first place — once again getting people who are using these new devices in the mindset that news should be free.
Read the full study here.
The state of the news media? Not so hot
The Project for Excellence in Journalism published its sixth annual State of the News Media report on Monday. The report, at 800 pages and 180,000 words, is a monster. The news media that it’s analyzing, however, is turning into something quite a bit smaller.
The group, along with its chief, Tom Rosenstiel, has provided a snapshot of where the news industry is today, though with an industry so large, a snapshot this size is impossible to condense into one little blog, let alone a story for the wire. If you’re looking to wallow, dig in to the specifics, follow this link.
Here, meanwhile, are some of the introductory remarks and top findings of the study, mostly in the study’s own words. Warning: These findings are not suitable for your friends in journalism who are struggling to maintain their sense of self-worth.
- Newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23 percent in the last two years.
- By our calculations, nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is gone, and 2009 may be the worst year yet.
- In local television, news staffs, already too small to adequately cover their communities, are being cut at unprecedented rates; revenues fell by 7 percent in an election yetar — something unheard of — and ratings are now falling or are flat across the schedule. In network news, even the rare programs increasing their ratings are seeing revenues fall.
- The number of Americans who regularly go online for news, by one survey, jumped 19 percent in the last two years; in 2008 alone, traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27 percent. Yet it is now all but settled that advertising revenue — the model that financed journalism for the last century — will be inadequate to do so in this one.
- The hastening audience migration to the Web means the news industry has to reinvent itself sooner than it thought.
- The recession? The numbers are only guesses, but executives estimate that the recession at least doubled the revenue losses in the news industry in 2008, perhaps more in network television.
So what are the new trends emerging in 2009? The PEJ tells us:
- The growing public debate over how to finance the news industry may well be focusing on the wrong remedies while other ideas go largely unexplored. (i.e. Stop worrying about micropayments: Try a cable TV model, or letting people buy things from local merchants through websites instead of just getting annoyed by advertisements for them)
- Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions. (About time!)
- On the Web, news organizations are focusing somewhat less on bringing audiences in and more on pushing content out.
- The concept of partnership, motivated in part by desperation, is becoming a major focus of news investment, and it may offer prospects for the financial future of news.
- Even if cable news does not keep the audience gains of 2008, its rise is accelerating another change — the elevation of minute-by-minute judgment in political journalism.
- In its campaign coverage, the press was more reactive and passive and less of an enterprising investigator of the candidates than it once was.
maybe if the news were less editorialised, the content less salacious, and the variety more than leftist to more leftist, thise newspapers might be worth reading in the first place. my local newspapers are only fit for lasagna-gardening, whilst on-line papers are diverse, thorough, and thought-provoking; iow i prefer ny strip steak to whoppers
Presidential candidates: Love ‘em and Lehman
Media coverage of the U.S. presidential race has not so much cast Democratic candidate Barack Obama in a favorable light as it has portrayed Republican opponent John McCain in a negative one.
That’ s the verbatim conclusion of a new report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that analyzes the way the press has covered the campaign.
The report shows that negative stories about Arizona Sen. McCain has been decidedly unfavorable and has worsened over time, with negative stories about him outnumbering favorable Obama stories by more than three to one.
That and many more interesting details are available in the 35-page report, but what caught our attention, being a business-oriented news service, was a graph charting the tone of press coverage devoted to both candidates and how it changed after the bankruptcy filing of investment bank Lehman Brothers.
When Lehman collapsed, the percentage of negative stories about Obama plunged from 30 percent that week in September to just under 10 percent a week later. It scooted back up to 45 percent by early October and has been down again since then. Negative stories about McCain eased to 50 percent from… well, just a bit over 50 percent. Since then it’s surged to nearly 70 percent.
After Lehman collapsed, the reported noted that McCain tried to seize the initiative on the economic crisis.
According to the report:
While there is no doubt that media bias is a real factor out there, it really is also possible that negative stories rise about candidates who have more negative attributes, run a more negative campaign, and have generally made more mistakes or pursued bad policies.
Sometimes if it looks like a duck….
WSJ Page One, now with 53 percent less Wall Street!
Many Wall Street Journal watchers bemoan new owner Rupert Murdoch’s greater emphasis on political and general news coverage in the paper, but so far their evidence has been anecdotal.
Not anymore! The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) furnished numbers that give an exact percentage on the decrease in business news that gets on the front page of the nation’s most powerful business daily. Here’s an excerpt from the report:
Under the Murdoch regime, the single biggest change in front-page coverage occurred with politics and the presidential campaign. From Dec. 13, 2007 through March 13, 2008, coverage more than tripled, jumping to 18% of the newshole compared with 5% in the four months before the ownership change.
Since the front page has a finite amount of space, that increase in political coverage seems to have come largely at the expense of business news. In the Murdoch era, coverage of corporate America has plunged by more than half-to 14% of the front-page space from 30% in the months before the sale.
How low can he go before the Journal’s high net-worth readership bolts?
–Reporting by Robert MacMillan and Kenneth Li
(Photo: Graphic courtesy of PEJ)
