Personalize MEdia

Ready to go

2011-03-27T06:54:00.000-07:00

The Personalize MEdia Conference -- its fifth year -- is in Boulder, CO, June 20 and 21.
The agenda is simple: Meet the entrepeneurs who personalize books, magazines,newspapers and more.
It's happening. You just have to experience, to believe.

Exciting, or what?

2011-03-07T13:08:00.000-08:00

So now we're getting real collaboration and competition in the possible race toward digital printing of newspapers and magazines and books. Is this what we've been waiting for?

The March 7 short from the magazine News & Tech, that covers this evolving situation better than anyone else.

From the magazine's online weekly report:

Donnelley, KBA team for digital press

RR Donnelley & Sons Co. and Koenig & Bauer AG announced a partnership to develop, manufacture and sell digital inkjet printing systems with piezoelectric printing head technology to the newspaper, commercial printing, packaging printing and securities segments.
Under terms of the deal, RR Donnelley said it will license its Apollo and other digital imaging technologies to KBA.
KBA’s new digital presses will be introduced in May 2012 at Drupa in Dusseldorf, Germany, the companies said.
“In our analysis, it was clear that RR Donnelley was uniquely positioned to partner with us from a digital print technology, experience and scale perspective,” KBA’s CEO Helge Hansen said in a statement. “It’s more than a sales and service agreement for existing technology. We look forward to jointly reinvigorating this industry with new digital imaging platforms.”
RR Donnelley said the deal brings together 1,000 engineers and imaging scientists. The companies said more details will be revealed at a later date.
KBA’s entry into the digital press arena brings to three the number of web offset vendors either offering or planning to market digital presses. TKS unveiled its JetLeader digital press in 2010 and is now marketing the second generation of the machine. The new model, the JetLeader 1500, is equipped with a high-speed multisection folder capable of creating newspapers with up to 72 pages and four sections.
Manroland, meantime, is teaming up with Océ to market a line of digital presses based on Océ’s JetStream and ColorStream platforms. The presses, using software and folders from manroland, are expected to be available later this year.
Heidelberg said it also intends to market a digital press in 2011.

Dilemma in a nutshell

2011-03-07T11:46:00.000-08:00

The nature of the web is a link society. So to play there you have to accept that those publications that are rushing to the web, but not understanding its nature, may be doomed. Here is one of the best analysis of a real, ongoing transition.

What's so wonderful about this explanation is how contradictory results can be during the transition. Huge growth in online from print, due to the nature of brand, pre-digital -- but eventual doom behind a walled garden, due to the nature of brand, post-digital: perhaps.

Visit: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/03/06/the-fts-decline/

Here's the full text by Felix Salmon, March 6:

I had a hard-to-follow Twitter debate yesterday about the FT’s paywall, where a couple of FT types — Alan Beattie and John Gapper — told me that the latest numbers for digital subscribers show that I was wrong when I criticized the FT’s strategy in October 2007. I’m often wrong, so that wouldn’t come as a surprise. But in this case I think I was right.

Because the FT is a subsidiary of a much larger corporation, it can confine itself to releasing only the numbers it wants to release. But a few things are clear at this point.

Firstly, the success of the website — if indeed it is a success — has not helped stop the bleeding in terms of print subscribers. Daily print circulation was 485,000 at the end of 2000, and dropped at a rate of about 5,000 a year to 440,000 at the end of 2008. The rate of decline has accelerated sharply since then: print circulation is now 390,000, which means the paper has been losing around 25,000 print subscribers per year over the past couple of years.

The good news is that digital subscribers have been arriving more quickly than print subscribers have been leaving. In the past year alone, the digital subscriber base has risen from 121,000 to 207,000 — an increase of 86,000 people, all of whom are paying print-like subscription rates.

Exactly what those rates are is not easy to determine. FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw told me a couple of years ago that he loved the kind of airline pricing models where someone who paid $45 for their ticket can be sitting next to someone who paid $945 for the same service. So there’s a lot of opacity built in to the system. But I can tell you a few different rates.

Here in New York, if I lock myself in to an annual subscription, the FT will give me website access (including mobile and iPad) for $259 per year, or “premium” website access, including the Lex column and a couple of other bells and whistles, for $389 per year. If I want the physical newspaper delivered as well, that costs $440 per year. If I sign up monthly rather than annually, the minimum cost for the website is $312 per year, with premium access at $468 and the combined print-and-online subscription at $528. The newspaper-only subscription, with no website access, is annual only, at $348.

All of these numbers are significantly lower than they are in the UK, where a basic web subscription is $380 pear year, the premium subscription is $549, and the combined paper-and-online subscription is $845.

There are a few messages being sent here. Firstly, the FT is taking full advantage of its quasi-monopolistic status among UK consumers who are not particularly price-sensitive to charge very high subscription rates there. But it’s keeping its US rates lower because it’s still having difficulty breaking into this market. Secondly, the FT charges a significant premium if you subscribe monthly rather than annually — which says to me that monthly subscribers have tendencies to disloyalty and letting their subscriptions lapse. And finally, the FT is happy to sell a physical newspaper subscription for less than the price of accessing the same content (including the Lex column) online — indeed, the newspaper-only subscription cost is probably less than the cost to the FT of printing and distributing the physical newspaper six days a week.

While the FT loves to tout its combined subscriber base, then, it’s clearly following two different models at once. The newspaper business is the same as it ever was: lose money on printing and distributing the physical product, but make it all up with ad revenues. The online business, by contrast, is all about the subscription revenues, with ad sales being much less important. Gapper goes as far as to say that 207,000 digital subscribers could actually be worth more to the FT than 20 million unique visitors.

Conceptually, what the FT is doing here is holding onto the ad-supported model for as long as it can, while moving aggressively to a newsletter model for the online product. And the problem here is that while newsletters can be profitable, they’re never important*, and they never go viral: they cut themselves off from substantially the enormous world of opportunity afforded by being online. Successful websites get that way because people share them, with their friends and colleagues and Twitter followers — every reader is also a potential content distributor. Under the FT model, by contrast, the FT itself is at pains to be the only content distributor, and tells readers redistributing its content in incredibly natural ways that they are copyright infringers and in violation of the site’s terms and conditions.

Gapper reckons that the newsletter model means higher cashflow, higher CPMs, lower volatility, and higher p/e ratings. I’m pretty sure he’s wrong on the p/e front: there’s no way that the FT is worth anything like the multiples we’re seeing in the online-content space, whether you look at price-to-earnings, price-to-revenues, or any other ratio.

As for the other metrics, cashflow and low volatility are nice things to have, but massive growth is nicer. And for a news organization which aspires to grow from its UK base to become a genuinely global brand, it’s crucial. The FT’s paywall is structured very aggressively — you have to register after reading just one article per month, and then unless you subscribe you’re cut off after 10 articles per month. That’s good at maximizing short-term cashflow, but it clearly hurts growth: the FT doesn’t release numbers for unique visitors, but both Quantcast and Compete show FT uniques falling significantly over the past year, and actually being overtaken by Business Insider. What I said back in 2007 was that the FT was removing itself from the conversation; that’s exactly what seems to have happened.

I don’t doubt for a minute that the FT’s CPMs are very high. But they’re getting there the wrong way, by minimizing the Ms (the number of pageviews) rather than maximizing the Cs (total ad revenues). Eventually, the FT is going to be such a niche product, compared to other business and finance publications, that global B2B advertisers simply won’t see the point in buying it any more. What it should be doing is becoming so big and important outside the UK that major advertisers feel the need to buy it even if they have no desire at all to reach the UK audience. But it’s nowhere near that point yet, and it doesn’t seem to be getting there, either.

And if the FT isn’t serving advertisers well, it’s not doing so well for readers, either. Paywalls should always be completely invisible to subscribers, but the FT’s fails miserably on that front: subscribers keep on running into that wall on a regular basis, especially when they try to visit ft.com from their mobile device, or when they try to follow a link sent to them by a non-subscriber.

Meanwhile, it’s not just the cost of a subscription which is opaque — the broader FT franchise seems set up to make no readers at all happy with what they’re getting.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’re very interested in China. There’s China content in the FT, of course, which will cost you a few hundred dollars a year to read. If you want wonkier and more in-depth material, a great place to look is FT Alphaville, which regularly takes FT content and then adds very sophisticated analysis and data. Confusingly, Alphaville content is free. And then there’s the Long Room, an elite forum for financial professionals to discuss such matters: that’s free, too. Over to the side, there’s also FT Tilt. That has its own proprietary China content for which it charges thousands of dollars, alongside contributed content which is free with registration. And finally there’s China Confidential, a newsletter which comes out every couple of weeks or so, costs even more than FT Tilt, and which has recently launched a spin-off called China Confidential Funds which doubtless costs more still.

The whole structure feels a bit like Scientology: every time you reach one level, you realize there’s another, more expensive level awaiting you. The China story is of course absolutely central to the FT’s mission of explaining global business and economics — but instead of corralling its resources and creating the best coverage for its readers that it can possibly put together, it balkanizes those resources and has one group of people writing for the paper, another for Alphavile, a third for Tilt, a fourth for China Confidential, and a fifth for China Confidential Funds. From a sheer journalistic-quality perspective, this can’t possibly make sense. And it’s not like there’s a strong correlation between the price of the products and the quality of the journalists, either. It’s really just a mess, a desperate scrabble for revenues from a company which ought to be building the best unified global business coverage it can.

Overall, the FT strategy is exactly the strategy I would choose if I was faced with an industry in terminal decline, and wanted to extract as much money as possible from it before it died. And that’s sad, because the FT can and should be a major global player in perpetuity. Pearson should sell it now, to someone who can invest in it and make it relevant to a fast-growing business audience worldwide. If Pearson fails to do so, the annual decline in the value of the FT franchise will always exceed the dividend that Pearson manages to extract from it.

*Update: I’m getting pushback on this one bit in particular, where I said that newsletters are never important. They can be important within small, specialized groups or industries. But they’re never important to a general audience, or even a general business audience: they only become important when they start targeting very narrow groups like private-equity general partners or hedge fund prime brokers.

Update 2: Gapper responds. He talks about earnings growth at the FT Group as though it proves something — but it doesn’t, because that says nothing about earnings growth at the FT. (One would expect FT Group earnings to be increasing, if only because Pearson keeps on adding things like Medley Global Advisors to the group.)

More to the point, Gapper seems to have convinced himself that the FT’s high CPMs are entirely a function of its paywall, rather than a function of who its readers are. He compares revenues at the FT to those at the Guardian and at Gawker Media (!), and on that basis decides that the FT could never make an ad-supported model work. But of course the FT could still charge very high CPMs even if it was free, they would never come down to general-interest levels.

Gapper seems to think that I said that ad revenues from 20 million unique visitors would exceed subscription revenues from 207,000 subscribers. I never said that. But, pace Gapper, let’s do the math. He seems to think that Gawker Media is a good example of a site with 20 million uniques, so let’s use that as our example: it gets about 300m pageviews a month — 3.6 billion pageviews per year — from its 20m US visitors.

Gapper’s estimate for FT digital subscription revenues is $52 million per year. In order to get $52 million from 3.6 billion pageviews, you’d need revenue per 1,000 pages of about $14. Let’s say you have two ad units per page, and you can sell two-thirds of your inventory. Then in order for your ad revenues to exceed $52 million, you’d need CPMs of about $10 on average. I’m sure the FT can charge much more than that.

Meanwhile, the value of the FT itself is surely much greater with 20 million global readers than it is with 3 million — after all, the media business is all about building as large an audience as possible. Yes, it’s nice to have a diversified revenue stream, which is why Pearson owns lots of subscription-based products and is buying more. But that doesn’t mean the FT itself has to move aggressively away from advertising and towards subscriptions.

Libraries unite

2011-02-24T09:22:00.001-08:00

If ever there were a push for ebooks from a source that can truly make a difference, especially in demanding and receiving a standardized format for epubs, it would be the libraries of America.
So this announcement is very interesting.
(You can go to this site to see the list of libraries that have joined the movement:
http://www.archive.org/post/349420/in-library-ebook-lending-program-launched.)

Internet Archive and Library Partners Develop Joint Collection of 80,000+ eBooks
To Extend Traditional In-Library Lending Model

San Francisco, CA – Today, a group of libraries led by the Internet Archive announced a new, cooperative 80,000+ eBook lending collection of mostly 20th century books on OpenLibrary.org, a site where it’s already possible to read over 1 million eBooks without restriction. During a library visit, patrons with an OpenLibrary.org account can borrow any of these lendable eBooks using laptops, reading devices or library computers. This new twist on the traditional lending model could increase eBook use and revenue for publishers.

Borrow in partner library"As readers go digital, so are our libraries," said Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. "It’s fabulous to work with such a great group of 150 forward-thinking libraries." (See the list of participating libraries below.)

This new digital lending system will enable patrons of participating libraries to read books in a web browser. “In Silicon Valley, iPads and other reading devices are hugely popular. Our partnership with the Internet Archive and OpenLibrary.org is crucial to achieving our mission – to meet the reading needs of our library visitors and our community," said Linda Crowe, Executive Director of the Peninsula Library System.

A recent survey of libraries across North America was conducted by Unisphere Research and Information Today, Inc. (ITI). It reported that of the 1,201 libraries canvassed, 73% are seeing increased demand for digital resources with 67% reporting increased demand for wireless access and 62% seeing a surge in demand for web access.

American libraries spend $3-4 billion each year on publishers’ products. "I'm not suggesting we spend less, I am suggesting we spend smarter by buying and lending more eBooks," asserts Kahle. He is also encouraging libraries worldwide to join in the expansion of this pool of purchased and digitized eBooks so their patrons can borrow from this larger collection.

How it Works

Borrow in partner libraryAny OpenLibrary.org account holder can borrow up to 5 eBooks at a time, for up to 2 weeks. Books can only be borrowed by one person at a time. People can choose to borrow either an in-browser version (viewed using the Internet Archive’s BookReader web application), or a PDF or ePub version, managed by the free Adobe Digital Editions software. This new technology follows the lead of the Google eBookstore, which sells books from many publishers to be read using Google's books-in-browsers technology. Readers can use laptops, library computers and tablet devices including the iPad.

What Participating Libraries Are Saying
The reasons for joining the initiative vary from library to library. Judy Russell, Dean of University Libraries at the University of Florida, said, "We have hundreds of books that are too brittle to circulate. This digitize-and-lend system allows us to provide access to these older books without endangering the physical copy."

"Libraries are our allies in creating the best range of discovery mechanisms for writers and readers...”
Richard Nash
Founder of Cursor, PublisherDigital lending also offers wider access to one-of-a-kind or rare books on specific topics such as family histories – popular with genealogists. This pooled collection will enable libraries like the Boston Public Library and the Allen County Public Library in Indiana to share their materials with genealogists around the state, the country and the world.

"Genealogists are some of our most enthusiastic users, and the Boston Public Library holds some genealogy books that exist nowhere else,” said Amy E. Ryan, President of the Boston Public Library. "This lending system allows our users to search for names in these books for the first time, and allows us to efficiently lend some of these books to visitors at distant libraries."

"Reciprocal sharing of genealogy resources is crucial to family history research. The Allen County Public Library owns the largest public genealogy collection in the country, and we want to make our resources available to as many people as possible. Our partnership in this initiative offers us a chance to reach a wider audience,” said Jeffrey Krull, director of the Allen County Public Library.

Publishers selling their eBooks to participating libraries include Cursor and OR Books. Books purchased will be lent to readers as well as being digitally preserved for the long-term. This continues the traditional relationship and services offered by publishers and libraries.

Borrow in partner library"Libraries are our allies in creating the best range of discovery mechanisms for writers and readers—enabling open and browser-based lending through the Internet Archive means more books for more readers, and we're thrilled to do our part in achieving that,” said Richard Nash, founder of Cursor.

John Oakes, founder of OR Books said, "We're always on the lookout for innovative solutions to solve the conundrum of contemporary publishing, and we are excited to learn about the Internet Archive's latest project. For us, it's a way to extend our reach to the crucial library market. We look forward to the results. "

OCE checks back in

2011-01-28T11:38:00.001-08:00

The acquisition by Canon slowed OCE's printer developments a bit, but now they are back with the announcement of the new Colorstream.

http://www.printweek.com/News/1051378/OcE-heralds-new-era-production-colour-ColorStream/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH

Océ heralds 'new era' in production colour with ColorStream
Tim Sheahan, printweek.com, 26 January 2011

Dutch digital equipment manufacturer Océ has claimed that the introduction of its latest machine, the ColorStream 3500 heralds a "new era in production colour".

The company gave a European debut to the high-volume inkjet machine at its international headquarters in Poing, Germany yesterday (25 January).

The full-colour web press can print on a web width of 540mm and Océ is pitching the machine at customers operating in the transactional, transpromo, direct mail and book-printing sectors.

Speaking at the event, Roland Stasiczek, international director of marketing continuous-feed printers at Océ, said the addition of the ColorStream 3500 cemented the company's status as the "biggest continuous-feed provider in the industry.

"The ColorStream 3500 takes the digital experience of Océ to provide a highly-flexible machine that is also low risk as it is based on proven technology," he added.

The manufacturer's new press can print at speeds up to 75m per minute, the equivalent to 505 A4ppm on a single unit configuration or 1,010 A4ppm on a twin model. The 3500 prints at a resolution of 600dpi.

Although the new machine is available in a four-colour configuration with the option to add a fifth or a sixth colour when required, customers can also opt for an entry-level mono model with the option to add colour further down the line.

Sebastian Landesberger, executive vice president of Océ Production Printing, said: "By consequently expanding our continuous feed colour family, we can cover the widest range of market requirements.

"The Océ ColorStream 3500 meets both full-color and monochrome demands, along with the need for efficient simplex and duplex printing."

Socially curated

2011-01-20T07:15:00.001-08:00

Using Twitter or Facebook or any number of social media sites as the basis, there are now appearing socially curated magazines and newspapers.

There is http:www.paper.li for the newspaper online format. And now this from TechCrunch:

(http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/sobees-launches-ipad-app-newsmix-a-socially-curated-digital-magazine/)

Sobees has made a business of creating innovative social media clients, particularly focusing on bringing Twitter, Facebook and social search to the a variety of platforms. Today, the developer is getting into the news business with the launch of NewsMix, an iPad app which presents news and content shared by your social circle in a magazine format on the device.

The app, which costs $2.99 in the App Store, allows you to create and mix a digital magazine composed of content shared in your Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds (Google
Reader and feed search). The app will categorize content in a magazine or show news in a separate timeline format for Facebook and Twitter. And you can view photos and videos in separate sections.

In terms of social capabilities, the app allows you to comment and like Facebook posts directly from the magazine, and you can share articles on both Twitter and Facebook simultaneously. The App also allows you to email content and send articles to Instapaper.

Sobees founder Francois Bochatay says that the app contains the startup’s proprietary curation technology, which will will automatically prioritize and curate Twitter and Facebook posts based on your interactions with the app.

Of course, NewsMix sounds very similar to the enormously popular iPad app Flipboard, which also curates articles and images from your social streams like Twitter and Facebook, and presents them in a magazine-like format. Pulse also plays in the space as well.

Free to change

2011-01-07T13:39:00.001-08:00

Is it true that if a newspaper company is not laden with debt it has a fighting chance today? That's the question that seems to be answered by Wall Street's positive attitude toward newspapers that have little debt and the negative attitude toward newspapers with lots of debt.

http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2011/01/wall-st-spanked-debt-laden-publishers.html

So goes the analysis of Alan Mutter, the so-called newsosaur who makes a big deal out of remembering/experiencing setting type one letter at a time. I, too, remember, linotype machines, and linotypists (what a breed) and the smell of molten lead and the joy of reading stones upside down and backwards.

All that aside, here is Alan's blog:

Wall Street repudiated the shares of debt-heavy newspaper companies in 2010 at the same time the stocks of generally less leveraged publishers advanced.

In a decidedly mixed year for the 11 remaining publicly traded newspaper companies, share prices last year soared as high as 51% for A.H. Belo while they plunged by an almost identical amount – 50.5% – at GateHouse Media.

As illustrated in the table below, the shares of six publishers rose in 2010 at the same time their peers went south. If you average out the winners and losers, the shares of the industry rose about 1% during the 12 months that the Standard and Poor’s index of 500 stocks gained 12.8%.

But the average performance for the industry is meaningless in light of the wide-ranging performance of the individual stocks.

The principal reason for the sharply disparate performance among publishers is the amount of debt loaded on their companies. Belo has zero long-term debt on its books, while GateHouse is staggering under $1.2 billion in debt, an amount equivalent to nearly 13 times its EBITDA in the last 12 months.

EBITDA – which stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization – is a common way of measuring the profitability of companies. Financiers divide a company’s debt by its EBITDA to gauge its ability to repay the money it borrows.

Given the uncertain future for newspapers after 4½ straight years of declines that brought total industry advertising sales in 2010 to approximately half of the record $49 billion achieved in 2005, some authorities believe newspapers should borrow no more than one time their EBITDA.

While this goal was beyond the reach of the publishers who borrowed aggressively to expand their empires prior to the financial meltdown, the newspaper companies with the lowest debt generally fared the best on Wall Street in 2010.

As noted in the table below, modestly indebted companies like Scripps (almost no debt), the Washington Post Co. (debt equal to 0.5 times of its EBITDA), Journal Communications (debt of 1.5x its EBITDA) and Gannett (2.0x debt) enjoyed neutral or favorable treatment on Wall Street in the last 12 months. On the other hand, the shares of GateHouse (12.9x debt), Lee Enterprises (6.4x debt) and Media General (5.8x) were sold off. (CORRECTION: Owing to a data transcription error on my part, the ratio of Lee was overstated in the original post; the number publisher here now is correct.)

There are some exceptions to the trend:

:: Shares of the New York Times Co. dropped 20.7% even though it trimmed its debt to 1.8x times EBITDA from a ratio of 3x a year ago. One drag on the shares of the Gray Lady may be the two-tiered ownership structure that gives family members superior voting authority over public investors.

:: McClatchy’s stock rose 31.9% even though its debt is 4.4x its trailing operating earnings. Here is the likely reason for the bounce: While the company looked at the end of 2009 like it might not be able to avoid joining several other over-leveraged publishers in bankruptcy court, MNI appears to have dodged the bullet by slashing expenses, boosting profits and reorganizing its debt.

:: News Corp.’s shares advanced by 3.3% despite an 8.8x debt load. The likely reason for this is that the company’s worldwide broadcast, cable, satellite, movie and other non-newspaper franchises are performing sufficiently well that investors are willing to tolerate a higher debt load.

What's behind the seemingly schizophrenic approach to investing newspapers?

The divergent performance of newspaper stocks in 2010 suggests that at least some investors are willing to put their money on companies with low debt burdens in the belief that the publishers will have the ingenuity, revenue and cash flow to morph their companies into successful players in the digital age.

Heavily indebted publishers, on the other hand, are forced to limit investment in their companies, because they have to earmark a disproportionate amount of their profits to interest payments. To maximize profits to pay their hefty interest bills, many publishers have cut staff, squeezed newshole, curtailed circulation and taken other, similarly counter-intuitve actions to come up with the money necessary to stay one step ahead of their creditors.

The selloff in highly leveraged newspaper companies means that Wall Street is rejecting publishers who are not able to invest in the long-term growth of their businesses.

At the simplest level, investors want to put their money into companies that have the best chances of growing in the future. But many investors probably also fear that the over-extended publishers eventually could go into bankruptcy to offload their crushing debt, a step that would render their investments worthless.

Choosing to be safe than sorry, investors last year steered clear of over-levergaed newspaper companies.

Mad as hell

2011-01-02T21:44:00.000-08:00

Howard Beale in the movie Network (1976) first and definitively expressed how you come to feel when your media cannot get the story right; when the media doesn't talk to you; when the media doesn't see the reality you live every day. When the media is not being the MEdia.

(Watch it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_qgVn-Op7Q&feature=player_embe)

Howard Beale: I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep guns under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street.

Nobody anywhere seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. We sit watching our TVs while some newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. Everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house. Slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller.

All we say is, “Please. At least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, my TV, my steel-belted radials. I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.”

I’m not gonna leave you alone. “I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest or riot. Don’t write to your congressman. I don’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about depression, inflation, the Russians, the crime in the streets.”

All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say “I’m a human being, goddamn it. My life has value.”

So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up now and go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore.“ I want you to get up right now, Go to your windows, open them, stick your head out and yell: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore.”

Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the oil crisis. Go to your windows, open them, stick your head out and yell: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more."

Big Blue weighs in

2011-01-02T14:00:00.000-08:00

When IBM says its going to be big, you can bet on the fact that they already have developed product and are about to flex muscle. So to some degree the trend is inevitable.

To see the whole story: http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=76602

The new year brings visions of the future, with technology predictions from IBM, Intel and others. IBM's vision is based on what it's working on and include harnessing heat from data centers, personalized systems, and long-lasting batteries. Intel's vision also focuses on its work, including hybrid tablets/netbooks and device sensors.

It's crystal-ball time. Along with vows of making more money and losing more weight, the new year prompts visions of what the technology future will hold.
IBM has issued its big-five predictions, based on what it's working on and a five-year time span, visualized with an animation on YouTube. For data-center managers, the company envisions all that heat from computers being harnessed to heat water or cool buildings. Big Blue also sees commuters in this bright future enjoying the evolution of personalization in GPS-equipped smartphones and car-based systems, with real-time traffic data, displays of alternate routes, and details on parking availability making traffic jams a thing of the past.

'Citizen Scientists'

Traveling may become easier, but virtual travel and expanded entertainment may make actually going someplace less important. IBM foresees glassless 3-D moving holograms that allow friends to share their telepresences, and that enable entertainment to blur the line between make-believe and reality even more.

While smartphones and other mobile devices have become more powerful, they are still limited by battery life. IBM envisions smaller batteries that last 10 times as long as current ones, and that can draw their power from air or from static electricity generated by the user.

Finally, the computing giant sees sensors inhabiting all manner of vehicles, devices and facilities, such that "citizen scientists" will be able to help real scientists and researchers map their environment by collecting and transmitting data about everyday surroundings. In other words, we all become Google Street View vehicles.

Not to be outdone by the people at IBM, Intel focused its predictions on just 2011 -- all of which, of course, involve areas of Intel R&D. Technologies picking up steam, according to Intel executives, include smart TV, hybrid tablets/netbooks, and "perceptual computers" that use object-recognizing, GPS and other sensors to create the next level in on-the-spot recommendations, such as when you're on vacation.

Intel also sees 2011 ushering in movie-like digital signs not unlike those in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, a surge in home energy-management devices, and a further blurring between consumer and enterprise devices. And, for those who think Moore's Law has reached its limit because the number of transistors on a chip cannot keep doubling about every two years, Intel says the law is still active and on the books in the new year.

Clouds in Your Future

Industry research firms, of course, are all about making predictions. Forrester sees hosted private clouds outnumbering internal clouds three to one, the arrival of industry-based community clouds, and workstation applications with cloud computing behind them, bringing high-performance computing "to the masses."

Al Hilwa, program director for applications development software at IDC, predicts HTML5 will begin to replace HTML "on some aggressive sites" by year's end, although Adobe Flash and Silverlight "will not go away" because of their "high-end effects, pixel fidelity, and content protection." He also sees a further heating up of mobile-application platforms, adding that "more than one vendor will provide tools that bring iPhone apps into their ecosystem."

One word that has dominated IT throughout 2010 has been "cloud," and Hilwa sees a wider adoption in 2011 of cloud application platforms, or what he described as "database, middleware and tools as a service." He predicted that in 2011 and beyond, these platforms will be more widely adopted by ISVs before "they gain serious traction in large enterprises."

Speaking of clouds, Gartner sees cloud computing in 2011 as tangled in a continuation of "inflated expectations," while IT management software and solutions company CA Technologies thinks 2011 will be the year when the talk about cloud computing's potential "will become a reality."

CA also expects organizations to change "their perception of cloud security as stronger, more advanced security options are deployed as cloud services from organizations that specialize in security," providing a level that most businesses cannot obtain by themselves.

With all these forecasts for the new year and beyond, it's wise to remember that predictions are quickly forgotten once the future shows up.

Another one gets personal

2011-01-02T07:18:00.000-08:00

You could say another one bites the dust. But I'd rather say another one gets personal.

(Visit: http://www.editorsweblog.org/multimedia/2010/11/board_members_of_la_nacion_confirm_closu.php)

Full text from EditorsWeblog:

Board members of La Nacion confirm closure of print edition

Posted by Emma Heald on November 16, 2010 at 9:50 AM
Board members of Chilean newspaper La Nacion approved on Friday the closure of the daily's print edition due to circulation decline. The 93-year-old newspaper will be only available online, Milenio reported.

According to media reports, the last print version will circulate on November 28, Efe revealed. However, neither the publishing company nor the government, which owns 69 percent of the newspaper's shares, could confirm the date. "The newspaper will not close," said government spokeswoman Ena Von Baer to Efe. "The government's desire is to keep the newspaper. It has asked the directory that this diary is maintained in a sustainable manner that suits the new time."

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

Virtual directness

2011-01-02T07:07:00.001-08:00

One of the fastest ways to get a response directly from an individual is online with a product of direct interest, such as a virtual product involved with a virtual game or experience the user is enjoying.

Here is a good look at the growth and size of that "direct mail" world.

(Go to http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/31/the-year-in-virtual-goods-by-the-numbers/)

Here is full text from Techcrunch on Dec. 31, 2010:

By Ted Sorom

Editor’s note: Guest author Ted Sorom is the CEO of Rixty, a virtual currency platform.

The global virtual goods industry put up some very impressive numbers this year. From special Easter eggs to virtual ad campaigns, virtual goods sales have grabbed their share of headlines over the past twelve months. Now with social gaming on the rise and everyone from your teenage nephew to your grandma to your old rugby teammate buying a “little something” to sweeten their online game, here is a look a back at the year in virtual goods sales.

$7,300,000,000: expected global revenue generated by the virtual goods industry in 2010. This is huge, considering the $60 billion generated in 2009 by the video game industry as a whole, and clearly shows that browser-based gaming is making great strides.

$2,100,000,000: The projected size of the US virtual goods market in 2011.

80,000,000: the all-time high number of Farmville players. The ubiquitous title for social gaming the world over, FarmVille surpassed its 2009 high mark of 50 million monthly active users, hitting this new peak in early 2010. You can now stop pretending you’re not addicted to your precious online farm. It’s ok… you’re among friends. Oh, and now CityVille is larger than FarmVille and approaching FarmVille’s all-time high with 75 million monthly active users.

20: percentage of Electronic Art’s overall revenue generated by digital sales. These aren’t just avatar items and XP boosts; the figure also refers to full-game downloads and downloadable content (DLC) to enhance console games. EA’s CFO Eric Brown notes that their “digital sales usually start with the sale of a physical disc, especially on the current generation of consoles.” But the upcoming Star Wars MMO is guaranteed to boost DLC consumption; want a blue double-ended light saber? It can be yours, if the price is right.

90,000,000: number of Pet Society virtual goods sold every single day. According to developer EA/Playfish, their most popular title has 20 million users, double that of World of Warcraft. It’s no wonder that EA was willing to pay $400 million to acquire the hot social developer in 2009.

$635,000: New world record for the single largest purchase in an online game, in this case a virtual intergalactic resort in Planet Calypso. A few years ago the same seller, Jon ‘Neverdie’ Jacobs, sold $335,000 worth of virtual real estate in Entropia Universe. While the majority of microtransactions cost just a few dollars, there are rare occasions where individuals spend serious money on virtual goods. Clearly, the virtual “Club Neverdie superdome” was a sound investment for Jacobs; the new owner (Yan Panasjuk) anticipates that the property will continue to grow in value. He is now dedicating 40 to 60 hours a week to the game, and has been playing MMOs for over a decade. Both parties are serious about their virtual worlds. Mr. Jacobs, also a career gamer, has already made over half a million dollars in online real estate.

4,000,000: total number of items in IMVU’s virtual goods catalog, making it the world’s largest. Based in Silicon Valley, the company runs a hybrid chat, gaming and avatar site. There are over 5,000 new items added every day, primarily created and uploaded by IMVU’s own user community.

10% (and growing): percentage of overall item sales in OurWorld generated by the resale market. The multiplayer gaming destination aggregates hundreds of third-party games into a virtual world with over 16,000 virtual items. OurWorld’s CEO, Derrick Morton, states, “In the last half year, we’ve seen our resale market explode. We think that a healthy secondary market is key to running a good virtual economy. If the players can’t trade amongst themselves, the virtual goods really have no value.” Think of it as virtual Craigslist.

220,000: number of “Summertime avatar baseball caps sold in Roblox, a blocky MMO playground. These hats were available for tickets, a free currency that all players get for logging in and which can be traded for Robux or vice versa. Rest, Relaxation and Roblox: gotta keep those virtual “rays” out of your eyes!

15,000,000: number of virtual hot dogs eaten by non-playable characters in LOLapps’ Ravenwood Fair (nom nom). The Facebook game saw huge growth last year to over 100 million monthly active users (MAU), and recently released an interesting info-graphic detailing their rise. For instance, 2 billion quizzes have been taken and 8 billion gifts have been sent!

Two: the factors that drive players to buy upper-tier items in online games, as opposed to just spending $0.99 here and there. The first is Value: Net Dragon’s value packs deliver the same bulk discount that players might find in a real-world big box store. The other big factor is Rarity; limited supply drives up demand. This often comes in the form of a “box” (such as the VIP Box in GameCampus’ Shot Online golf) which contains a wide range of items plus a chance to uncover the game’s rarest and most valuable equipment.

And with that, we wish everyone a Happy New Year. By this time next year, these numbers will look small.

The gauntlet's thrown

2010-11-10T11:40:00.000-08:00

Here comes the e-tablet at a subscription price.

(Visit http://www.newsandtech.com/whats_new/article_a042946a-eb6a-11df-bce8-001cc4c002e0.html)

Full text from News and Technology magazine;

News International will launch a digital paper before year-end that's available only on tablet computers.
The paper, called The Daily, will cost $1 per week, Murdoch told the Australian Financial Review in an exclusive interview.
AFR said that Murdoch believes he needs a circulation of 800,000 to make The Daily financially viable, but that he's optimistic about the growth of tablet computers.
"I believe every single person will eventually have one, even children," he told AFR.

Getting better all the time

2010-11-10T11:29:00.000-08:00

Plastic Logic, the backbone of the e-reader, e-tablet and other future platforms for content, is growing.

(visit: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-plastic-logic-gets-second-chance-with-russian-funds-to-make-business-re/)

Full text by Robert Andrews:

E-reader maker Plastic Logic may finally have benched its long-awaited, first-generation monochrome Que tablet this August after 18 months of delays - but could a second life be on the cards?

See more of our latest coverage.

The firm says it’s taking “a significant investment” from Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies (Rusnano) to make a factory in Russia for a second-generation device.

Plastic Logic, spun out of England’s Cambridge University in 2000, has long worked on using polymer transistors in electronic displays, creating a low-energy, low-quality tablet screen. Its website says it had already taken over $200 million in venture funding. But the Que, slated for launch in January 2009, faced delays and was overtaken by the high-colour iPad and even the Kindle, before the firm conceded an eventual launch would be worthless.

The company says it will maintain its Cambridge R&D facility, its Mountain View HQ and its Dresden factory but will open a second production centre.

In the joint funding announcement, Plastic Logic boasts about its plastic electronics IP, which it says has “many economic, manufacturing, form factor and environmental benefits, and will ultimately replace traditional silicon semiconductor glass-based display products in a variety of devices in the future.”

That may sound like Plastic Logic is merely touting some of its work-to-date for other uses. But it’s also being specific about a new reader: “The display is at the core of Plastic Logic’s first commercial consumer electronics product, a next-generation electronic reader for business that is currently under development.”

The pair say the new factory will be “capable of producing hundreds of thousands of units a month”. Right now, that kind of place at the tablet table may look optimistic for Plastic Logic.

But it has been in this technology’s space for a decade and, though it has been Apple’s, and not its own, technology which has lit the blue touch paper under this new opportunity, the enthusiasm shown by the likes of News Corp (NSDQ: NWS) toward the form factor means that there may yet remain a significant share to be won with the right product.

Robert Andrews
@robertandrews
Nov 9, 2010 6:15 PM ET

Share

Hope

2010-11-09T15:55:00.001-08:00

Hope springs eternal.

Visit http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/nov/08/the-independent-i-sales

Independent's i 'selling 125,000 copies'
Cut-price paper's circulation has dropped off since launch and staff are feeling the strain of producing it, according to sources

Mark Sweney
guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 November 2010 09.16 GMT

The Independent's cut-price spin-off i is thought to have attracted average daily sales of about 125,000 copies, with circulation thought to have halved since launch.

Staff on the paper have been working "extreme and unsustainable hours" since the launch, according to the National Union of Journalists, which is planning to lodge an official complaint that the launch was "recklessly" planned and executed.

Alexander Lebedev's 20p weekday daily launched on 26 October with a flurry of media coverage helping to drive paid-for sales of about 180,000, according to several sources. However it is understood that sales have steadily fallen away, with numbers thought to have dropped to under 100,000.

It is early days for the paper and daily sales are likely to be volatile until circulation settles.

Industry sources estimate average daily sales at between 125,000 and 150,000, with the majority picking the bottom end of the range.

"The sales have dropped off and they are trying to work out if the numbers at the beginning or its current figure reflect its appeal," said one source. "I'm sure they will be optimising their distribution model, analysing which areas and which newsagents are generating more sales, and moving copies away from areas where they are generating fewer sales."

"Wholesalers give competitors the percentage of copies that are returned but they don't tell them how many copies we distribute in the first place," said Andrew Mullins, the managing director of the Independent, Independent on Sunday and the London Evening Standard. "As a result, any numbers being talked about are purely conjecture as they do not know how many copies we have printed and distributed each day. Our numbers will remain confidential for the foreseeable future, but we can say that sales of the Independent at £1 are unaffected."

The stress of the launch, both for staff and for the Independent's balance sheet, has become starkly clear, with pay negotiations now linked to the performance of the i.

At a meeting of the Independent's National Union of Journalists chapel earlier this month members passed a motion complaining about their workload since the launch.

"The chapel is concerned about the extreme and unsustainable hours expected of some staff to produce i, and fears the problem is likely to persist due to management's reckless planning and execution of the project," the NUJ said. "Members are clear that everyone fully supports the success of i. However, members explained that they are not prepared to put up with extreme hours becoming the norm."

The chapel voted almost unanimously in favour of holding a ballot for industrial action – 105 for with one against and two abstentions – over the failure to conclude a pay deal for 2010.

The launch of i has been backed with 100,000 giveaways, about 55,000 of those thought to be targeting the London market. Before launch the longer-term target was for a combined circulation for both i and the Independent of 400,000.

The Independent has a total net circulation of 182,000, with about 89,000 sold at full rate, meaning the i needs to get to well over 200,000 copies to achieve this goal. In addition the aspiration is for i to be successful enough to have a completely paid-for customer base.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

ONA una

2010-11-06T19:39:00.001-07:00

The Online News Association annual event in Washington is fascinating for its breadth and depth. You can watch all the livestream video from the event.

(Go to http://jeffsonderman.com/2010/10/video-watch-the-sessions-from-ona-2010/)

Or you can focus on one of the presenting groups: Treesaver.

(http://www.treesaver.net/)

In their own words:

Treesaver is a new design for the web. It’s made for people who like to read. It’s for great narrative experiences — text and pictures.

Treesaver divides content into pages, automatically adjusting the layout to the size of the screen. It works on any device that has a web browser: Desktop PC or Mac, notebook, netbook, iPad and iPhone. It’s produced with web standards — HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You can embed video or Flash in it, just as you can with any web site. There is no app to download. No plug in to install.

Treesaver provides a cost effective platform for writers and publishers. You get to leverage your existing resources and systems, instead of building and maintaining separate applications for each platform. Plus, it provides a friendlier format for advertising.

For more information, email Roger Black, Filipe Fortes and Jock Spivy, follow @trsvr, or sign up for the Treesaver newsletter:

Now that's getting personal.

More direct from Tribune

2010-10-19T14:48:00.001-07:00

There but by the grace of Prosper go us. Is the Tribune's purchase of a Kodak Prosper press a breakthrough? You can watch the video from Graph Expo 2010.

Go to http://www.kzonelive.com/10-4.html

Here's Lou Taziola, president, Tribune Direct: “The justification for Prosper was based on Tribune Direct, but we are owned by one of the largest newspaper companies in the country, and another opportunity we see for Prosper would be on short run, niche publications.”

What is Tribune Direct? A national full-service, direct mail marketing company – headquartered in Chicago, with locations in five markets around the country, owned by Tribune Company.

Here's Tim Klunder, Vice President of Sales and Client Relations, Tribune Direct: “Variable data publishing helps us drive personalization that can integrate electronic media with the paper-based publications which we are seeing increase exponentially today. How do those two mediums interact with each other? The conversation focuses around ‘How can we harness the power of our data to actually drive personalization . . . make a reality of ink on paper.”

Taziola explains that current Tribune Direct does shared mail to 3.5 million homes on Wednesday and 2 million on Saturday, basically pre-print fliers for the Chicago Tribune non-subscribers. That's 60 million pieces of advertisement each week
And in solo mail about 25 million pieces a month in Chicago, nationally double that – postcards, self-mailers, letters, etc.

Klunder again: “Customers today have a need to talk in a personalized fashion with their clients. A few short years ago they may not have had the data to support that, today, they have been making investments in data capabilities, so they have those capabilities today.

“The variable data volumes we push through every month continue to increase exponentially. . . Digital is a great way for us to serve our clients’ needs. Prosper allows us to run long run, highly personalized, high quality at a cost effective price that’s really unprecedented in the print industry today.”

Taziola calls the Prosper press "A game changer for the industry". Taziola praises the press' speed and quality and variability.

Woe is us

2010-10-19T14:36:00.000-07:00

Once again the confusion sets in: is print dead or is one size fits all dead?
Read this.

(go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/oct/17/newspaper-abcs-websites-internet-news)

From the guardian.co.uk

We thought the internet was killing print. But it isn't
There is no clear correlation between a rise in internet traffic and a fall in newspaper circulation. Some papers are growing in both formats, others are succeeding in neither, according to new research.

by Peter Preston, The Observer

The woe, as usual, is more or less unconfined. September's daily newspaper circulation figures, as audited by ABC, are down 5.31% in a year: Sunday totals are 6.7% off the pace. And, of course, we all know what's to blame. It's the infernal internet, the digital revolution, the iPad, laptop and smartphone taking over from print. Online is the coming death of Gutenberg's world, inexorable, inevitable, the enemy of all we used to hold dear. Except that it isn't.

A fascinating new piece of research this week looks in detail at the success of newspaper websites and attempts to find statistical correlations with sliding print copy sales. As one goes up, the other must go down, surely? These are the underpinnings of transition.

But "in the UK at least, there is no such correlation", reports the number-crunching analyst Jim Chisholm. "This is true at both a micro-level in terms of UK newspaper titles and groups and at a macro-level comparing national internet adoption with circulation performance. Indeed, the opposite case could be argued: that newspapers that do well on the web also do better in print… Understandably worried traditional journalists should know that the internet is not a threat."

Chisholm's aim is to prod British publishers into renewed web action – citing the Guardian, Telegraph and Independent particularly for producing the highest ratios of monthly unique visitors to their sites when compared against print circulations. (The Guardian, with a 125 unique-visitor-to-print ratio, is far higher than any other European paper he can find, and also generates over three times the number of UK page impressions relative to its circulation). Moreover, UK national papers as a whole score well on such tests, clear top of the EU league and walloping German performance nine times over.

Could they, and British regionals, do better, though? Indeed they could. "The issue is not one of total audience, but of frequency and loyalty – and online, as in print, newspapers are great at attracting readers from time to time, but they don't attract them often enough, and they don't hang around."

At which point, perhaps, it's time to look at the flipside of Chisholm's findings. If the name of one game is frequency and loyalty – via investment, innovation, constant linkages and promotions – might that not also be an answer to drooping print sales as well? If you reject the net as an agent of newsprint doom, then reverse scenarios also apply.

Go back to ABC circulations before newspaper websites really began – say September 1995 – to make the point. One, the Daily Star, is doing better than 15 years ago with no net presence to speak of: 757,080 copies in 1995 against 864,315 last month. The Daily Mail, at 2,144,229 this September against 1,866,197, is well up, with a website growing by more than 60% a year. Some – say the Mirror, down from 2,559, 636 to 1,213,323 – have suffered direly. See: no correlations?

The Guardian, Times and Telegraph are all down by around a third, and the Sun has lost more than a million: but again there's no mechanical relationship here. Price matters. It always does. But investment and innovation matter as well. They always do. And you can't help by being struck how little of that goes on in print these days. A pull-out section vanishes, and comes back. Single-theme front pages come and go at the Indy. The Telegraph still looks for somewhere else to put its features. Nothing much changes. Another researcher (at Enders Analysis) calculates that papers have lopped 20% of the pages they put in a decade ago in order to bulwark sharply rising cover prices.

No correlations here, either? Nothing to prove that the more effort and talent you put in, the more you get out? More, more, more ... and more research, please.

Origon of the species

2010-09-30T18:41:00.001-07:00

People often ask me what is the definition of variable data publishing.

I turn to no other trusted source than wikipedia:

The term variable-data publishing was likely an offshoot of the term "variable-data printing", first introduced to the printing industry by Frank Romano, Professor Emeritus, School of Print Media, at the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology.[citation needed] However, the concept of merging static document elements and variable document elements predates the term and has seen various implementations ranging from simple desktop 'mail merge', to complex mainframe applications in the financial and banking industry. In the past, the term VDP has been most closely associated with digital printing machines. However, in the past 3 years the application of this technology has spread to web pages, emails, and mobile messaging.

Check it out yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_data_publishing

Prospering in Chicago

2010-09-30T14:43:00.000-07:00

I've had several requests from blog readers to follow up with more details about the Chicago Tribune Direct's purchase of a Kodak Proper press for direct mail and potential niche publications use (see blog entry "Flatfooted No More" Sept.29, 2010).

Following up with Tim Street (director of Tribune Direct Marketing), here are a few more details about their plans.

Although they have purchased the Kodak Prosper 1000 they expect to have the 5000Xl in place hopefully by Q1 2011.

They have had a lot of success in the past few years with Kodak presses in their direct mail business, which has grown 100 percent, although they have visited with and analyzed many of the other digital presses available on the market.

Now they want to follow their recent success into new opportunities for their customers, including the ability to print on multiple substrates and go as quickly as possible, in the 650 feet per minute range. (Tribune Direct is strictly a digital printing company with no offset presses.)

When asked about reference to potential "niche" publications, Street deferred to Paul Lynch (senior manager/quality/commercial printing, Chicago Tribune) as someone who is more focussed on such solutions, but Street posited that possibly Tribune Direct:
1. Could use the Prosper pressed to print publications with tiered advertising directed at different audiences.
Or
2. Could, for instance, print publications for attendees at events at McCormick Place with targeted offers for the attendees such as local restaurants.

Speaking of events at the McCormick Place, Tim pointed out that during Graph Expo 2010, starting on Sunday, the Kzone will live stream discussions of the Tribune developments including from 10:30-11 a.m. Central Time on Monday, Oct. 4 this program, called "Owning the Competition with Digital Print":

The gloves are off. And Tribune Direct is taking it to the competition with the Kodak Prosper Press platform. How? By bringing new, exciting direct mail capabilities to its customers nationwide. Learn how the revolutionary combination of quality and variability at the speed of offset is helping Tribune Direct knock out the competition.
Moderator
Dave Zwang, Zwang & Co.
Panelists:
• Lou Tazioli, President, Tribune Direct • Tim Klunder, Vice President of Sales and Client
Relations, Tribune Direct • Ronen Cohen, Kodak

Visit http://www.Kzonelive.com for the discussions.

Flatfooted no more

2010-09-29T11:58:00.001-07:00

Many newspaper and magazine companies were caught flatfooted with this development: a major publishing company buying a variable data inkjet press and claiming to use it, at least in part, for niche publications. Flatfooted, no more. You can find out as much as you want because executives from Tribune Direct will discuss their plans during a live interview in the K-Zone, scheduled for Monday, Oct. 4, at 10:30 a.m. CST at Kodak’s Graph Expo booth (#1227). The session will be streamed live over the Internet at www.kzonelive.com.

And here's the full press release with contacts.
Media Contacts:
Don Stuart, Kodak, +1 585-724-7735, Donald.Stuart@kodak.com
Shannon Rumble, Eric Mower and Associates, +1 585-389-1817, KodakPR@mower.com
Kate Mersman, Chicago Tribune, +1 312-222-3165, kmersman@tribune.com

KODAK PROSPER Press to Expand and Enhance Tribune Direct Marketing’s Capabilities in One-to-One Communications

ROCHESTER, N.Y., Sept. 27—Tribune Direct Marketing is the first direct marketing company to use the KODAK PROSPER Press Platform to offer unique capabilities for producing personalized, full-color direct mail solutions that meet customers’ requirements in today’s digital marketing environment.
“We believe that the PROSPER Press will be a game-changer for our industry,” said Lou Tazioli, President, Tribune Direct. “The PROSPER Press brings flexibility to vary both the images and content of every single mail piece to achieve maximum relevancy and ROI for our clients.”
Tribune Direct Marketing selected the PROSPER Press because of several features that make it ideally suited for direct marketers looking to increase efficiency and effectiveness. Those features include speed, productivity and substrate flexibility. The PROSPER Press will offer speeds up to 650 feet per minute, while providing offset printing image quality on a broad range of paper. In addition, the press boasts an advanced ink formulation to further enhance print quality, durability and the unique ability to print on glossy coated substrates.
“Our clients are utilizing transaction-level data along with traditional RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary), demographic, and lifestyle models to drive a more targeted one-to-one communications strategy,” said Tim Klunder, Vice President of Sales and Client Relations, Tribune Direct. “The PROSPER Press helps us to meet client needs by offering high quality, lower cost personalized print solutions in ways that were not possible before. With the PROSPER Press, fully personalized marketing campaigns are available to clients in ways that are consistent with today’s economic realities and the pressure to improve returns on marketing investments.”
Along with direct marketing solutions, Tribune Direct will produce niche publications and other highly targeted printed material with the PROSPER Press.
“Tribune Direct is one of the leading thought leaders and practitioners in direct marketing that has built its reputation for developing outstanding programs that get results in a number of ways, including embracing the latest technology,” said Ronen Cohen, Vice President, Inkjet Printing Solutions, Kodak. “We look forward to working with Tribune Direct on taking its direct marketing capabilities and solutions to even greater heights with the support of the PROSPER Press.”

Fat lady

2010-09-29T07:56:00.000-07:00

As they say it's not over until the fat lady sings. Well she must still be in the back room drinking hot tea and loosening up her voice with an announcement like this: Reuters and the International Herald Tribune are combining to create a new weekly section in the paper -- on the Middle East, expanding insight into that region.

Check it out: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/sep/28/reuters-middleeast

Reuters and International Herald Tribune launch new supplement
Badge Greensblade blog

Reuters and the International Herald Tribune are jointly launching a special supplement that will be inserted into IHT's Middle East editions on a weekly basis.The first four-page issue of Middle East with Reuters, to be published on Thursday, will contain regional news, opinion and coverage of culture.

It will draw on the output of more than 200 Reuters journalists who cover the Middle East at a local and international level.

IHT's publisher, Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, said: "We are excited to be expanding our collaboration with Reuters to provide even more analysis and fresh insight for our readers in the Middle East.

"There is a thirst here for the IHT's brand of high quality, independent journalism as reflected in our growing circulation numbers."

IHT has a new regional headquarters in Dubai. Meanwhile, over the last 18 months, Reuters has recruited dozens of new journalists to its Middle East bureaus, doubling the amount of original Arabic-language news it produces.

The joint launch emphasises the way in which large media organisations are now prepared to team up in order to reach wider audiences.

Just on a smile

2010-09-28T19:28:00.000-07:00

It's hard to get by just on a smile. The tipping point for analog print newspapers (to change to digital, variable data print) may never come according to PRIMIR. Projections are wonderful. But what about people, I ask?
Books are here, thank God, which means the digital presses will continue to come, even with a frown.

Check it out: http://www.piworld.com/article/primir-study-identifies-tipping-points-digital-printing-applications-2014/1

Since 1993 when Indigo first introduced their digital press, the printing industry has debated the merits of the technology, which markets it would best serve, which applications would eventually go all digital, and when we would see the demise of conventional printing as we know it. Here it is 17 years later and the sky still hasn’t fallen in—at least not due to this new technology. So PRIMIR members asked the folks at IT Strategies to investigate this marketplace and provide some insights into why the much anticipated tipping point hasn’t occurred, when it might, and where opportunities exist today.

The key objective of the "PRIMIR Megatrends in Digital Printing Applications" study was straightforward: evaluate major print applications and determine which (if any) will migrate from analog to digital production printing, when and why?

Over the course of eight months, IT Strategies conducted extensive research with experts, printers and customers via e-mail surveys and personal interviews—in all, over 900 respondents. The study focused on 12 applications: books, catalogs, direct mail, labels, magazines, manuals, marketing collateral, newspapers, packaging (folding cartons & flexible), and specialty printing such as calendars, photo books, etc.). The research was limited exclusively to production printing, excluding any equipment under $50,000 in acquisition cost akin to desktop printers and copier/MFP devices. Using equivalent letter-size simplex impressions/pages as the lowest common denominator, this study quantifies the page volume and rate of transition from analog to digital production printing for each application.

Tipping point = unstoppable momentum.
A surprise finding of the research: few of the studied 12 applications will tip within the time period of the study (by 2014), some have momentum to possibly tip by 2020 or later, but the tipping point for most of the applications is decades away, if at all.

However, digital printing has made some serious inroads in the non-publishing related applications, especially where there is opportunity to add value through complex variable-data content. Book printing, however, is the one publishing application that has embraced digital printing and will continue to see positive growth.

According to Marco Boer, vice president, IT Strategies, and principal researcher on this study, “A more important finding is that the analog production page volume is shrinking independent of digital production print volume growth. In fact, while digital production printing in North America is forecast for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.5% thru 2014, it is from a very small overall volume base (22 billion in 2009 to 33 billion pages in 2014). Despite the relatively small volume, the value of those North American pages, including valueadded services is much higher than analog. Analog printing will see a negative CAGR (-5%) for the same period. Digital production printing would have to grow about 200% per year to even approach an overall market tipping point.”
And, although not a focus of this particular study, let’s not forget that many digital pages are bypassing digital production print entirely and shifting to decentralized selfprint in the office in very short runs using copier/MFP or desktop printers.

Digital printing is a very attractive offering for print service providers from a revenue and profit perspective especially in niche applications where the value of the pages is much higher. The research reconfirmed the fact that digital production print thrives with smaller run length, complex (variable data), rapid response jobs. In 2009 in North America those jobs represented 1.5% of production print volume (if one excludes newspaper, catalog, and magazines digital production print it represents a 7% share). (Figure 2)

As production run length per job continues to decrease, digital production print eligible share of jobs will grow proportionally. Figure 3 identifies the CAGR for the applications specifically covered in the study. Established applications for digital printing have lower projected growth rates, while those that are not established may have significant potential and high growth rates. Still, these growth applications currently represent relatively limited volumes. The report also identifies conditions under which digital printing adoption could accelerate even in the high analog volume segments such as magazines and catalogs. Despite that, the threat to analog is not digital printing.

The true threat to analog is habit change and pages migrating to electronic displays/readers. A point in fact from the research—print specifiers reported that investment for design and marketing for electronic display is nearly equal for most production applications to investment in production print.

Opportunity abounds formanufacturers serving both analog and digital print markets. The published report will detail threats and opportunities, as well as provide a thorough analysis of findings from both the printer and specifier for each of the 12 applications. The report will be published in mid-fall and available to both NPES and PRIMIR members.

Evolving Print

2010-09-28T06:33:00.000-07:00

John Dowd has summed up one of the key elements of this question of personalization of print in pointing out that the problem with newspapers (dwindling circulation) has nothing to do with platform and everything to do with giving people choice (of content).

Visit http://www.evolvingprint.com to see graphics that go with this text.

The full blogs:

Before leaving the Why Print theme I want to toss out a couple of additional data points that suggest that the widely held wisdom that Print Is Dead is off the mark.

Consider The Economist, my favorite magazine. Though serving higher-income readers with above-average penetration rates of both smart phones (judging by how frequently the iPhone is advertised on the back cover) and broadband internet the magazine has managed to double its print circulation over the last six years. Here’s the chart:

That’s quite remarkable, isn’t it? Across a recession and in spite of the introduction of Facebook, iPhones, YouTube, etc here is a print publication that can’t stop growing!

Oh, and lest you conclude that The Economist has been boosting sales by catering to gray hairs among us, consider that the average age of its readers is 39 years old – younger than that of any other major news magazine (source).

One more interesting data point is worth mentioning. The Radio and Television News Director’s Foundation took the simple approach and just asked people whether they prefer to read in print or online (full report here). Intentionally or not they very usefully (for my purposes) asked the question in a manner that isolates the impact of the media – print vs. online – without clouding the issue by considering the differing content each offers. Here’s what they found:

Notably, the answer from the 18-34 year old cohort was remarkably similar to that of older respondents: 76.5% of the former group preferred print to 77.5% of the latter.

This data suggests that the culprit behind the unambiguous shift from print newspaper reading to online reading (of principally non-newspaper sites) is not the paper on which the newspaper is printed but rather the content which it includes.

The idea that content is king (or culprit) explains why some print (The Economist and college newspapers) continue to thrive while others, despite the reader’s preference for print, do not.

But more on that in a later post.

Why print?
Posted on August 11, 2010 by John Dowd
A blog on print? Really? Wasn’t there a memo…something about online killing print?

Yup, heard all that before. But the truth is print retains a lot vitality, despite the rumors of its impending demise. I hope to share some of that story in this blog, along with my own thoughts on how print ought to evolve so that the rumors remain just that.

Entry #1 on the “why print” ledger comes from what should be ground zero for the death of print – the college campus. ”Ground zero” because college campuses have all the ingredients that are allegedly connected to print’s death at the hands of the internet:

Young people
Free WiFI
Ubiquitous laptops and smart phones
So, what do you get when you mix those nasty ingredients and stir? Well, Alloy Marketing+Media did some research on 550 campuses to find out – their results may surprise you.

That’s right, the printed edition gets more traction in a single day than the online edition gets in a month! (30% read print daily, 20% read online monthly)

Both are free and have identical content. The online edition is probably more available given that students have their laptops and smartphones with them at all times.

Hmmm…so much for the perfect storm, right?

Now don’t get me wrong. Newspapers have a huge problem. In fact, they have two. The first is declining ad sales. Left unresolved this will lead to dramatically lower profits (and under-staffed newsrooms and other follow on effects). The second and larger problem is declining circulation, especially among younger readers. Left unresolved this will lead not to lower profits but rather to oblivion for the industry.

My concern is that the industry is misdiagnosing the first problem and largely ignoring the second (or at least not treating it as the burning platform that it really is).

The problem, however, is not print, as the campus newspaper illustrates. In fact, in a future post I’ll elaborate how – in the parlance of web developers – print is actually a feature, not a bug, of the current model.

Breakthrough

2010-09-27T12:43:00.000-07:00

Now here's a press announcement worth remarking: The Chicago Tribune has bought a Kodak digital inkjet press in order to do variable data printing.

Visit: http://newsandtech.com/dateline/article_27a441e8-ca63-11df-a1f2-001cc4c03286.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

From a News and Tech magazine twitter:

The Chicago Tribune’s Tribune Direct Marketing unit put into operation a black-and-white digital press from Kodak for its direct-mail and niche printing, becoming one of a handful of U.S. newspaper publishers to deploy digital printing within their operations. It plans to upgrade the press to a full-color model next year.
The Tribune’s Prosper 1000 is part of Kodak’s family of digital presses. The line, introduced earlier this year, is driven by the vendor’s Stream Inkjet technology, which uses air deflection and silicon nozzles to produce sharp images at speeds of up to 650 feet per minute, Kodak said.
“We believe the Prosper press will be a game-changer for our industry,” said Lou Tazioli, president of Tribune Direct, in a statement.
In addition to direct mail pieces, Tribune Direct will use the press to produce niche publications and other highly targeted printed materials, Tribune said. It will upgrade the platform to a full-color Prosper 5000XL, capable of producing magazines and inserts as well as direct-mail, next year.
Other U.S. publishers with digital printing presses are Investor’s Business Daily parent O’Neil Data Systems, which last year ramped up an HP Inkjet Web Press at its Los Angeles facility to print direct-mail pieces, and Newsworld, which produces a number of international papers for distribution in the New York region on a Screen Truepress Jet520.

Hear hear

2010-09-23T11:12:00.000-07:00

How about hearing your newspaper, instead of reading it? Would that personalize the experience for you. Check it out. It's already happening.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LI24Df04.html

The full text from the Asia Times:

Adventure of the talking newspaper
By Raja Murthy

MUMBAI - As with over two million others in India, I got a shock on Tuesday morning when I opened my daily newspaper and heard a voice from within its pages. I dropped the newspaper in surprise, and the voice stopped. On opening it again, a male voice bleated about German engineering.

It was my eerie moment of history, the era of speaking newspapers had dawned, with no advance warning, and I had become part of all its attendant wonderful and nightmarish possibilities.

Using a small, ingenious, light-sensor activated, voice-recorded device glued to the newspaper page, the Times of India and The Hindu carried an audio advertisement launching a new Volkswagen car model on September 21. The two leading Indian

dailies, both over 100 years old, became the world's first multimedia newspapers of a kind perhaps never imagined by Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press in around 1441.

The talking paper launched the Vento, a premium entry-level sedan and the latest offering from top-selling Volkswagen India Group that markets the Audi, Skoda and Volkswagen brands. Volkswagen India reported growth of 120.7% in its latest sales figures for January to July 2010.

The newspaper audio continued Volkswagen India's reputation for innovative marketing - such as "Roadblocked" last November, when it took over the entire advertising space in all of the 16 Times of India editions across India, for its Polo hatchback model.
Volkswagen releasing the first-ever audio page in print media opened up a Pandora's box of ideas: will the next James Bond movie have newspapers singing out the theme? Will cash-rich political parties be demanding votes through talking newspapers next elections? Worse, imagine sitting inside a train or an aircraft with a babble of audio papers.

Given the responses the next day, on September 22, there may be a hundred other duplicate ideas of yakkety-yak magazines and newspapers. But now that it is known that paper can be made to speak, that first pristine moment of utter astonishment has passed. Memorable, though, is the inaugural experience of what I had never thought of before: a newspaper talking.

For a few seconds, I had rarely been more bewildered than on hearing a voice coming from the newspaper in the early morning. My first confused thought was that somehow a cell phone had found its way into the pages by mistake - but then, even cell phones can't start talking by themselves, and I don't own a cell phone. When I saw what the voice was, I couldn't help smiling: a full-page car advertisement on a back page, with a two-inch black rectangular box glued to it doing the talking.

The astonishment was more because there were no advance warnings or teaser advertisements in days leading up to the caper. The edition with the voice carried a small note to "Our Readers: The Times of India and Volkswagen have created four pages of content as a sort of a special media innovation. Don't miss reading and listening to this 'speaking newspaper'!"

But I found this message only after looking for it.

"Best in class German engineering is here," announces the male voice. "The new Volkswagen Vento. Built with great care and highly innovative features, perhaps that's why it breaks the hearts of our engineers to watch it drive away. The new Volkswagen Vento, crafted with so much passion, it's hard to let it go. Volkswagen. Das Auto."

The message repeats itself, until the news page is folded sufficiently to block the pinhole-sized perforation on the black audio box through which lights travels to sensor to trigger the recorded disk.

Varied, colorful responses were reported across India to opening a newspaper and hearing it talk. They ranged from frightened children to a Mumbai police bomb squad rushing to investigate suspicious noises coming from a litter-bin near S L Raheja Hospital in suburban Mahim - some irritated reader had chucked away the black chatterbox, which can continue talking for nearly two-and-a-half hours.

A startled housemaid reportedly picked up the talking newspaper and screamed "ghost", an understandable reaction given the stories I heard as a kid about ghosts violently slapping people opening the front door at dawn - probably as grouchy farewell before the spooks vanish at sunrise.

Hundreds of messages about the morning newspaper experience flooded social networking sites like Twitter. "The Volkswagen talking ad in today's TOI [Times of India] scared the hell out of me!" tweeted one. "It's both funny and weird."

More proof of how the astonished mind can produce any thought came with one startled reader revealing he had thought the wall behind his newspaper was talking.

Not everyone was startled or impressed. Bangalore resident Rani Venugopal scolded the Times of India for creating an environmental problem with all the plastic that will be thrown away with the newspaper.

The bearded, bear-like Prahlad Kakkar, a prominent Mumbai-based advertising filmmaker, complained of an intrusive, unwelcome advertisement before breakfast. "When a man gets up in the morning, he wakes up with the newspaper and this is the only time of peace and solace in the day," Kakkar told a Times of India reporter. "The voice box intruded into this space and I did not know how to stop it."

Even so, I bought an extra copy to relish again the childhood habit of dismantling fascinating toys to explore the innards. The two-inch, featherweight, hollow rectangular "voice box" contained two button cells wired into a disc about an inch wide that produces the repetitive message.

I thought it was lighter pressure of fingers or of folded newspaper pages that activated the voice - but the Times of India declared the next day that a light-sensitive device worked the moment the pages were even half open.

The iPod-sized gizmos with the speaker, chip and batteries are made at a Volkswagen factory in China. Mumbai resident and Volkswagen India manager Lutz Kothe said his 14-year-old niece, Beatrix Madersbacher, gave him the idea during a business trip to Munich.

Beatrix may have had a brainwave or seen the idea on the Internet. In early 2009, Lalit Pahwa, director of a small Mumbai-based publisher, Pioneer Book Co, had talked about a pre-recorded audio chip embedded in a newspaper or magazine page. It would start playing when the reader opened the page and stop when page was turned. But Pahwa could not implement the idea for the two women's magazines he publishes.

The German connection though was appropriate in enabling the world's first speaking newspapers. Apart from Gutenberg, another German, Johann Carolus (1575-1634), published the first-ever generally acknowledged newspaper - his "Relation", or Relation aller Furnemmen und gedenckwurdigen Historien (Collection of all distinguished and commemorable news) was published from 1605.

It took nearly six months of working logistics for the September 21 edition of the Times of India and The Hindu to carry the talking page - 2.5 million copies of the edition were selectively distributed in Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai.

The copies had become collectors' items in Mumbai by the next morning, the concluding day of the city's biggest annual festival of Ganesha, the charismatic god of enterprise and adventure.

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Defining content

2010-09-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

In many ways the difference between print and online is not a platform difference but an ecosystem difference.
Print content is content in context.
Online content is content in network.
In other words with print whether it's actually printed or digital, the material is in an atmosphere that is not related to an outside world.
With online content the material is related and draws its secret sauce from links to the outside world.

Even in death

2010-09-19T07:48:00.000-07:00

Personalization is showing up in medicine, in athletic gear and now in death. Yes the Catholic Church has recognized personalization in modern incarnations of wakes and other mortuary traditions of the church.

Check this out: http://catholickey.org/index.php3?gif=news.gif&mode=view&issue=20100917&article_id=6420

The full story:

Catholics have new options to honor loved ones
By Marty Denzer
Catholic Key Reporter
KANSAS CITY — When a loved one dies, it is left to the living to honor their memory and the memories shared through the years. Through the centuries, Catholics have devised many ways of doing this before the funeral Mass and after.
The vigil kept by the family before the Mass, whether the evening before or in the hours leading up to the liturgy, is as much a celebration of this life as the Mass is a celebration of eternal life in heaven. This may be one reason why the Catholic Church prefers the sharing of memories — eulogies — be a part of the visitation or wake.

Deacon Ralph Wehner, diocesan director of the Office of Worship, said, “The funeral liturgy is the central celebration of the Christian community for the deceased. At the funeral Mass, the community gathers with the family and friends of the deceased to give praise and thanks to God for Christ’s victory over sin and death, to commend the deceased to God’s tender mercy and compassion and to seek strength in the proclamation of the paschal mystery.”

Catholic funeral directors are beginning to suggest ways of personalizing the visitation, to make it unique and memorable. Steve Pierce, president of Muehlebach Funeral Home, said that as baby boomers age and find themselves having to plan funerals for loved ones and even themselves, “they are making funeral choices based on values that are different than in previous generations. Baby boomers see the visitation and funeral as part of the grieving process and are seeking ways to make them meaningful. In fact 64 percent of those surveyed said they wanted visitation and funeral services to be unique and personalized.”

If the person has written down his or her wishes for the visitation, funeral Mass and burial services, it can make it easier for surviving family members and make the services more personal. Often though, it is left to the family to plan the services.

The funeral service consumers of the 21st century are planning services that are as unique as the person who died, Pierce said. “The idea of personalization has resulted in an explosion of unique visitation services that reflect the hobbies, passions and interests of the person who died.”

Photographs and videos of the person, items relating to the person’s job, hobbies or interests, and blank journals where visitors can jot down their own memories of the person are some of the suggestions for personalization, he said.

Funeral liturgies are also personalized. Family members work with the parish priest or counselor to plan the readings from Sacred Scripture, the liturgical music and the intentions. The Order of Christian Funerals forbids eulogies during the Mass, but some information about the person is often worked into the celebrant’s homily. According to Diocesan policy, a brief homily should dwell on God’s compassionate love and on the Paschal Mystery of the Lord, how this mystery was present in the life and death of the deceased and that this mystery is active in the lives of those present as well.

The planners also can designate who will do the readings, who will bring up the gifts at the Offertory and any extraordinary ministers of communion. Working with the parish ensures that a Catholic funeral Mass will stay within diocesan guidelines.

Pierce also said that sometimes pallbearers and readers are asked to wear clothing reflecting the deceased’s personality. For example, pink was the person’s favorite color. So at the funeral Mass, the pallbearers and readers might be asked to wear pink shirts or blouses.

The personalizing can continue to the cemetery. After the committal services are concluded, Pierce suggested that balloons could be released to represent both the soul’s flight to heaven and the joys the person felt in life.

Family planners work with cemetery staff to select a headstone or marker, or the marker preselected by the deceased. The inscription, engravings and medallions containing photographs or religious, cultural or occupational symbolism on the headstone or marker may say as much or as little about the deceased as is desired.

Pierce said another option for Catholics is an online obituary. To enhance their obituary offerings, in the last month Muehlebach Funeral Home has partnered with Tribute.com., an online resource for local and national obituaries. “Families served by Muehlebach will now be able to create beautiful online multimedia tributes that honor their loved ones’ lives with photos, videos, music and more to create a permanent record on our website www.muehlebachchapel.com and on Tributes.com,” he said. “This establishes a special place where family and friends can go to celebrate a loved one, leave a condolence or share a memory or a photo at any time of the day, no matter where they live.

“Through personalization,” Pierce said, “funeral services can be more meaningful. Funeral directors can offer ideas on how families can personalize their loved one’s funeral and are open to suggestions and creativity. The National Funeral Directors Association encourages funeral service consumers to discuss their ideas with their funeral director to ensure an individualized ceremony befitting the person who died.”

Long time coming

2010-09-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time coming. But it's here. The first local website to become a local print publication that I've heard about. Why has this been so hard to see? Targeted print publications have always had the same DNA as websites, so why hasn't this happened many times before. Why have the creation of websites from print publications come in droves, in millions, in billions, in zillions, before a local print publication from a website. It should have been a two-way street from the beginning, but I guess the construction crews arbitrarily -- or rather the culture police arbitrarily -- decided it was a one way street.

To see the full story visit http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2010/sep/16/hyperlocal-blog-hu17-beverley-paul-smith-print

Or here it is:

Hyperlocal blogger expands into print publishing
Website publisher launches full colour weekly

A hyperlocal news site owner has launched into print with a low cost advertising weekly for Beverley.

Paul Smith is known to many bloggers for campaigning to clear his name after the Hull Daily Mail accused him of activity in the porn industry and questioned his fitness to run the website HU17.net in high-profile coverage in the area.

But several stressful months on – and with a partially upheld PCC complaint against the paper behind him – Smith has stepped up his local publishing venture by launching in their backyard.

He told me how the new venture was progressing:

"The first edition was just sport with no other editorial, it was more as a promotional idea though has evolved since then. Now it is 28 pages in full colour on A4 pages.

"It is for everyone in the town though it seems to appeal to those who are out and about – ie who use the shops, bars and or play sport in the area".

Competition

The newspaper competes for its readers, and advertisers, with the Johnston Press's Beverley Guardian as well as the Hull Daily Mail's own Beverley Advertiser.

Cover Photograph: Paul Smith/guardian.co.uk
What Smith calls his "magic formula'' is a mixture of pictures capturing local events under the strapline 'it's all about Beverley' and low cost advertising - £5 per week for a good sized advert.

"I am told people like to see who is in it, I think it also helps that the content is exclusive and very niche. Having an established web site has helped, people know the brand too."

The print version hits the streets each Tuesday and is distributed to drop off places in Beverley such as bars, barbers and social clubs.

"Local shops have been very supportive with many signing up to advertising package that is realistic and very affordable, something that was certainly needed in the area.

"We still only make a limited number up to 100 copies but each one gets seen by lots of people."

HU17 can also be accessed online at HU17.net and on Facebook.

E-ink Forever

2010-09-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen this video of a hacker challenged to destroy the cover of the famous Esquire Magazine 75th anniversity issue -- with blinking E-ink screen: "The 21st Century begins now," check it out.

http://gizmodo.com/5054022/esquire-e+ink-cover-hacked-to-death-with-knives-and-fire

Always heartening

2010-09-13T07:09:00.000-07:00

Always heartening to read the details of America's escalating love of media. I can't help but be reminded of one of Marshall McLuhan's dictums that new media doesn't replace old media, it just expands usage.

Here's the Pew Center's newest research.

Check it out http://people-press.org/report/652/

Here's the full text:

There are many more ways to get the news these days, and as a consequence Americans are spending more time with the news than over much of the past decade. Digital platforms are playing a larger role in news consumption, and they seem to be more than making up for modest declines in the audience for traditional platforms. As a result, the average time Americans spend with the news on a given day is as high as it was in the mid-1990s, when audiences for traditional news sources were much larger.

Roughly a third (34%) of the public say they went online for news yesterday – on par with radio, and slightly higher than daily newspapers. And when cell phones, email, social networks and podcasts are added in, 44% of Americans say they got news through one or more internet or mobile digital source yesterday.

At the same time, the proportion of Americans who get news from traditional media platforms – television, radio and print – has been stable or edging downward in the last few years. There has been no overall decline in the percentage saying they watched news on television, and even with the continued erosion of print newspaper and radio audiences, three-quarters of Americans got news yesterday from one or more of these three traditional platforms.

In short, instead of replacing traditional news platforms, Americans are increasingly integrating new technologies into their news consumption habits. More than a third (36%) of Americans say they got news from both digital and traditional sources yesterday, just shy of the number who relied solely on traditional sources (39%). Only 9% of Americans got news through the internet and mobile technology without also using traditional sources.

The net impact of digital platforms supplementing traditional sources is that Americans are spending more time with the news than was the case a decade ago. As was the case in 2000, people now say they spend 57 minutes on average getting the news from TV, radio or newspapers on a given day. But today, they also spend an additional 13 minutes getting news online, increasing the total time spent with the news to 70 minutes. This is one of the highest totals on this measure since the mid-1990s and it does not take into account time spent getting news on cell phones or other digital devices .

The biennial news consumption survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted June 8-28 on cell phones and landlines among 3,006 adults, finds further evidence that the combination of digital and traditional platforms is leading to increased news consumption.

The groups that are driving the increase in time spent with the news – particularly highly educated people – are most likely to use digital and traditional platforms. Fully 69% of those with some post-graduate experience got news through a digital source yesterday; this also is the group that showed the largest rise in time spent with the news from 2006-2008 to 2010 (from 81 minutes yesterday to 96 minutes). There also has been a modest increase in time spent with the news among those 30 to 64 – but not among older and younger age groups.

Digital platforms are supplementing the news diets of news consumers, but there is little indication they are expanding the proportion of Americans who get news on a given day. The vast majority of Americans (83%) get news in one form or another as part of their daily life. But even when cell phones, podcasts, social networks, email, Twitter and RSS feeds are accounted for, 17% of Americans say they got no news yesterday, little changed from previous years.

Moreover, while young people are most likely to integrate new technologies into their daily lives, they are not using these sources to get news at higher rates than do older Americans. Rather, those in their 30s are the only age group in which a majority (57%) reports getting news on one or more digital platforms yesterday.

The integration of traditional and digital technology is common among those in older age groups as well. Nearly half (49%) of people in their 40s, and 44% of those between 50 and 64, got news through one or more digital modes yesterday – rates that are comparable to those 18 to 29 (48%). Digital news consumption is low only among those ages 65 and older, just 23% of whom used one or more digital modes for news yesterday.

Print Newspaper Decline Only Partially Offset by Online Readership

Only about one-in-four (26%) Americans say they read a newspaper in print yesterday, down from 30% two years ago and 38% in 2006. Meanwhile, online newspaper readership continues to grow and is offsetting some of the overall decline in readership. This year, 17% of Americans say they read something on a newspaper’s website yesterday, up from 13% in 2008 and 9% in 2006.

But the online audience is only partially stemming the decline in the share of Americans who turn to newspapers; even when all online newspaper readership is included, 37% of Americans report getting news from newspapers yesterday, virtually unchanged from 39% two years ago, but down from 43% in 2006. (These percentages still may miss some people who access newspaper content indirectly through secondary online sources such as news aggregators or search engines.)

In general, daily newspaper readers tend to be older on average than the general public, but the regular readership of some of the major national newspapers – USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and especially the New York Times – defy this trend. More than half of regular USA Today and Wall Street Journal (55% each) readers are younger than 50 – a profile that largely matches the nation as a whole (roughly 55% of all adults are between 18 and 49). Fully two-thirds (67%) of regular New York Times readers are younger than 50, with a third (34%) younger than 30 – making its audience substantially younger than the national average (55% younger than 50, 23% younger than 30).

The young profile of the regular New York Times readership is undoubtedly linked to the paper’s success online. Nearly one-in-ten of internet users younger than 30 (8%) – and 6% of all internet users – volunteer the New York Times when asked to name a few of the websites they use most often to get news and information.

Cable News Audiences in Flux

Overall, cable news continues to play a significant role in peoples’ news habits – 39% say they regularly get news from a cable channel. But the proportions saying they regularly watch CNN, MSNBC and CNBC have slipped substantially from two years ago, during the presidential election.

Only Fox News has maintained its audience size, and this is because of the increasing number of Republicans who regularly get news there. Four-in-ten Republicans (40%) now say they regularly watch Fox News, up from 36% two years ago and just 18% a decade ago. Just 12% of Republicans regularly watch CNN, and just 6% regularly watch MSNBC.

As recently as 2002, Republicans were as likely to watch CNN (28%) as Fox News (25%). The share of Democrats who regularly watch CNN or Fox News has fallen from 2008.

In terms of specific programs, Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly have succeeded in attracting conservative and attentive audiences. This is also the case for radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Most of those who regularly watch O’Reilly (63%) and Hannity (65%) are 50 or older; 44% of the public is 50 or older. By contrast, the Daily Show and Colbert Report have the youngest audiences of any outlet included in the survey. Large majorities of those who say they regularly watch the Colbert Report (80%) and the Daily Show (74%) are younger than 50; 55% of public is 18 to 49.

News Audiences’ Political Views

Ideology continues to be closely associated with people’s choice of certain news sources. Eight-in-ten Americans (80%) who regularly listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch Sean Hannity are conservative – roughly twice the national average of 36%. And at the other end of the spectrum, the New York Times, Keith Olbermann, the Daily Show, the Colbert Report and Rachel Maddow have regular audiences that include nearly twice the proportion of liberals than in the public.

News audiences also vary widely when it comes to opinions about current issues and topics. For instance, those who describe themselves as supporters of the Tea Party movement make up disproportionately large proportions of the audiences for Limbaugh’s radio show and Fox News opinion programs. This also is the case for supporters of the NRA (National Rifle Association).

By contrast, supporters of gay rights make up large shares of regular New York Times readers, viewers of the Colbert Report and NPR listeners. Several ideologically divergent news audiences – including Wall Street Journal readers and viewers of the Colbert Report and Glenn Beck show – include larger-than-average percentages of self-described libertarians.

News Outlets’ Appeal: From Breaking News to Entertainment

News audiences are drawn to different sources for different reasons. A substantial majority (64%) of regular CNN viewers say they turn to the network for the latest news and headlines; far fewer say they turn to CNN for in-depth reporting (10%), interesting views and opinions (6%) or entertainment (4%). Similarly, the main appeal of network evening news, USA Today and daily newspapers is the latest news and headlines.

Regular Fox News viewers offer somewhat different reasons for tuning into that network: 44% say they go to Fox for the latest news, but a sizable minority (22%) volunteers several reasons or say that all apply.

Regular readers of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are drawn particularly by in-depth reporting; 37% and 33%, respectively, say they mostly read those papers for in-depth reporting, the highest percentages for any new outlet.

For the audiences of evening cable programs – whether liberal or conservative – interesting views and opinions are the primary appeal. That is the case for regular listeners of Rush Limbaugh as well, although many Limbaugh listeners cite multiple reasons or say that all apply.

For some news audiences, such as regular NPR listeners, no single reason stands out as to why people watch, read or listen: 28% of regular NPR listeners cite several, or all, of the reasons listed, while nearly as many say they listen for the latest news (21%) or for in-depth reporting (20%).

Entertainment is by far the biggest reason why regular viewers of the Colbert Report and the Daily Show tune into those programs; 53% of the regular Colbert audience and 43% of the Daily Show audience say they mostly watch those programs for entertainment. Yet entertainment also is a factor for many regular viewers of morning news shows (18%), readers of USA Today (16%) and other audiences.

Fewer Liberals Enjoying the News

Overall, the share of Americans who say keeping up with the news is something they enjoy a lot has dipped, from a consistent 52% in recent biennial news consumption surveys, including 2008, to 45% in 2010.

The decline is linked to partisanship and ideology: in 2008 67% of liberal Democrats said they enjoyed the news a lot, compared with just 45% today. By contrast, about as many conservative Republicans say they enjoy keeping up with the news today as did so two years ago (57% now, 56% then). This has resulted in a switch in news enjoyment. Today, conservative Republicans enjoy keeping up with the news more than any other ideological and partisan group; just two years ago it was the liberal Democrats who held that distinction.

Other Key Findings

• While 26% of all Americans say they read a print newspaper yesterday, that figure falls to just 8% among adults younger than 30.

• Far more men (50%) than women (39%) get news on digital platforms, such as the internet and mobile technology, on any given day. Men are more likely to get news by cell phone, email, RSS feeds or podcasts than are women. But men and women are equally likely to get news through Twitter or social networking sites.

• More people say they mostly get news “from time to time” rather than at “regular times.” The percentage of so-called news grazers has increased nine points (from 48% to 57%) since 2006.

• Search engines are playing a substantially larger role in people’s news gathering habits – 33% regularly use search engines to get news on topics of interest, up from 19% in 2008.

• About three-in-ten adults (31%) access the internet over their cell phone, but just 8% get news there regularly.

• Most Facebook and Twitter users say they hardly ever or never get news there.

• One-in-four adults (25%) who have Tivos or DVRs say they program them to record news programs.

• About eight-in-ten (82%) say they see at least some bias in news coverage; by a 43% to 23% margin, more say it is a liberal than a conservative bias.

• Roughly a third (35%) read a book yesterday, which is largely unchanged over the past decade. Of those, 4% read an electronic or digital book.

• The public struggled with a four-question current events quiz – just 14% answered all four correctly. But about half (51%) of regular Wall Street Journal readers aced the quiz, as did 42% of regular New York Times readers.

• Among news audiences, Obama gets his highest approval ratings among regular viewers of Keith Olbermann (84% approve) and Rachel Maddow (80%); his rating is nearly as high among regular readers of the New York Times (79%). Obama gets his lowest ratings among regular Sean Hannity viewers (7%) and Rush Limbaugh listeners (9%).

• Partisan gaps in media credibility continue to grow, with Republicans far more skeptical of most major news sources than Democrats. The one exception is Fox News, which twice as many Republicans believe all or most of (41%) than Democrats (21%).

SECTION 1: WATCHING, READING AND LISTENING TO THE NEWS

When asked if they had a chance to read a daily newspaper yesterday, just 31% of Americans say they read a newspaper, the lowest percentage in two decades of Pew Research Center polling. When online news consumers are later probed separately if they happened to read anything on a newspaper website, the total rises to 37%, but even this more inclusive measure of newspaper readership is on a downward trajectory. Four years ago 43% reported some kind of newspaper reading, in print or online. These percentages still may miss some people who access newspaper content indirectly through secondary online sources such as news aggregators or search engines.

Daily audiences for TV and radio, by contrast, are holding steady. Television remains the most prevalent source of news; 58% of Americans say they watched the news or a news program on television yesterday, a percentage that has changed little over the past decade. About a third (34%) say they listened to news on the radio yesterday, which is little changed from recent years, but far lower than during the 1990s.

The proportion turning to the internet for news continues to grow – 34% say they got news online yesterday in the latest survey, up from 29% in 2008 and 23% in 2006. And the overall reach of digital technologies is even broader – 44% say they got news yesterday from the internet, cell phones, social networks or podcasts.
The vast majority of Americans (83%) get news in one form or another as part of their daily life. But even with the availability of news over a wide range of new technologies, 17% of Americans say they got no news yesterday, a figure that is virtually unchanged from previous years. In the 2008 survey, 19% said they got no news yesterday – and that survey did not ask about getting news on a given day via cell phones or other digital technologies. Currently, 27% of adults under age 30 get no news on any given day; among the very youngest, ages 18 to 24, the number going newsless yesterday is 31%.

The Array of Digital News Platforms

The share of Americans getting news on mobile devices or through online social networks on any given day is substantial, though far more people continue to get news from traditional news sources. Roughly one-in-ten Americans (9%) got news over a cell phone or smartphone yesterday, and the same percentage says they got news through a social networking site such as Facebook or Twitter.

A similar number (10%) says they got news through RSS feeds or a customizable webpage like My Yahoo or iGoogle. Email has a somewhat broader reach – 14% get news by email on any given day.

That about a quarter of adults (27%) under age 30 get no news on any given day – even when the array of mobile and online news sources are accounted for – is not new. The number of young people getting no news yesterday was comparably high in 2008 (29%) and 2006 (26%).

Even with their widespread adoption of modern communications technology – internet usage among those younger than 30 is nearly universal, 80% have profiles on social networking sites and 58% go online using their cell phones– fewer than half (48%) of young people got news over any kind of digital platform yesterday. In fact, more of those younger than 30 (57%) got news from traditional sources yesterday.

Instead, it is people in their 30s (30 to 39) who are the most likely to use digital technologies to get news. Fully 57% of those in their 30s say they got news through a digital platform yesterday – either online or mobile – the highest percentage of any age group. And 21% of those 30 to 39 say they got news through social networking or Twitter yesterday, which is higher than other age groups.

Many older Americans also use new technologies to get the news. Nearly half (49%) of people in their 40s got news yesterday through some internet or mobile source, as did 44% of those ages 50-64. Digital news drops off as a source only among those ages 65 and older (23%), largely because older Americans remain less likely to go online or use mobile technology. In many cases, seniors who do have the technology are just as likely to use it to get news as their younger counterparts (see Section 2: Online and Digital News).

While men and women are equally likely to get news from one or more traditional platform on a given day (75% of men, 74% of women), men are far more likely than women to get news digitally. Overall, half of men (50%) get news over some kind of online or digital platform on any given day, compared with 39% of women. Specifically, men are twice as likely as women (12% vs. 6%) to get news using cell phones, and more men than women also get news from email, RSS readers and customizable webpages. However, there is no gender gap in the percentage getting news through social networks or Twitter on any given day.

These gender differences persist across all age groups, but are particularly wide among younger adults. While 56% of men under 30 get news digitally on any given day, just 41% of young women do so. In fact, 20% of men in their late teens and twenties got only digital news yesterday – without any television, radio or print newspapers – compared with just 11% of women the same age.

College graduates and higher income Americans typically express the greatest interest in news, and also have the broadest access to new technology in both their personal and work lives. Thus, not surprisingly, there are large educational and income differences in the use of internet and other digital technologies to get news. Two-thirds of college graduates (66%) got news through a digital source yesterday, compared with 27% of adults with no more than a high school degree. Similarly, 64% of people with family incomes of $75,000 or more get digital news on any given day, compared with 27% of those with incomes of less than $30,000.

Television Still Has Broadest Reach

Even with the array of digital technology, the traditional news platforms of television, radio and print newspapers continue to reach a much broader segment of the public on any given day. Fully 75% of Americans report getting news from one or more of these mediums yesterday: 58% watching television news, 34% listening to news on the radio, and 26% reading a print newspaper. This compares to the 44% who got news over the internet or another digital platform. Even among the very youngest adults age 18-24, as many get news from television, print or radio (53%) as from a digital platform (48%) on any given day.

Among these sources, television stands apart not only because more people get news there, but also because people continue to spend more time getting news there than any other source. People getting TV news on any given day spend an average of 55 minutes doing so. This compares to 38 minutes among people getting news online and 37 minutes among people reading a newspaper. Measured another way, 56% of television news watchers spend an hour or more with television news, compared with 40% of radio news listeners and just 25% of online news consumers and 19% of print newspaper readers.

And television remains the dominant source for older Americans – 75% of people age 65 and older watch television news on any given day, while just 23% are getting news online or from any kind of digital source.

Print Newspapers’ Decline

While there has been no decline in the share getting news on television, the percentage saying the read a newspaper yesterday continues to slip. Overall, 37% of Americans report reading any kind of newspaper –in print or online – yesterday. That compares with 39% two years ago and 43% in 2006. The decline since 2006 represents a steep dropoff in print newspaper readership that is only partially offset by growth in online newspaper readership.

This year, 26% of adults report reading a print newspaper on any given day, down from 30% two years ago and 38% in 2006. The decline over the past four year spans all age groups. Looking at all Americans under age 50, the share reading a print newspaper on a given day has fallen by nearly half, from 29% in 2006 to 15% today. Among those ages 50 and older, print newspaper readership fell from 50% to 40% over the same time period.

Meanwhile, online newspaper readership has grown, though not enough to counterbalance the print decline. Currently, 17% of Americans say they read a newspaper online yesterday or visited a newspaper website. This is up from 13% two years ago and 9% in 2006, but is still lower than the 26% who read the newspaper in print. People in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s are all about equally likely to read newspapers online. The rate falls off among those ages 65 and older because fewer use the internet. Among seniors who use the internet, 17% read a newspaper online yesterday; that is comparable to the percentage of those under 65 who are online and read a newspaper (21%).

Time with the News

On average, the typical American spends 70 minutes watching, reading and listening to news on any given day. That is the highest level since the 2004 survey, which was conducted during the presidential campaign and amid rising violence in Iraq. The largest share of that time (32 minutes) is spent watching television news, 15% listening to news on the radio, and – reflecting the drop in overall readership – just 10 minutes reading a print version of the newspaper.

There is a consistently large gap in time spent on the news by age. Those who are younger than 30 spend just 45 minutes with the news on any given day. That compares with 68 minutes for people in their 30s, 74 minutes for people in their 40s, and more than 80 minutes for those people 50 and older.

Much of this is based on the fact that fewer younger people are getting any news on a given day, which brings down the average substantially. But even when younger people get news, they spend less time doing so than do older people. Those younger than 30 who got news yesterday spent, on average, 64 minutes doing so, compared with 85 minutes among those 30 and older.

Regular Sources of News

The relative stability in the number of adults who report getting television news on any given day is consistent with the trend in how many say they “regularly” get news from various types of television news programs. Following steep declines during the 1990s, the share who report regularly watching the national nightly network news programs has remained flat in recent years. Currently 28% watch the evening news regularly, little changed from 30% ten years ago. Roughly four-in-ten (39%) regularly watch cable news outlets, and half of Americans (50%) regularly watch the local TV news. Of these major TV news sources, only local news has experienced a significant decline over the past 10 years, from 56% in 2000 to 50% today.

By contrast, every year the number of Americans who describe themselves as regular readers of newspapers continues to fall. Currently, 40% say they regularly read a daily newspaper either in print or online, down from 46% two years ago and 52% in 2006. The share regularly reading local weekly community newspapers has fallen from 35% in 2006 to 33% in 2008 to 30% today. And fewer are reading news magazines such as Time, U.S. News or Newsweek; just 8% now say they read news magazines regularly, down from 12% in 2008 and 14% in 2006.

Meanwhile, consistent with the measure of use yesterday, the internet continues to grow as a regular source of news. In the latest survey, 46% say they get news online either every day (32%) or three-to-five days a week (14%). This is up from 37% two years ago and 31% in 2006, and just 2% when the question was first asked in 1995. Much of this reflects the continued growth in the share of Americans who have access to the internet.

Search engines have seen a particular surge in usage as a source of news over the past two years. A third (33%) of adults today say they use search engines to search for news on a particular topic at least three days a week or more, up from 19% in 2008 and 14% in 2006. But political blogs have seen no such increase – just 9% of Americans say that they regularly read blogs about politics or current events, virtually unchanged from 10% two years ago.

More Regularly Watching Fox News than CNN

For the first time in over a decade of tracking both audiences, more Americans say they regularly watch Fox News (23%) than CNN (18%). From 2002 through 2008 Fox News and CNN had run about even in the size of their regular audience, and in 1998 and 2000 CNN had the larger audience. But over the past two years, CNN’s regular audience has declined by six points while Fox News’ has remained stable. MSNBC and CNBC, which have consistently had fewer regular viewers than the other two cable networks, have also seen substantial drop-offs over the past two years. The share that regularly watch MSNBC fell from 15% in 2008 to 11% in 2010, and over this period CNBC’s regular audience fell from 12% to 8%.

The decline in regular CNN viewership – from 24% in 2008 to 18% today – spans many demographic and political groups. Fewer younger (under 30) and older people (50 and older) now say they watch CNN regularly. Notably, significantly more people age 65 and over now watch Fox News regularly (30%) than CNN (21%). Two years ago, those 65 and older were about as likely to regularly watch CNN (30%) as Fox News (29%).

The proportion of Democrats that reports watching CNN regularly has fallen from 33% in 2008 to 25% currently. As in 2008, about twice as many Democrats as Republicans regularly watch CNN (25% vs. 12%).

Meanwhile, regular viewership of Fox News, which was already politically polarized, has become even more partisan. Currently, 40% of Republicans say they regularly watch Fox News, compared with just 15% of Democrats. Two years ago, the partisan gap was narrower (36% of Republicans vs. 21% of Democrats). Independents continue to watch both cable news networks at about the same rate (17% regularly watch CNN, 20% regularly watch Fox News). (See Section 4, Who Is Listening, Watching, Reading – and Why, for a detailed look at the demographic and political profiles of the audiences for CNN, Fox News and other news sources.)

Opinion and Comedy Programming

A number of talk shows focusing on political opinions and humor appeal to relatively few regular viewers. One-in-ten Americans (10%) say they watch the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News regularly, unchanged from two years ago, but up from earlier in the decade. Glenn Beck’s program, which airs earlier in the day on Fox News, is watched regularly by 7%. About the same percentage regularly watches Sean Hannity’s program, which follows O’Reilly’s program. Reflecting the network’s smaller audience overall, talk and opinion shows on MSNBC have fewer regular viewers. Just 4% say they regularly watch Hardball with Chris Matthews, and 3% watch Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann regularly.

Seven percent of Americans say they regularly watch the Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central – a regular audience which has grown over the past decade. Roughly the same number (6%) regularly watch the Colbert Report, which airs immediately following.

What Young and Old Watch Regularly

One characteristic of the talk and opinion shows on both Fox News and MSNBC is that they tend to appeal to older audiences. The gap is particularly wide for the O’Reilly Factor, which is watched regularly by 16% of people 65 and older, and 5% of those under 30, but the same pattern applies to his fellow Fox News hosts Beck and Hannity. At MSNBC, Chris Matthews is watched regularly by 8% of older adults, and just 1% of 18-29 year olds, with smaller age differentials for Maddow and Olbermann.

Not surprisingly, the age pattern is the reverse for Comedy Central’s programs. Among those younger than 30, 13% watch the Daily Show regularly, and the same number says they regularly watch the Colbert Report. Among people 65 and older, the figures are just 2% and 1%, respectively. Young people are about as likely to regularly watch these comedy shows as they are to regularly watch the network evening news, weekday morning news shows, or CNN.

Partisan News Choices

While many of the most widely used news sources – such as local TV news, network evening news programs and daily newspapers, reach about as many Republicans as Democrats, the same cannot be said for many other news sources, which have become increasingly politicized over the past decade.

As discussed above, 40% of Republicans regularly watch Fox News, compared with just 15% of Democrats. And this general partisan divide is magnified when political ideology is taken into account. Nearly half (48%) of conservative Republicans regularly watch Fox News, compared with 27% of moderate and liberal Republicans. Among Democrats, just 7% of liberals are regular Fox News viewers, compared with 18% of conservative and moderate Democrats.

Fox News is a top news source among conservative Republicans; the proportion saying they regularly watch Fox News (48%) is about equal to the percentages of conservative Republicans who watch local TV news (50%) or read a daily newspaper (47%).
No single news network ranks among the top sources for other partisan groups.

The partisan tilt in viewership of Fox News is even greater for individual programs on the network. Over a quarter (27%) of conservative Republicans say they regularly watch the O’Reilly Factor, compared with 9% of moderate and liberal Republicans, 9% of independents, 4% of conservative and moderate Democrats, and 1% of liberal Democrats. Viewership patterns for Hannity and Beck are comparable.

There also are differences in the other direction when it comes to MSNBC and its programs. For example, 7% of liberal Democrats say they regularly watch Rachel Maddow’s program, compared with 3% of conservative and moderate Democrats, 3% of independents, 2% of moderate and liberal Republicans, and 1% of conservative Republicans.

There is a sharp partisan divide when it comes to reading the New York Times regularly – 8% of Democrats and just 4% of Republicans do so. Among liberal Democrats, 13% regularly read the Times, compared with 5% of conservative and moderate Democrats, 6% of independents, 4% of moderate and liberal Republicans, and just 1% of conservative Republicans. The Wall Street Journal is read more regularly by Republicans (6%) than Democrats (3%), though the ideological differences are less pronounced.

When it comes to radio, Democrats (14%) and independents (14%) are more likely than Republicans (6%) to say they regularly listen to NPR. Nearly a quarter of liberal Democrats (23%) regularly get news from NPR, compared with 10% of conservative and moderate Democrats, 8% of moderate and liberal Republicans and 6% of conservative Republicans. By contrast, 13% of Republicans (including 17% of conservative Republicans) say they regularly listen to Rush Limbaugh’s radio program; that compares with just 4% of independents and 2% of Democrats.

September 12, 2010
Americans Spending More Time Following the News

SECTION 2: ONLINE AND DIGITAL NEWS

The internet is a regular news source for a majority of Americans – 57% regularly get news from at least one internet or digital source. Over the past several years, there has been a rise in the use of more traditional online technologies, like search engines, and a proliferation of new technologies, like news applications for mobile phones, and tablet computers, such as the iPad.

Nearly half (46%) of the public says they get news online three or more days a week, up from 29% in 2004 and 37% just two years ago.
About a third (32%) gets news online every day, which is double the percentage that reported going online for news daily four years ago.

The use of search engines to find news has also increased substantially. A third (33%) of the public employs search engines, such as Google, Yahoo or Bing, three or more days a week to search for news on a particular subject of interest. That is up from 19% in 2008 and has tripled since 2004, when only 11% used search engines for news that frequently.

The public turns to other online technologies for news far less often. About one-in-ten regularly get news or news headlines by email (12%), through a customizable webpage or RSS reader (10%), or read blogs about politics or current events (9%). When it comes to newer technologies, 8% regularly get news on their cell phone or smartphone, 7% regularly get news through social networking sites and 5% regularly watch or listen to news podcasts. Only 2% of the public regularly gets news through Twitter, and 1% uses their iPad or other tablet computer for news regularly.

Regular Online News Consumption

There continue to be age, education, gender and racial differences in online news consumption. Although young adults are often on the leading edge of internet and digital technology adoption, those in their 30s and 40s – who are the most avid news consumers – are also the most likely to get news online. A majority (58%) of those ages 30 to 49 get news online at least three days a week, compared with 48% of those under 30 and 46% of people ages 50 to 64. Just 22% of those 65 and older regularly get news online.

College graduates continue to go online for news at much higher rates than do those with less education. About seven-in-ten (69%) college graduates get news online at least three days a week (including 53% who do so every day). By comparison, only 27% of those with a high school education or less regularly get news online at least three days a week.

More men than women regularly get news online (51% vs. 41%). Non-Hispanic whites (49%) also are significantly more likely than non-Hispanic blacks (31%) to get news online at least three days a week. Many of these demographic patterns partly reflect variations in internet use; still, there are substantial educational, racial and gender differences in going online for news even when internet use is taken into account.

Online News Sources

Many familiar names dominate the list of websites people go to most often for news and information. More than a quarter (28%) mention Yahoo – the most frequently mentioned website – and another 15% cite Google and 14% name MSN as one of the websites they use most often. Fewer mention AOL (7%) and their internet service provider (4%) as their top online sources for news.

Cable television news organizations also are among the most common websites for news and information – 16% cite CNN, 8% mention FOX, and 7% name MSNBC among the websites they use most often. Far fewer cite BBC (2%), ABC (2%), NBC (2%), NPR (1%) and CBS (1%).

Online news consumers also turn to the websites of national newspapers; 6% name the New York Times website, but USA Today (2%), the Wall Street Journal (2%) and the Washington Post (1%) are mentioned less often.

Only 2% cite the Drudge Report and 1% volunteer the Huffington Post as one of the websites they go to most often for news and information. And 1% mention Facebook as one of their top sources for news.

Searching for News Online

Not only are Yahoo and Google among the most frequently mentioned websites for online news, but two-thirds of the public say they use search engines to find news on a particular subject. And Americans are using search engines more frequently than they were just two years ago. About a third (34%) of the public now use search engines at least three days a week, up from 19% in 2008. The increase is evident across most demographic groups.

Similar to two years ago, far more college graduates than those with a high school education or less use search engines at least three days a week (50% vs. 20%). Those 65 and older are the least likely to use search engines.

Far fewer regularly get news through a customizable webpage or RSS reader than search for news. One-in-ten (10%) regularly get news through a customizable webpage, such as iGoogle or MyYahoo, or through an RSS reader. About two-thirds of the public (67%) never gets news through a customized webpage or RSS reader.

People under 50 are more than twice as likely as those 50 and older to regularly get news through a customized webpage or RSS reader (14% vs. 6%). And 14% of college graduates get customized news through a webpage or RSS reader, compared with 6% of those with a high school education or less.

News on the Go

About a third of the public (34%) and 42% of cell phone owners access the internet or email on their cell phones or smartphones. But far fewer people are getting news on their cell phones; 8% regularly get news or news headlines on their cell phones; 6% sometimes do this. About one-in-ten (9%) say they got news on their cell phone yesterday.

Among those who access the internet on their cell phones, 24% regularly and 18% sometimes get news on their cell phones. More than a quarter of this group (27%) say they used their cell phones to get news yesterday.

Fewer than one-in-five (16%) Americans have downloaded an application or “app” to access news or news headlines on their cell phone, but 44% of cell phone internet users have downloaded a news-related application for their phone.

More men than women regularly get news on their cell phone. College graduates are more likely than those with less education to use their cell phone for news. And although Americans under 50 are more likely than those ages 50 and older to regularly get news on their cell phones, much of this reflects that those over 50 are far less likely to use the internet on their cell phones. There are no significant age differences on this question among cell internet users.

Getting News from Social Networking Sites

Nearly half (45%) of the public has created a profile on a social networking site like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn. Far fewer use Twitter (9%). Not surprisingly, more get news through social networking sites than from Twitter.

About one-in-five (19%) regularly (7%) or sometimes (12%) get news or news headlines through social networking sites. By comparison, only 3% of the public regularly or sometimes gets news from Twitter. Similarly, 9% say they got news yesterday through social networking sites, compared with only 2% who got news-related tweets yesterday.

However, among users of each of these sites, there are fewer differences in news consumption. As many Twitter users say they regularly get tweets about the news as social networking users who regularly get news through social networking sites (17% vs. 16%). But more social networking users get news sometimes than Twitter users (26% vs. 15%). Similarly, 18% of Twitter users got news yesterday through Twitter, while 19% of social networking users turned to these sites for news.

Twitter users are more likely to follow news organizations or individual journalists; 24% of Twitter users do this compared with 16% of social networking users. And, as is the case with cell phones and news consumption, far fewer send news through social networking sites or Twitter than receive news; 21% of social networking users regularly (4%) or sometimes (17%) send news through these sites. Somewhat fewer Twitter users send news tweets: 15% of Twitter users regularly (6%) or sometimes (9%) send news or news headlines through Twitter.

As with other types of online news consumption, there are demographic differences in the use of social networking sites and Twitter for news. Combining those who get news through social networking sites or Twitter, Americans under 30 are the most likely to get news through these sites at least sometimes (36%). About a quarter (26%) of those ages 30-49 also gets news through these sites regularly or sometimes. But far fewer (6%) who are 50 and older turn to these sites for news. However, among social networking or Twitter users, these age differences are smaller – only those 65 and older lag far behind other age groups in getting news through these sites.

Women are slightly more likely than men to get news through social networking sites or Twitter – 22% of women get news through social networking sites or Twitter regularly or sometimes, compared with 18% of men.

More college graduates (13%) regularly get news through social networking sites or Twitter than those with a high school education or less (4%). But both groups are equally likely to sometimes get news through these sites.

Little Partisan Difference in Blog Reading

About one-in-ten (9%) Americans regularly read blogs about politics or current events, another 19% sometimes turn to blogs for their news and 22% hardly ever read blogs. About half (49%) never read blogs or do not use the internet. Among internet users, 35% regularly (11%) or sometimes (24%) read political or news blogs. This is similar to 2008, when 14% of internet users regularly read blogs and 20% sometimes turned to blogs for news.

There are virtually no partisan differences in blog reading; 10% of Republicans, 10% of Democrats and 9% of independents regularly read political blogs. Conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats are slightly more likely than their moderate counterparts to regularly read blogs about politics or current events.

There are only modest age differences in blog reading; those under 30 are the least likely to read blogs. And although far fewer people age 65 and older engage in many online activities, seniors who go online are just as likely as their younger counterparts to read blogs. Similar to the pattern for other online behaviors, college graduates (13%) are more likely to regularly read political or news blogs than those with some college experience (9%) and those with a high school education or less (7%).

Emailing News

About a quarter (27%) of the public regularly (12%) or sometimes (15%) get news or news headlines by email. Another 20% hardly ever receives news in their inboxes and 54% never get news by email or are not online. Meanwhile, 14% say they got news or news headlines by email yesterday. And 10% of the public says they get news emailed to them directly from news organizations or journalists.

Fewer send news by email than receive it; only 3% regularly and 11% sometimes send news by email. About two-thirds of Americans (67%) never send news by email (49%) or do not use the internet (18%). Even among internet users, only 4% regularly send news by email, compared with 14% who receive news in their inboxes regularly.

Young People Most Likely to Happen Across News Online

A majority of the public (62%) and about three-quarters of internet users (76%) say they come across news online even when they are on the internet for purposes other than getting news. The proportion of internet users who happen across news online is virtually unchanged over the last six years.

Young people are the most likely to come across news when online for other purposes – 85% of those under 30 say this, compared with 70% of those ages 30 to 49 and 56% of those ages 50 to 64. Seniors are the least likely to happen across news online (29%). These age differences are similar but less pronounced when looking only at internet users.

Far more college graduates (82%) come across news when online for other purposes than those with some college education (68%) or those with a high school degree or less (46%). And 67% of men happen across news when online for other reasons, compared with 58% of women.

Regular News Consumption Among Young People

While nearly half (48%) of those younger than 30 get news online regularly (three or more days a week), many young people also continue to rely on traditional news sources – particularly television. About three-in-ten (31%) regularly watch local news and nearly as many (29%) watch cable news.

Among specific television outlets and programs, 17% say they regularly watch Fox News while 13% say they regularly watch CNN.
About as many young people regularly watch the Daily Show (13%) and the Colbert Report (13%) as watch the national network evening news (14%) and the morning news shows (12%).

After local TV and cable news, newspapers are near the top of the list. About a quarter (23%) of those under 30 read a daily newspaper regularly and 17% are regular consumers of weekly community newspapers.

Young people also regularly turn to many online or digital sources for news; 16% get news on a customized webpage or through an RSS reader, 13% use their cell phones for news and 13% get news through social networking sites or Twitter. About one-in-ten (11%) young people regularly get news by email.

Gender, Age and Online News Consumption

Among young people, men are more likely than women to regularly get news online and to use many online technologies for news. More than half (54%) of men under the age of 30 get news online at least three days a week, compared with 41% of young women. Similarly, 48% of young men use search engines to find news on a particular subject while 33% of women under 30 get news by using search engines.

More than twice as many young men as young women get news through a customizable webpage or a RSS reader (20% vs. 9%). Men under 30 also are more avid consumers of news on their cell phone or smartphone than young women. About one-in-five (19%) young men get news or news headlines on their cell phone, compared with only 7% of women under 30. Men under 30 also are more likely to regularly read blogs about politics or current events. But there are no significant differences among young men and women in their use of social networking sites or Twitter and the use of email for news.

Recording the News

More Americans have the technology to digitally record television programs – 45% now have a TiVo or DVR, up from 35% just two years ago, and nearly double the proportion that had one in 2006. But only 24% of those with a TiVo or DVR have programmed it to regularly record any news programs. This is little changed from two years ago (22%), even though the share of Americans who have a TiVo or DVR has grown.

There are very few demographic differences among those who program their TiVo or DVR to regularly record news programs. Men are as likely as women to regularly record news programs and similar proportions of whites and blacks have programmed their TiVo or DVR to record news programs. There are only modest differences by age – those 65 and older are slightly less likely than those in other age groups to record news programs using a TiVo or DVR.

More college graduates (31%) regularly record news programs using a TiVo or DVR than those with some college (24%) and people with a high school education or less (17%). And there is a similar pattern by income – those with the highest family incomes are the most likely to have programmed their TiVo or DVR to regularly record news programs.

About a quarter of Republicans (23%), Democrats (24%) and independents (26%) regularly record news programs with a digital video recorder. And there are no significant differences among Republicans or Democrats along ideological lines.

SECTION 3: NEWS ATTITUDES AND HABITS

Most Americans say they enjoy keeping up with the news, but the proportion saying they enjoy following the news a lot has declined. Currently 45% say they enjoy following the news a lot, while 36% say they enjoy this a little and 18% say not much or not at all. In each of the past three news consumption surveys (2004, 2006 and 2008), 52% said they enjoyed following the news a lot.

The falloff in the number saying they enjoy the news a lot has come across many groups, but the declines have been particularly large among Democrats – particularly liberal Democrats – young people and those with no more than a high school education.

The percentage of liberal Democrats who say they enjoy keeping up with the news a lot has fallen 22 points, from 67% in 2008 to 45% currently. The decline is 12 points among conservative and moderate Democrats (58% to 46%). By contrast, opinions among Republicans and independents have shown little change.

Those younger than 30 have consistently been less likely to say they enjoy keeping up with the news than have older age groups. The falloff since 2008 is also larger for young people than for other age groups. About a quarter of those ages 18 to 29 (27%) now say they enjoy keeping up with the news a lot, down 12 points from 39% in 2008.

The percentage of those with a high school diploma or less who say they enjoy keeping up with the news a lot dropped from 49% in 2008 to 39%; there has also been a slight decline among those with some college experience (from 51% to 45%). The views of college graduates are largely unchanged (59% in 2008, 55% today).

Fewer Getting News at Regular Times

With the availability of the internet and 24-hour news channels, nearly six-in-ten Americans (57%) say they are the kind of people who check in on the news from time to time, as opposed to getting the news at regular times. That is up from 51% in 2008 and 48% in 2006.

The percentage saying they are more likely to get their news at regular times has dropped from 50% in 2006 to 45% in 2008 to 38% today.

Young people have long been more likely than older Americans to say they check in on the news rather than getting news on a regular schedule. That remains the case today, but “news grazing” has become much more common among older age groups.

Among those 50 to 64, about as many say they get news from time to time (49%) as at regular times (46%). Just two years ago, a majority (55%) of this age group said they got news at regular times. Those 65 and older are still most likely to get their news at regular times (57%), but that is down from 64% in 2008. The percentage that says they get news from time to time rose from 31% to 37%.

Among those ages 30 to 49, 63% say they are more likely to get news from time to time than at regular times (32%). Two years ago, the divide was more narrow (57% from time to time, 41% at regular times). A substantial majority of those younger than 30 continue to say they get news more from time to time (74% now, 70% in 2008).

People with no more than a high school education also are now more likely to get news from time to time. Among this group, the percentage that says they get news from time to time increased from 49% in 2008 to 58%, while the number saying they get their news at regular times dropped from 47% to 36%. Majorities among both those with some college experience (59%) and those with a college degree (54%) say they seek out news from time to time. That also was the case in 2008.

Most See Some News Sources as More Trustworthy

Most Americans say they trust certain news sources more than others. Currently, 57% express this view, up slightly from 53% in 2008. About four-in-ten (39%) say they see all the news media as “pretty much the same.” That is down slightly from 43% in 2008 and 45% in 2006.

About three-quarters of conservative Republicans (76%) and 69% of liberal Democrats say they trust a few news sources more than others. Smaller majorities of other political groups express this view.

While there has been little change among Democratic groups on this question since 2008, an increasing number of conservative Republicans say they trust a few sources more than others; 76% express that view currently, compared with 65% in 2008.

Those with a college degree or more education are more likely than those with less education to say they trust certain sources more than others. Three-quarters (75%) of those with at least a college degree say they trust certain sources more, up from 69% in 2008. About six-in-ten (59%) of those with some college experience say this, as do 43% of those with a high school diploma or less education. Those numbers are little changed from 2008.

More Prefer News with No Point of View to their Point of View

About six-in-ten (62%) say they prefer getting political news from sources that do not have a particular point of view. A quarter (25%) says they prefer getting news from sources that share their political point of view. That is down slightly from 2008 when 66% said they preferred getting news from sources that do not have a specific point of view.

About four-in-ten conservative Republicans (41%) say they prefer to get news from sources that share their political point of view – the highest percentage of any political group. That compares with a third of liberal Democrats (33%) and only about one-in-five conservative and moderate Democrats (22%), moderate and liberal Republicans (20%), and independents (19%).

Roughly seven-in-ten (71%) of those with a college education or more say they prefer political news with no point of view, compared with just more than half (53%) of those with a high school diploma or less education. In terms of income, 70% of those with family incomes of $75,000 or more say they prefer news with no point of view; 54% of those with family incomes of $30,000 or less agree.

Majority Sees Bias in News Coverage

About eight-in-ten Americans (82%) say they see at least some bias in news coverage – 52% say they see a lot and 30% say they see some. By a wide margin, those who see bias in news coverage say it is a liberal bias; 43% of the public says there is more of a liberal bias while just 23% see more of a conservative bias.

Republicans, especially conservative Republicans, are more likely than other political groups to say they see a lot of press bias. More than six-in-ten Republicans (62%) say this, compared with 47% of Democrats and 53% of independents. About seven-in-ten Republicans (69%) say that bias tilts liberal. Among conservative Republicans, 72% see a lot of bias in news coverage and 79% say that bias tilts liberal.

Nearly half of Democrats (47%) say they see a lot of bias in coverage, while another 33% see some. Slightly more Democrats say they see a conservative bias (36%) than a liberal bias (28%).

But by nearly two-to-one (41% to 22%), more liberal Democrats see a conservative bias in news coverage than a liberal bias.

Independents largely mirror the public as a whole: 53% see a lot of bias and 30% see some. Fully 44% say that bias tilts liberal, while 21% say it tilts conservative.

Fewer of those with a high school degree or less say they see at least some bias than those with some college experience or a college degree or more education. About four-in-ten (39%) of those with a high school degree or less education say they see a lot of bias, compared with 58% of those with some college experience and 64% of those with a college degree or more education.

About half of those with at least a college degree (51%) say the bias tilts liberal, compared with 35% of those with no more than a high school education. Among those with some college experience, 48% perceive a liberal tilt.

Tracking the News for Work

More than a third of those employed full or part-time say that keeping up with the news is important to their jobs. That number has changed little in recent years, fluctuating from 35% in 2006 to 30% in 2008 and then up to 36% this year.

And, as in past surveys, those with at least a college degree are much more likely than those with less education to say it is important for their jobs to keep up with the news. Fully half of those with a college degree or more education say this, compared with 28% each of those with some college experience or a high school diploma or less education.

Those with annual family incomes of $75,000 or more are also more likely than those with smaller incomes to say keeping up with the news is important to their jobs. Nearly half (47%) of those earning at least $75,000 say this, compared with 21% of those earning less than $30,000 and 35% of those earning between $30,000 and $74,999.

Not surprisingly, those who say that keeping up with the news is important to their jobs are more avid news consumers. A majority (56%) of those who say the news is important for their job enjoy keeping up a lot, compared with 37% of those who say keeping up with the news is not important to their jobs.

And those who say keeping up with the news is important to their jobs are much more likely to go on-line from work. About seven-in-ten (69%) say they regularly go online from work, while just 38% of those who say it is not important to their jobs to keep up with the news say this.

Looking at all full and part-time workers, about half say they regularly go online at work (49%), while half say they do not.

Again, those with more education and higher family incomes are more likely go online regularly from their jobs. Fully 70% of those with a college degree or more education say they go online regularly at work. That compares with 46% of those with some college education and 30% of those with a high school education or less.

Similarly, two-thirds (67%) of those with family incomes of $75,000 or more say they regularly go online at work. That drops to 45% of those earning between $30,000 and $74,999 and 27% of those with incomes of less than $30,000.

Little Change in Book Reading

Though the public’s preferences for how they get news may be changing, the percentages that say they read a book in the past day have remained largely steady in recent years. Just more than a third of the public (35%) says they read a book yesterday. That is little changed from 38% in 2006 – the last time the question was asked – and matches the number that said they read a book yesterday in 2004.

Almost all of those who say they read a book in the past day say they read a printed book (95%). Despite the growing popularity of electronic book readers, just 4% say they read an electronic or digital book yesterday. Another 4% say they listened to an audio book.

Those who say they read a book yesterday are equally likely to say they read fiction as non-fiction: 16% of the public say they read fiction and 16% say non-fiction.

While young people are less likely than older Americans to get news on a typical day, there are no significant age differences in book reading. Fully 36% of those ages 18-29 say they read a book “yesterday,” compared with 33% of those 30-49, 36% of those 50-64 and 35% of those 65 and older.

Just about all of the book reading recorded in the survey – among all age groups – was of printed books. Just 2% of those ages 18-29 say they read an electronic book the previous day, compared with 6% of those ages 30-49, 5% of those ages 50-64 and 1% of those 65 and older.

Though still small, the percentages of the better educated and more affluent that say they read an electronic book yesterday are larger than for those with less education and lower incomes. For example, 7% of those with a college degree or more say they read an electronic book yesterday, compared with 2% for those with some college experience or no more than a high school diploma. Among those with household incomes of $75,000 or more, 7% say they read an electronic book yesterday, compared with 3% of those earning less than $75,000.

Magazine Readership Still Declining

While the trend for book reading shows little change, the percentage saying they read a magazine in the past day continues to decline. Currently, 19% say they read a magazine yesterday, down slightly from 23% in 2008. In 1994, 33% said they had read a magazine in the past day.

Those with at least a college degree (28%) are more likely than those with some college experience (19%) or a high school education or less (14%) to say they read a magazine in the previous day. Similarly, more people with family incomes of $75,000 or more (25%) say they read a magazine yesterday than those with incomes of between $30,000 and $74,999 (18%) and incomes of less than $30,000 (15%).

SECTION 4: WHO IS LISTENING, WATCHING, READING - AND WHY

Not all Americans are looking for the same things when they turn to the news. With the wide array of news sources now available, the regular audiences for various news outlets offer differing top reasons why those sources appeal to them. Regular CNN viewers, for example, overwhelmingly say they turn to CNN for the latest news and headlines, rather than for in-depth reporting, opinions about the news or entertainment. Many regular New York Times and Wall Street Journal readers value the publications for their in-depth reporting, and, not surprisingly, those who watch the Daily Show and Colbert Report regularly say overwhelmingly that they are mostly seeking entertainment – not the latest headlines and in-depth reporting – from those programs.

When it comes to cable news programs such as The Glenn Beck Program or The Rachel Maddow Show, roughly a third of regular viewers say they turn to these sources mainly for the interesting views and opinions they provide. Still, roughly the same numbers say they turn to these programs mostly for hard news.

While 64% of regular CNN viewers say they go there mostly for the latest news and headlines, only 44% of regular viewers of Fox News say the same. While about one-in-ten (11%) regular Fox News viewers say they turn to the channel mostly for “interesting views and opinions,” 22% volunteer that it is a combination of offerings – the mix of hard news, opinion and entertainment – that draws them to the network.

The same kind of pattern holds with NPR – 28% of regular listeners say there is no single aspect of NPR coverage that draws them in, but instead the combination of breaking news, in-depth reporting, interesting opinions and entertainment. And, though the show offers a different kind of content, many of Rush Limbaugh’s regular radio listeners say the same. While 37% say they mostly listen to Limbaugh for views and opinions, 28% say it is the combination of news, opinion and entertainment that they find appealing.

News magazines like Time, Newsweek and U.S. News, have a similar profile – many regular readers cite them as sources for headlines, in-depth reporting, and interesting views and opinions. The same can be said for political blogs and for Sunday morning television talk shows.

While a number of programs clearly appeal to overwhelmingly ideological audiences, not all viewers cite the views and opinions presented on those shows as the main reason they watch. For example, 80% of those who regularly watch Sean Hannity’s show say they are conservative, but only 39% say the views and opinions presented on the show are the main reason they watch. Nearly as many regular viewers (35%) say they turn to the show mainly for breaking news (14%) or in-depth reporting (21%).

The same is true at the other end of the spectrum: Rachel Maddow’s regular MSNBC audience is roughly twice-as-liberal as the national average, yet as many viewers cite her show as a source of breaking news and in-depth reporting as sources of opinion and viewpoints.

Audience Party and Ideology Profiles

More than half of the audiences for Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly and about six-in-10 of those who regularly watch Sean Hannity or listen to Rush Limbaugh say they are Republicans. Fully 80% of regular Hannity and Limbaugh viewers and listeners describe themselves as conservative, as do 74% of Beck’s and 72% of O’Reilly’s regular viewers. Among the general public, 36% describe themselves as conservative, while 37% are moderates and 19% are liberals.

Fox News overall has a larger regular audience than any of its individual opinion-oriented programs (23% of adults regularly watch Fox News, compared with 10% for O’Reilly, 7% for Beck, and 6% for Hannity). While the channel’s viewership tilts much more Republican and conservative than the population as a whole, that tilt is less pronounced for the channel as a whole than for the individual shows.

None of the leading conservative political shows has an audience with more than 10% Democrats – though a third of the public (33%) describes themselves as Democrats.

On the other hand, at least half of the audiences for MSNBC’s political talk programs – Hardball with Chris Matthews, the Rachel Maddow Show and Countdown with Keith Olbermann – say they are Democrats. Just 3% of Olbermann’s audience and 12% of Maddow’s viewers say they are Republicans. Looking at New York Times regular readers, 9% say they are Republicans, far less than the 25% of the American public that says they are Republicans.

Liberal-leaning shows have more liberals among their audiences than there are in the general population, but these programs also attract a lot of moderates. Olbermann’s audience has the largest share of liberals (43%), more than double the percentage for the overall population, but his audience has about as many moderates (42%); 12% of his regular viewers say they are conservative.

Audiences and Political Labels

Asked whether certain political labels applied to them, majorities of Americans say they are environmentalists (60%) or are pro-business (56%). About four-in-ten say they are Christian conservatives (43%), progressive (41%), NRA supporters (40%), or gay rights supporters (40%). Fewer say they are supporters of the Tea Party movement (25%) or that they are libertarian (18%).

Identification with these labels varies greatly across the various media audiences. Roughly three-quarters of Limbaugh (76%), Beck (76%) and Hannity (75%) regular audiences say they are Tea Party supporters, while just 10% of Maddow viewers, 8% of New York Times readers and 5% of Olbermann viewers say they support the Tea Party.

The differences are nearly as large when looking at Christian conservatives. At least seven-in-ten Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck and O’Reilly regular viewers say they are Christian conservatives. By contrast, just 12% of regular New York Times readers say so. Two-in-ten Olbermann viewers (20%) say this label applies to them, as do 29% of Maddow viewers and 28% of NPR listeners. About four-in-ten (41%) Hardball viewers say they are Christian conservatives, about the same as the public as a whole (43%).

Support for the NRA, the National Rifle Association, ranges from 76% of Limbaugh’s audience to 13% of regular readers of the New York Times. Audiences of the four conservative talk shows were most likely to call themselves supporters of the gun-owners lobby, while audiences of Olberman and Maddow were less likely to adopt the label than was any other audience – except for the readership of the New York Times. Four-in-ten Americans say they are NRA supporters.

Environmentalists, Progressives and Gay Right Supporters

Regular audiences of Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh and O’Reilly are the least likely to call themselves environmentalists, or to say that they are progressive. The term environmentalist is much more popular with a number of audiences: At least three-quarters of the audiences for Matthews, Olbermann, Maddow, MSNBC, the Daily Show, news magazines and NPR say this label applies to them.

The term progressive is less popular, but at least six-in-ten regular viewers of the Colbert Report, Maddow and CNN, plus NPR listeners and readers of the New York Times and news magazines call themselves progressive.

When it comes to support for gay rights, almost eight-in-ten New York Times readers (78%) say they are supporters, making them almost twice as likely as the American public (40%) to adopt this label. Just 22% of Hannity viewers and Limbaugh listeners are gay rights supporters.

The regular Hannity and Limbaugh audiences, along with Wall Street Journal readers and O’Reilly and Beck viewers, also are most likely to call themselves pro-business. At least half of every audience in the survey says they are pro-business.

Relatively small percentages of all news audiences – and just 18% of the public – describe themselves as libertarian. The proportion of libertarians ranges from 33% for Wall Street Journal readers to 13% for Maddow viewers.

Attitudes about Politics

As one might expect, audiences of liberal programming are much more likely to approve of the job President Obama is doing than are audiences of conservative programming. At least eight-in-ten Maddow and Olbermann viewers say they approve of the job Obama is doing, while 13% of O’Reilly viewers, 11% of Beck viewers, 9% of Limbaugh viewers and 7% of Hannity viewers approve. In this survey, just under half (48%) of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing.

New York Times readers express much higher approval (79%) of Obama than do USA Today (46%) or Wall Street Journal (39%) readers. Almost two-thirds of NPR viewers approve. Three-in-ten Fox News viewers approve, while about two-thirds of MSNBC and CNN watchers approve. Almost seven-in-ten watchers of the political humor shows the Colbert Report (68%) and the Daily Show (69%) approve of the job Obama is doing.

Views of Government

Americans overall are divided over whether the government is doing too much – or too little – to solve problems: 43% say the government should do more to solve problems, while 47% say the government does too much that is better left to businesses or individuals. Regular audiences for news blogs, local and national TV news and Sunday morning news and talk programs are divided along similar lines.

Audiences of the conservative political shows, however, are firmly in the government-does-too-much-camp. At least three quarters of the audiences for O’Reilly (77%), Beck (79%), Limbaugh (81%) and Hannity (84%) express this view. At the other end of the spectrum, about seven-in-ten Maddow viewers (69%) and six-in-ten Olbermann viewers (61%) say the government should do more to solve problems.

Views of News Media

Most Americans see some news sources as more trustworthy than others (57%), though much higher percentages of the regular audiences for many of the options in the survey agree with this statement. At least three-quarters of the regular audiences for 11 of the 24 sources say some sources are more trustworthy than others. And, as in the past, most Americans (62%) say they prefer to get news from sources that don’t have a particular point of view. A quarter (25%) says they want news that shares their point of view.

Viewers of both liberal and conservative talk shows are more evenly divided on whether they prefer news that shares their point of view than is the general public.

When evaluating news sources, viewers of Hannity (90%) and the other conservative hosts (84% each) are especially likely to say there are some sources they trust more than others. That is also the case for readers of the New York Times (85%) and the Wall Street Journal (84%). Conversely, regular television news watchers (nightly network news, morning news and local TV news) are about as likely as the general public to say some news sources are more trustworthy.

When it comes to mixing news and point of view, about 45% of the audiences regularly watching shows hosted by Hannity, Matthews, Beck and Maddow say they want news without a point of view. Almost as many say they want news from their own perspective. At the other end of the spectrum, at least seven-in-ten NPR listeners, Colbert Report and Daily Show watchers and USA Today readers say they want news without a point of view. Regular readers of blogs that cover news and politics are split along the same lines as the general public: 59% want news without a particular viewpoint, and 29% want news from their point of view.

Perceptions of Bias

About half of Americans (52%) say they see a lot of bias in news coverage, but regular audiences for many of the news sources in the survey are much more likely to say they see a lot of bias than the public as a whole.

Looking at partisans, Republicans generally see more bias in media coverage (62% a lot) than Democrats (47%) or independents (53%). The same holds true for conservatives (61%) when compared to moderates (49%) and liberals (46%).

Regular audiences for the more conservative shows are among the most likely to say they see a lot of bias in news coverage. Nine-in-ten Hannity viewers, 87% of Limbaugh’s regular audience and 81% of O’Reilly’s say they see a lot of bias in news coverage. Still, close to seven-in-ten (69%) regular viewers of Chris Matthews’ MSNBC show say this, while about six-in-ten of regular Maddow (60%) and Olbermann (59%) viewers agree. Among regular blog readers, 71% say they see a lot of bias in the news.

Viewers of morning news programs (51%), nightly network news (51%) and local TV news (52%) are less likely to say they see a lot of bias.

Audience Age and Profiles

Because younger people spend so much less time with the news than older people, the profile of most news audiences is substantially older than the nation as a whole. Still, there are a few key exceptions.

The late night Colbert Report audience is the youngest of the 24 studied: 53% of its regular viewers are 18 to 29, while just 23% of American adults are younger than 30. The Daily Show (41% younger than 30) and the New York Times (34%) also have younger regular audiences. Interestingly, the percentage of New York Times regular readers under 30 is more than double the 13% of regular daily newspaper readers in the 18-29 age group overall.

On the other hand, Sean Hannity’s show and Hardball with Chris Matthews have a lot of regular viewers who are 65 and older. While 17% of the country is in that age group, 30% of Hannity viewers and 35% of Hardball watchers are at least 65.

In terms of gender, many news audiences have roughly the same percentages of men and women watching, listening or reading. The proportions are more lopsided in the audiences of several media sources, however. Two thirds of the Wall Street Journal’s regular readership is male (67%), while one third is female (33%). The proportions are almost exactly reversed for regular watchers of morning news programs (32% men, 68% women). The Colbert Report and the Daily Show, as well as Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, all have more men than women in their audiences, while local and national TV news have more women than men among regular viewers.

Women have become a bigger part of the Hannity audience since 2008. Two years ago, women were 33% of Sean Hannity’s audience. This year, they are 45%.

Audience Income and Education Profiles

The Wall Street Journal and New York Times have the most highly educated – and the highest-income – audiences of the media sources measured. Fully 71% of regular Wall Street Journal readers have a college degree, as do 65% of regular Times readers. (Nationwide, three-in-ten adults have college degrees.) Most regular readers of these newspapers also have family incomes of at least $75,000 a year, compared with just 26% of all Americans who are at that income level. USA Today, news magazines and NPR also have particularly high-income audiences.

Knowledge of Politics and Current Events

Asked a series of four questions to test their knowledge about politics and current events, just 14% of the public got all four correct – as many got all four wrong (15%). Two-in-ten got three correct, 26% two and 25% one. Regular readers, viewers or listeners of most media sources outscored the general public.

People were asked which party currently controls the House of Representatives (Democrats), to identify the post held by Eric Holder (U.S. attorney general), which company is run by Steve Jobs (Apple) and which country has an active volcano that disrupted international air travel earlier this year (Iceland).

Wall Street Journal readers fared the best on the quiz—51% of regular Journal readers got all four questions right; just 3% got none right. New York Times readers also fared well: 42% got all of the questions right. USA Today readers scored better than the general public, but not nearly as well as Times or Journal readers; 22% of USA Today readers got all the questions correct, while 6% got all four wrong. As a whole, 22% of daily paper readers answered all the questions correctly.

Looking at the talk shows, at least 30% of the audiences for Limbaugh, Hannity, Olbermann and Maddow got all four questions correct. O’Reilly’s audience did about as well (29%). The regular Glenn Beck and Hardball audiences performed slightly worse, with 21% and 23% of their respective viewers getting all the questions correct. Daily Show and Colbert Report audiences fared about as well.

Overall, seven-in-ten Americans know that Democrats have a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. No media audience did poorly on this question, and 90% or more of the Hannity, Limbaugh and O’Reilly audiences got this right.

Far fewer know that Eric Holder is the attorney general. Just 22% got this question right. Wall Street Journal readers and Hannity viewers performed best on this question, with 56% of each audience answering it correctly.

About four-in-ten (41%) know that Steve Jobs is the head of Apple. Wall Street Journal (85%) and New York Times (80%) readers are especially likely to know this. Six-in-ten know that the volcanic eruption that recently disrupted international air travel is in Iceland. Journal (82% correct) and Times (81%) readers also did especially well on this question.

Cable News Audiences at a Glance

A comparison of the profiles of audiences for cable news outlets reveals substantial partisan and ideological differences. CNN, Fox News and MSNBC all attract roughly the same proportions of women and men and young people and old people as regular viewers. But while Republicans make up 17% of the CNN audience and 14% of the MSBNC audience, they are a much bigger share of the Fox audience: 44%, and these are overwhelmingly conservative Republicans (34% of the total).

Democrats, meanwhile, make up 21% of Fox’s audience, but 47% of CNN’s and 53% of MSNBC’s. Liberal Democrats make up just 3% of the Fox cable network’s audience.

Fox’s regular viewers are much more likely to call themselves Christian conservatives, to be NRA supporters and to be Tea Party supporters than are regular watchers of the other cable networks. CNN and MSNBC audiences are more likely to call themselves environmentalists, progressives and gay rights supporters than are Fox viewers.

Major Newspaper Audiences at a Glance

In many respects, regular readers of daily newspapers look very much like the country as a whole, but readers of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today differ a great deal from one another and from newspaper readers in general.

Readers of each of the three national papers are more likely to be male than are regular readers of all daily newspapers. This is especially the case for the Wall Street Journal: Two-thirds of its readership is male. Fully a third of the New York Times’ regular readership is younger than 30, more than twice the percentage for daily papers overall and a higher share than for the Journal or USA Today.

Regular readers of the Wall Street Journal (71%) and New York Times (65%) are much more likely to have graduated from college than are readers of USA Today (45%) or readers of newspapers overall (40%). The audiences for all three major papers come from households with higher family income, but the difference is more dramatic for the Times and Journal.

Politically, the papers’ audiences are very different. Just 9% of the New York Times’ regular readers are Republicans, but at least a third of Journal (36%) and USA Today (33%) readers are Republicans. Democrats (49%) — liberal Democrats in particular (26%) — are a much bigger part of the New York Times’ readership than of the other papers.

New York Times readers are much more likely to say they are gay rights supporters and progressives than are readers of the Wall Street Journal or USA Today. Times readers are much less likely to call themselves Tea Party supporters, NRA supporters or Christian conservatives than are readers of the other two national papers. Journal readers are more likely to say they are pro-business than are readers of the other papers, though clear majorities of all three audiences say they are pro-business.

SECTION 5: NEWS MEDIA CREDIBILITY

The public continues to take a skeptical view of reporting from the major news outlets. No more than a third says they can believe all or most of the reporting by 14 major news organizations.

There has been little change in public views of media credibility since 2008. Since the late 1990’s, however, there has been significant erosion in the believability ratings of several news organizations.

For example, since 1998 ABC News, CBS News and NBC News have all seen substantial declines in the percentages saying they believe all or most of what they say (among those who say they can rate those organizations). Currently, about two-in-ten say they believe all or most information from ABC News (21%), CBS News (21%) and NBC News (20%) – down from about three-in-ten in 1998.

The longer-term declines can be seen across different media groups as well. Since 1998, CNN and the Wall Street Journal, for example, have experienced double-digit declines in the percentages saying they can believe all or most of their reporting (a rating of four on a scale of one to four). Currently, 29% say they can believe all or most of the reporting of CNN and 25% say the same about the Wall Street Journal.

The credibility ratings for Fox News (27% today) and 60 Minutes (33%) have shown less change over the past decade. And NPR is the only news organization whose credibility rating has improved since 1998 – 28% now give it the top rating compared with 19% a dozen years ago.

National newspapers fare relatively poorly when it comes to public perceptions of media credibility. Just two-in-ten (20%) of those who offer a rating for the New York Times say they can believe all or most of what it says and just 17% say the same about USA Today. Those numbers have fluctuated only slightly since 2004. Local daily news newspapers are seen in largely the same way (21% get the highest credibility rating).

Majorities give each of the news organizations included on the survey a credibility rating of three or four on the four-point scale. Relatively small percentages give the organizations a one – meaning they can believe “almost nothing” of what the news organization reports.

Partisan Gaps in Credibility Ratings

Republicans have long viewed the overall media more skeptically than Democrats and this continues to be reflected in credibility ratings for individual news outlets. Republicans express far less confidence than Democrats in most major outlets. The Fox News Channel stands out as the only news organization that more Republicans than Democrats view as highly credible.

Democrats are at least twice as likely as Republicans to give the highest believability ratings to CNN, NPR, MSNBC and the New York Times.

About four-in-ten (41%) Republicans say they believe all or most of what the Fox News Channel says, by far the highest believability rating offered by Republicans. By contrast, 21% of Democrats give a believability rating of four to Fox News, among the lowest rating given by Democrats to any outlet.

Local TV news, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today receive about the same ratings from Republicans and Democrats. For example, 28% of Republicans and 33% of Democrats say they believe all or most of what the Wall Street Journal says.

Widening Gaps in Credibility Ratings of Cable News Channels

In recent years, the divides between Democrats and Republicans have grown in judging the credibility of the cable news outlets. In 2000, about equal percentages of each said they could believe all or most of what Fox News said (26% Republicans, 27% Democrats). Since then time, Fox News’ credibility rating among Republicans has increased (now 41%). As a result, there is now a 20-point partisan gap in Fox News’ credibility ratings.

Republican credibility ratings for MSNBC have fallen over the past decade, from 24% in 2000 to 13% today. Democrats’ ratings have changed little over this period (now 34%). As a result, partisan differences over MSNBC’s credibility (21 points) are as large as those over Fox News.

Similarly, there is sizable partisan divide in perceptions of CNN’s credibility; 19% of Republicans say they believe all or most of what they see or hear on CNN, compared with 40% of Democrats.

COMMENTARY

A NEW PHASE IN OUR DIGITAL LIVES
A commentary on the findings by Tom Rosenstiel, Director of the
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism

Some people describe it as The End of the Internet, though that is probably a misnomer.

Others, at the risk of cliché, might call it News 3.0.

Maybe the best way to understand what is occurring today with the way people interact with the news and technology is to think of it as the end of our digital childhood.

By whatever term you give it, the latest biennial survey on news consumption from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reveals signs of a new phase, perhaps even a new era, in the acquisition and consumption of news.

And there is every reason to expect the shift will only accelerate now with a new wave of technology devices – from smartphones to iPad-style devices – which the data do not fully measure.

In the last two years, people have begun to do more than replace old news platforms with new ones. Instead, the numbers suggest that people are beginning to exploit the capacity of the technology to interact with information differently.

This notion – that we are beginning to use the tools differently without necessarily abandoning the old ones – can be seen first in the amount of time people spend getting news. Compared with much of the past decade, people say they are spending more time each day acquiring or interacting with news.

In addition to the roughly one hour they spend with traditional platforms – which is largely unchanged from a decade ago – on average they spend another 13 minutes a day getting news online. Traditional platform use has stabilized (or has declined only slightly) in the last few years. And the online numbers, as the survey report notes, do not include time spent getting news on cell phones or other digital devices, the arena where news producers are now focusing so much of their effort and seeing so much potential.
The data reinforce findings that we began to see earlier this year when the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Internet and American Life Project collaborated on a survey that explored the new participatory culture for news. That survey asked a new battery of questions and opened up new areas of inquiry. The newest People-Press survey also tracks the trends on long-standing questions, adding to our knowledge about these shifts.

Why have we moved into this new phase -- where people are not simply replacing old technologies with new but using new ones for different things or in different ways, augmenting their more traditional behavior?

One explanation is that the content is changing. News producers are beginning to understand how they can deliver news in new ways to create new understanding, whether through the use of online graphics, customizing news to fit a consumer’s interest or location, or recognizing the public as a community that participates in the news rather than an audience that receives it. Another factor is improved connections and faster speeds that bring the technology’s potential to life. A third is that consumers themselves are changing, recognizing that each platform has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. The strength of an aggregator or search engine, which allows someone to find answers to his or her own specific questions, is very different from the agenda-setting power of a newscast or a newspaper front page (even online), in which the news is ordered and presented for you. The power of a social networking site to tell you what people you know are thinking about or reading is different than the convenience of using a smartphone on the spur of the moment to check a fact or scan a headline.

And these notions are reinforced in the data about why people say they use different media. News has many different functions in our lives; the proliferation of devices, platforms and products makes that variety more recognizable for us as consumers. The quick scan of news we might get from a cell phone is a different experience from the deeper interaction that users of the iPad say that they experience with those devices. The survey data show this is even true for traditional media. A large majority of regular CNN viewers say they turn to it for the latest news and headlines, while Bill O’Reilly’s viewers turn to him for interesting views and opinions. The numbers reveal USA Today has a different function for its readers (primarily the latest headlines) than do the two other national papers in the United States, the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, which are more valued for in-depth reporting.

The numbers also reveal some older publications, because of their strengths, are appealing to new audiences in ways they almost certainly never could have without the creative destruction and promise of the digital age. Regular readers of The New York Times are young – 34% are younger than 30, compared with 23% of the public – suggesting that a new generation of readers is discovering virtues of the newspaper that had been known as the Old Gray Lady. The growing popularity of search engines, directing people to sites like nytimes.com, apparently has had an effect.

It all points to something we might have forgotten. The medium may not quite be the message, as Marshall McLuhan argued two generations ago. But the medium does make a difference. Different platforms serve us differently, and there is now more evidence people are integrating all of them into their lives.

ABOUT THE SURVEY

Results for this survey are based on telephone interviews conducted under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International among a national sample of 3,006 adults living in the continental United States, 18 years of age or older, from June 8-28, 2010 (2,005 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 1,001 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 392 who had no landline telephone). Both the landline and cell phone samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English. For detailed information about our survey methodology, see http://people-press.org/methodology/.

The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race/ethnicity, region, and population density to parameters from the March 2009 Census Bureau's Current Population Survey. The sample is also weighted to match current patterns of telephone status and relative usage of landline and cell phones (for those with both), based on extrapolations from the 2009 National Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also accounts for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell phones have a greater probability of being included in the combined sample and adjusts for household size within the landline sample. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take into account the effect of weighting.

The following table shows the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey:

In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.

About the Center

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is an independent opinion research group that studies attitudes toward the press, politics and public policy issues. We are sponsored by The Pew Charitable Trusts and are one of seven projects that make up the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan "fact tank" that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.

The Center's purpose is to serve as a forum for ideas on the media and public policy through public opinion research. In this role it serves as an important information resource for political leaders, journalists, scholars, and public interest organizations. All of our current survey results are made available free of charge.

All of the Center’s research and reports are collaborative products based on the input and analysis of the entire Center staff consisting of:

Andrew Kohut, Director
Scott Keeter, Director of Survey Research
Carroll Doherty and Michael Dimock, Associate Directors
Michael Remez, Senior Writer
Leah Christian and Jocelyn Kiley, Senior Researchers
Robert Suls, Shawn Neidorf and Alec Tyson, Research Associates
Jacob Poushter, Research Analyst
Mattie Ressler and Danielle Gewurz, Research Assistants

More than the past

2010-09-12T19:07:00.001-07:00

Personalization, in the past, has meant something like putting your initials on your shirt, as personified by the Personalization Mall.

But Personalize MEdia means much more than that. Personalize MEdia means turning the virtual world where we live exactly as we wish, into a physical place. Such as taking a keyword search from MyYahoo and having it paginated into a printed page.

http://www.personalizationmall.com/Default.aspx?utm_source=linkshare&utm_medium=affiliate&siteID=WsTZ0lApxRM-3GMYDY5TTMyVJa5pLI8lqg

What makes VDP possible?

2010-09-11T19:41:00.001-07:00

Targeted advertising. That simple. All of the business models that embrace personalization -- whether it's online, in print, on an e-reader or out of a home printer -- get their jam from advertising CPMs north of the $1 online and the $50 in print.

That' s what this chart is all about. Showing this.

Let's look back

2010-09-08T12:47:00.000-07:00

MINE. What an exciting experiment that was.

Here's a good video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq084TqQjtk&feature=related

Worth a thousand words

2010-09-08T07:33:00.001-07:00

For many people personalizing their world news means thumbing through pictures with helpful cutlines. It's fast, it's exciting, it's comprehensive, it's insightful, it's beautiful.

My experience with the Reuters app on the I-pad reinforces that approach. Swishing through a day's pictures with the flick of my forefinger couldn't be more satisfying.

And now word that the Big Picture, the Boston Globe's world news in pictures and its most popular blog, has been readied for the I-pad with a $2.99 a month app. That's exciting.

Visit http://www.editorandpublisher.com/Departments/Online/boston-coms-the-big-picture-blog-now-an-iphoneipad-app-62532-.aspx

The full story:

Boston.com's The Big Picture Blog Now an iPhone/iPad App

By: E&P Staff

Published: September 07, 2010

NEW YORK
The Big Picture, Boston.com's popular blog, is now available as an iPad and iPhone app. The photo blog presents news stories solely through large-format, high-quality photographs gathered from news services worldwide.

The Big Picture's wide range of coverage recently has included Iceland's volcano eruption, the war in Afghanistan, and the World Cup. It also presents photography of more timeless subjects, such as astronomy.

New photo essays are posted each Monday, Wednesday and Friday each week.

The blog won two Webby Awards last year for Best Use of Photography, both juried and people's voice. It has also been nominated for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Web Awards and Editor & Publisher's Eppy Awards.

"Far and away, The Big Picture is our most popular blog, with a worldwide following," Robert Kempf, vice president of digital for Boston.com, said in a statement. "It's able to tell a story that is moving and meaningful, through a medium that needs no translation."

"The Big Picture from Boston.com" app is $2.99 and includes versions optimized for the iPad and iPhone. The app can be downloaded from the Apple App Store.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-big-picture-from-boston/id370709214?mt=8

The Boston.com portal is owned by The New York Times Co.

Turnaround

2010-09-07T15:40:00.000-07:00

I love this video for several reasons. First, as with most things on the web, it is time-stamped 2007. This type of explanatory video was all the rage in 2007. Second, it explains RSS very, very well. At the heart of this video is an illustration with someone sitting at a computer and two boxes to the right, one marked "blogs" and the other marked "news" and the moderator explains by arrows from the person at the computer to the boxes that the OLD way of finding out what is new in the "blogs" and the "news" sources was to reach out to them and search them.

Then he says brilliantly, but the NEW way can be explained by turning those arrows around so they point from the "blogs" box and the "news" box to the person at the computer. In other words, RSS automatically sends you the new "blogs" and "news."

In my book, turning those arrows around explains everything from RSS to the web in general to KNOWLEDGE. As strange as it seems knowledge, which used to come from outside of us from the larger world, now comes from inside of us (where the larger world really is and always has been). That doesn't sound workable in today's world, but it's true. Knowledge is more and more what we say it is not what ANY external authority says it is.

Watch it yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU.

We're mad as hell

2010-09-07T15:19:00.000-07:00

Funny, on the internet, how this happens. How did I find this post, which was a speech delivered in France more than a week ago? Because I have a friend who I sincerely respect, who on occasion I check in with, although I'm in Colorado and he's in West Virginia, and I'm in media and he's in academia and somewhere on his page, not high up, but somewhere he had this link that I followed and shazam here it is. You can feel that you are part of a group of people worldwide communicating in a new language. Beautiful.

You are going to have to do a little bit of work here. You need to go to Jay Rosen's blog -- http://jayrosen.posterous.com/ -- and search Sept. 6, 2010. That's where you will find "The Journalists formerly known as the Media: My advice to the next generation." You will also find embedded in that blog the famous scene from the movie NETWORK where Howard Beale tells the world on TV and inspires the world to be liberated from TV with "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."

This is Jay Rosen's speech to a group of incoming French journalism students.

Your own hero

2010-09-06T18:46:00.001-07:00

Want to be your own hero, and get points toward future purchases from today's purchases. Anywhere you carry your I-Phone. Well here's the web version, as usual on steroids compared to the past. You go into a store, launch an app off you I-phone and then hit the barcodes of the items on the shelf to discover how many points you'll get if you buy. And by just reading the barcode you are racking up points to attain new status such as "King" of the sugar doughnuts.

Check out the URL: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/16/barcode-hero/

And the full techcrunch story by MG Siegler, Aug. 16, 2010:

You’re likely aware of Foursquare, the location-based service that turns checking-in to venues into a game of sorts. You may also be aware of StickyBits, an app that turns barcodes into message boards. What do you get when you combine them? Barcode Hero, a new product by Kima Labs, a startup founded by two Amazon veterans.

The main idea behind the service is an app that attempts to make shopping more social. A user takes their phone into a store, launches the app, and starts scanning the barcodes of items they’re interested in. Doing so unlocks points and rewards such as dukedoms and kingships — yes, the Foursquare idea, but here it’s for product categories. More importantly, this scanning allows Barcode Hero to build up a database of information and will help them to personalize your shopping experience.

“We want to attack in-store shopping,” co-founder Blake Scholl tells us. Personalization has revolutionized shopping online, Scholl says. But there’s very little of that in actual stores, he notes. Obviously, this is the Amazon influence at play — both Scholl and co-founder Jason Crawford worked at the online retailing giant for several years. Both then moved on to Pelago, makers of the location-based app Whrrl, where they clearly got the app itch.

What’s nice about the app is that it’s simple. From the moment you launch it, it’s very clear what you’re supposed to do: find a barcode and scan it. It’s also a bit addicting to see yourself gaining points and moving past other users in certain product categories as you battle for the aforementioned dukedoms and kingships. And doing other actions such as recommending a product or writing a short review will get you even more points.

Obviously, all of this is to entice users to help Barcode Hero build out this recommendation service. But the app is also helpful because it provides price comparisons via a deal with PriceGrabber. This is in line with what a few other apps in the barcode scanning space do, such as Red Laser and ShopSavvy. But Crawford notes that they’re different because they’re mainly focused on the social aspect.

In that regard they may be more like Blippy or Swipely — but those products are only on the web. While Barcode Hero has a website, the main focus are these apps. At first, this is only an iPhone app, but the plan is to expand to other platforms quickly.

And then, of course, there’s Shopkick, one of the newer hot startups in the social shopping space. Today, that service formally launched their broad partnership with Best Buy retails stores. But Shopkick seems more focused on the geo-based coupon aspect of in-store shopping. Barcode Hero wants to be the recommendation arm of that experience. Of course, getting users to use multiple apps to enrich the shopping experience will be difficult.

Barcode Hero’s goal is to be the one app you go to when you enter a store. “That’s a very monetizable place to be,” Crawford says. They expect both brands and merchants to be very interested in this, and note plenty of interest already. Scholl also is quick to say that while coupons remain very much on the table, they don’t want to get into that space too early. They want to build up the social graph and perfect the user experience first.

Today, they’re also announcing they have the cash to do just that. Kima Labs has raised a $770,000 seed round from an impressive roster of angels including SV Angel (Ron Conway), Naval Ravikant, Owen Van Natta and several former senior executives from Amazon.com, Google, Facebook, and Wal-Mart. The Washington Post Company also made a strategic investment as part of the round, we’re told.

You can find Barcode Hero in the App Store here. Apple just recently began featuring it as one of their “New & Noteworthy” apps, so that social graph should be growing quickly already.

Fashion for me

2010-09-05T15:17:00.000-07:00

Personalized shopping on the internet. That's what covet.com, which just got bought by GOOGLE, promises. The site uses visual search as it is called. In other words you look at styles that you like or don't like, vote on them, and then the site goes and searche clothes (on sale) for you.

(the URL: http://www.covet.com/hon?alt=true)

New media wild west

2010-08-31T09:34:00.000-07:00

Anyone toiling in the fields of new media, must come to grips with their own sense of fair play (or to use the legal term: fair use) in order to keep toiling.

That's why in all my blogs I always site the actual URL and copy and paste the full story I'm referencing. In my world, I'm just commenting on work someone else has done. I'm not co-opting. And I want to give them full credit and full disclosure, so the point they obviously were trying to make is clear (and separate from mine) so my interpretation or spin becomes icing on the cake.

If YOU want some guidance in fashioning your own sense of fair play, here it is, an annotated study of digital law.

(The url is: http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2010/whos-afraid-news-aggregators)

The full story:

Who's Afraid of the News Aggregators?

Posted August 30th, 2010 by Kimberley Isbell
in Aggregation CMLP Fair Use Hot News Misappropriation Journalism
As anyone who has been following the debate regarding the "future of journalism" knows, there have been a lot of ink (and bytes) spilled arguing over the role news aggregators are playing in the "decline" of traditional journalistic models. Rupert Murdoch has labeled the practice of news aggregation by entities like Google News "theft," and a professor from the Wharton Business School recently called on lawmakers to amend the copyright laws to prevent aggregators from posting any portion of news stories for a full 24 hours after their initial publication. Even the FTC has gotten in on the act, listing "Additional Intellectual Property Rights to Support Claims against News Aggregators" as the first policy proposal in the Staff Discussion Draft recently released in connection with its workshop series on "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" (To which Google had a thoughtful reply.)

But for all of the heated rhetoric blaming news aggregators for the decline of journalism, the fall of civilization and male pattern baldness, many are still left asking the question: are news aggregators violating current law?

Today, CMLP releases a white paper entitled "The Rise of the News Aggregator: Legal Implications and Best Practices" that attempts to answer that question by examining the hot news misappropriation and copyright infringement claims that are often asserted against aggregators, and to provide news aggregators with some "best practices" for making use of third-party content.

A hearty thanks goes out to the people that helped make this paper possible: Justin Silverman, for invaluable research assistance; David Ardia and Sam Bayard, for reading and critiquing numerous drafts; and the speakers from the "Saving Journalism from Itself? Hot News, Copyright Fair Use and News Aggregation" panel at our spring conference, for helping to frame and crystalize many of the issues.

You can download the report here.

(The URL for that report link is: http://www.citmedialaw.org/sites/citmedialaw.org/files/news%20aggregation%20white%20paper.pdf)

Painting vs. photography

2010-08-30T06:31:00.000-07:00

More than 150 years ago photography threatened to displace art as the locus of visual reality. But geniuses such as the French Impressionists and later the Cubists and Futurists and Dadaists in Europe and then the abstract expressionists in America propelled painting from the mundane representational world into the universe of ontology.

And painting has never looked back. So with media and the internet.

The internet is a much better medium for news and information and opinion and rumor and innuendo and discussion. Media will have to become more of the ontological record of humankind. Media will have to embrace all of the instincts and practices and contexts of the web, but remain a record, not a network. An expression, not a notation.

YouData newspaper

2010-08-26T13:08:00.001-07:00

A.H.Belo has signed on with YouData to give readers in East Los Angeles the ability to get paid for clicking on ads on the Riverside, CA-based Press-Enterprise's website PE.com.

This new advertising model maybe moving out of the virtual world into the physical world.

(Vist http://blog.youdata.com/)

YouData and The Press-Enterprise Launch A New Permission-Based Advertising Model On PE.com.

A brand new ad model that delivers the ultimate in permission-based, opt-in advertising by allowing readers to determine the type of ads they want to see.

(PRWEB) May 4, 2010 -- Houston-based YouData, Inc. (YouData.com (http://www.youdata.com)), a new kind of ad network that bills itself as "the world's first attention payment system", has partnered with Riverside, CA-based The Press-Enterprise (PE.com (http://www.pe.com)), an A. H. Belo (http://www.belo.com) publication, to bring Press-Enterprise online readers an innovative new way of interacting with advertising.

Advertisers and consumers get matched up based on compatible traits in private opt-in consumer profiles called "MeFiles". Advertisers then bid to buy ultra-targeted attention directly from the source; the consumers themselves, who get paid for engaging with the ads.

According to Trae Nickelson, President of YouData, "Our model provides consumers with incentive to define the type of ads that interest them and to give high quality attention to those ads that do. By putting all the right incentives in place, advertising just works better, and everybody's happy - consumers, advertisers, and publishers."

Anita Davis, Director of National & Major Accounts at The Press-Enterprise, says that YouData's product "offers what our advertisers have been asking for - a way to pay for and deliver ads to the right audience. YouData is giving a lot of control to the advertiser and removing a lot of the risk. We expect it to be a great addition to our portfolio of advertising solutions."

YouData's CEO Jim Prather says, "We are proud and excited to count PE.com as our first major newspaper partner. When we first met the PE team, it was immediately apparent how genuinely committed they are to serving their readership and community. So when they decided that our advertising solution was worthy to present to their readers and advertisers, we considered it real validation of what YouData is doing."

"We think our readers are going to enjoy this”, says Ron Redfern, Publisher and CEO of The Press-Enterprise. “It will be interesting to see how the test of this new ad model plays out."

To see this experiment in advertising in action, visit www.pe.com (http://www.pe.com).

To learn more about YouData, visit www.youdata.com.

----------------------------------

About the Press-Enterprise Company

The Press-Enterprise Company, a Riverside-based subsidiary of A. H. Belo Corporation, is a multimedia company serving Inland Southern California. The company publishes news and information in print and online via The Press-Enterprise, the region’s largest daily newspaper and PE.com, the region’s largest local online Web site reaching a combined total of nearly 900,000 readers. Through other print and online products including The Business Press, a weekly business journal; La Prensa, weekly Spanish-language newspapers serving the region's diverse Hispanic community; and InlandSoCal.com, the Press-Enterprise Company products reach nearly 1.5 million people each month in the Inland Southern California region.

About A. H. Belo Corporation

A. H. Belo Corporation (NYSE: AHC), headquartered in Dallas, Texas, is a distinguished newspaper publishing and local news and information company that owns and operates four daily newspapers and a diverse group of Web sites. A. H. Belo publishes The Dallas Morning News, Texas’ leading newspaper and winner of eight Pulitzer Prizes since 1986; The Providence Journal, the oldest continuously-published daily newspaper in the U.S. and winner of four Pulitzer Prizes; The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, CA), serving southern California’s Inland Empire region and winner of one Pulitzer Prize; and the Denton Record-Chronicle. The Company publishes various specialty publications targeting niche audiences, and its partnerships and/or investments include the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium and Classified Ventures, owner of cars.com. A. H. Belo also owns direct mail and commercial printing businesses. Additional information is available at www.ahbelo.com or by contacting David A. Gross, vice president/Investor Relations and Strategic Analysis, at 214-977-4810.

About YouData, Inc.

YouData, Inc., a brand new ad network headquartered in Houston, Texas, bills itself as the world's first "attention payment system". YouData allows consumers to package and sell their own attention directly to interested advertisers. Consumers build MeFile™ accounts in which they voluntarily describe key consumer characteristics and interests. Advertisers use the same traits to define precise target audiences and have their advertisements matched to exactly the targeted consumer every time. Ad irrelevancy is virtually eliminated, and a high value engagement between consumer and ad is delivered every time. Publishers hosting this high-value exchange gain an effective additional revenue source, while providing a new level of value to both reader and advertiser.

Personalize shoes?

2010-08-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

In sports, this is not so weird. Remember Michael Jordan came out with his own line of shoes, but, of course, you could buy those and there were tens of thousands of them sold, so in the end, that wasn't personalized.

And from time to time you have seen athletes sharpie onto their helmet or shoes or even their faces the number or name of an inspirational person to give them more courage during competition.

Here, today, is an example of a hybrid. An unknown (not megastar like Michael Jordan) personalizing her shoe with the word "courage," but instead of using a sharpie, she is using the manufacturer, Addidas.

(Visit http://sports.yahoo.com/tennis/blog/busted_racquet/post/Melanie-Oudin-will-need-a-lot-of-what-her-U-S-O?urn=ten-264826)

Read the whole story on Yahoo Sports:

Last year, Melanie Oudin "believed" her way into the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open. This year, the 18-year-old will try to break out of her recent slump with some "courage."
Oudin will take to the court at this year's Open with personalized adidas shoes emblazoned with the word "COURAGE." Last year, her "BELIEVE" shoes became one of the major stories of the tournament, thanks to their folksy orgin, bright colors and Oudin's magical run to the quarters. This year, she and adidas opted for less mantra and more fortitude:
"The reason I chose the word COURAGE is because in order to believe you have to have the courage to do so. Courage to me means playing with no fear and going for it no matter what. You can believe in yourself so much but unless you have the courage to go on the court and put yourself on the line every time you won't make it. You need courage and belief to make it to the top."
Oudin is going to need all the courage she can get in Flushing Meadows. She's just 18-23 since last year's Open run and a first-round loss could drop her as far as No. 90 in the rankings. Barring a deep run at Flushing Meadows, Oudin's ranking will drop far enough where she'll be forced to play qualifiers at most major tourneys.
Maybe the shoe should have said "MIRACLE" instead.

Mashable me

2010-08-11T05:29:00.001-07:00

What's more natural then getting all your news from your friends and extended family, i. e. thought leaders in the worldspace you share. One caveat may be to make sure there is at least one traditionally minded friend about major events in the world.

(where you can find the story: http://mashable.com/2010/08/10/personalized-news-stream/)

Or read about it here:

The social network of a reader is quickly becoming their personalized news wire. That’s because in the last five years, a revolutionary shift has taken place in the way we consume news. We have gone from consuming news through traditional media and news websites to having the news broadcast to us by our social network of friends. In fact, 75% of news consumed online is through shared news from social networking sites or e-mail. Social news is finding us.

Readers who still actively seek out the news want, and almost expect, it to be personalized and customized to their tastes and interests. News organizations, social networks and technology companies are all attempting to respond with sites and tools that address this changing shift toward a personalized social news stream.

Personalization of News and the New Social Editors
The shift toward personalization of news is in many ways a response to the problem of noise, but also a shift from trust in news organizations to the individual people you know who now often act as curators. Jay Rosen, New York University journalism professor and media critic said, with credit to Clay Shirky, that “there’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.”

“The social stream is a means to filter success. Relying on friends and a personal network to filter the news and point out the best stuff solves that problem Shirky identified,” Rosen said.

Also, the trust that readers place in people they know isn’t the same as the trust they place in news organizations, Rosen said. But prior to the evolution of the web to its current social state, people who you know couldn’t be news sources the same way that big media companies could. But now in a sense they are able to, he said. That’s because people have an influential voice in the new and social distribution model, and are just as integrated into the conversation around the news as the news makers themselves (and many times they are the ones to make the news too).

“People can use the [Facebook] news feed and their Twitter streams as their editors,” Rosen said.

Friends as Your News Wire
News organizations that see this shift are hoping to enlist users as their “editors” by making it easier for them to engage their content on social platforms. Some companies, like National Public Radio, are starting to pay attention to their audiences in the social space and are investing resources to learn about their consumption habits.

After having a presence on Facebook for more than two years, NPR decided to take a closer look at its more than 1 million Facebook fans with a survey. Andy Carvin, senior strategist at NPR, said he had a certain hypotheses, including one that stemmed from his own reliance on his Twitter and Facebook friends for news: Do people really use their social network to get news? After more than 40,000 responses to the survey, 74.6% said that Facebook was a major way in which they received news and information from NPR, and 72.3% said they “expect” their friends to share links to interesting information and news stories with them online.

“It’s not that people have lost interest in the news, it’s that they have shifted platforms,” Carvin said.

Realizing the shifts in consumption behavior, Facebook is beginning to partner with, and provide resources for, news organizations and publishers to more effectively use the platform. Most noticeably, you can now see what your Facebook friends have “liked” or “recommended” on sites like CNN or Washington Post. Washington Post, for example, has prominently integrated Facebook’s Social Plugins into its site for a social news experience:

Wearing Woe

2010-08-02T06:06:00.000-07:00

As the virtual world gets physical, what surprises me is that it shows up first in a museum. But then again, maybe that is appropriate because this movement is essentially esthetic (unnecessary except for the soul).

Clothes that reveal your mood, is the invention of the day.

Here's the URL: http://www.technewsdaily.com/smart-clothing-responds-to-wearers-emotions-0669/

‘Smart’ Clothing Responds to Wearer’s Emotions
By Michelle Bryner, TechNewsDaily Contributor

08 June 2010 11:56 AM ET

High-tech clothing with embedded biosensors and an Internet connection could respond to your mood and help you get through the day.

The new “smart” clothing contains wireless biosensors that measure heart rate and temperature (among other physiological indicators), small speakers, and other electronics that wirelessly connect to a handheld smartphone or PDA. Data from the sensors is sent to the handheld where it is converted into one of 16 emotional states, which cues a previously setup database to send the wearer some inspirational message.

These "mood memos" could be a text message, which scrolls on a display on the garment’s sleeve, a video or photograph displayed on the handheld device, or a sound that comes through the embedded speakers.

The researchers have made two prototype garments so far, a male and a female version, and plan to display them at museums over the next two years. They are also looking at medical and fashion applications.

The sounds, photos and videos sent to the wearer aren’t arbitrary. Instead, the messages are spoken by a friend or loved one.

“When you first wear the garment, you turn on the device and you tell it what person you want to channel that day,” said Barbara Layne, professor at Concordia University and co-developer of the garments. “That could be your lover who’s away, it could be your deceased parent, your best friend, whoever you want to be with that day.”

The multimedia is pre-loaded into a database for each person the wearer wants to virtually hang out with.

“[At] multiple times during the day, you can set it for as many times as you want, [the garment] will take your biometric readings, your bio-sensing data, analyze it on that emotional map and then go up to the Internet, to the database that relates that emotional state, and bring you back something that you need,” Layne said.

Layne and co-developer Janis Jefferies, professor at the University of London’s Goldsmiths, along with their team members have not yet pursued commercial applications but are seeing a lot of interest.

“The interest is really huge from all kinds of sectors,” Layne said. One example is the medical area, which could use the smart clothing “to promote well-being maybe for someone who’s ill, either house-bound or in a hospital where wearing this kind of jacket can make them feel better,” Layne said.

In the future, the researchers hope to work with a behavioral psychologist to improve the model used to convert the physical data – heart rate and temperature, for example – into an emotional state

Feeling Wanted

2010-08-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

Liberating the internet into the physical world continues to be an adventure, probably lead by MIT's Media Lab.

This is the story of a vest that massages you at the behest of your social media friends.

That's right. So you're feeling a little punk, and you text your friends, who text back to the vest you are wearing, thus igniting the internal washers that create a massaging experience. It's the next best thing to them standing next to you and massaging your back to make you feel better. That's age-old and natural.

(Here's the URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38430916/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/)

Here's the whole story:

by Stuart Fox

LOS ANGELES — With its hugs, pokes and even vampire bites, social networking sites have always integrated the idea of physical contact into their virtual relationships. But a new project, SOS: Stress Outsourced, adds a dimension to social networking by transforming the metaphorical touching into an actual physical sensation: a massage delivered by a wired, motorized jacket.
The jacket, on display here at this year’s SIGGRAPH interactive technology and computer graphics, links to a website through a Wi-Fi chip in one of the sleeves.
When the wearer hits a button in the other sleeve to indicate he or she is feeling stressed, a social networking website notifies other network members. Communicating through a Wi-Fi-linked necktie, the other website members can decide whether to activate the jacket’s massage motors in sympathy.
“It’s much more relaxing because you feel a connection with people, not because the massage is so great,” said Byron Lahey, the wearable-technology coordinator at SIGGRAPH, who was not personally involved in the project.
After a response by a critical mass of users, the jacket, which has six massage motors, starts massaging the wearer. The whole process is anonymous, although the jacket does indicate from how far away the necktie wearers responded. Responses from within 10 miles of the jacket wearer trigger a spinal massage; responses from within the same country work the inner shoulder, and responses from other countries trigger an outer-shoulder massage.
Jacket wearers can log onto a website, see where everyone who responded is located and thank them.
By augmenting online relationships with real physical contact, the SOS project seeks to create tighter-knit online communities.
Designed by students from MIT’s media lab, the SOS system is still in the testing phase, and the attending website has yet to go live.

What ____ means

2010-08-01T10:37:00.001-07:00

There are many words for it: personalization, customer relationship management, social media, etc.

What ____ means is that through the powerful tools of the web an entity (person or company) creates a more interactive, supportive, engaged relationship with individual clients.

The media, although and perhaps because it's in the communication business, believe that they have some natural ability at this new instinct. In fact their arrogance has put them way behind in the development of this instinct, and the most recent foray into paywalls is just another result of that arrogance.

A very good discussion of this comes from Janet Titterton on the Journalism.co.uk website.

(Here's the URL: http://www.journalism.co.uk/6/articles/539838.php)

And probably in your own experience you've seen how retailers and non-profits who used to not even play in the communication game (they used to play only in the advertising game) have gotten very good at CRM. Whereas media companies continue to expect primarily the one-way process.

The local art museum emails me every Friday with news of the get-together that evening, including the lecturer and the food. The library emails me two days before my books are due, and then emails me thank you for returning them. My local supermarket gives me coupons online tied to the foods I have bought in the past. My dentist reminds me online of my appointments, and includes insurance forms. My favorite department stores alerts me to pre-sales. and on and on.

If you are open to these dialogues with the market, you can get them, and they are very helpful.

And what does my newspaper and tv station and radio station and city magazine offer me. More news. Can't they be more helpful than that? What would happen if I told them what I bought, and they promised to give me the insurance and warranty information I needed, as needed. Or if they put me in touch with other people who had bought the same products so I could compare my experience, and perhaps get help when I needed it. Or if they told me who was going to be at the fundraiser that I plan to attend. Customer Relationship Marketing involves truly emphathizing with someone's needs.

What happens if the media group just emailed me to ask how I thought about their service, and what could they do differently?

Would the media companies be out of their comfort zone, by doing these things? Were the retailers, who have grown the social media side of their business, originally out of their comfort zones? I don't think so. You can't be arrogant about changing.

Media brands, from magazine publishers to newspapers, are more concerned than ever about their ability to engage customers and remain profitable - and with good reason. Never before has there been so much high quality information available for so little.

With all eyes currently on the Times paywall, or rather what some commentators are referring to as "News International’s anti-social media experiment", we are witnessing a very real struggle as media owners attempt to map out the future of their industry and evaluate how they will build profitable relationships with their customer base.

A recent survey of 3,000 members of the public, carried out by OnePoll on behalf of PR Week, found that 93 per cent of people thought newspapers should use advertising rather than a paywall to make money online. Only time will tell if the paywall works or not, but it would be inaccurate to say it’s the only hope for publishers. There are other revenues streams, such as discounted reader offers and brand partnerships, and real potential in these areas.

Learn from other sectors

Publishers could learn from leading brands in sectors such as retail and financial services, who have been maximising both customer engagement and generating additional revenue from the mass market very successfully for years. They have achieved this by offering 'added value propositions' tailored to their customer segments, which both differentiates their brands and enhances their core product and service offering.

The retail sector is an expert at generating stronger relationships with value-added propositions that enhance the customer experience and generate incremental revenue. Take Comet for example, when you buy a flat screen television you also have the option to use their expert installation service to make sure everything works perfectly and then the annual repair service for peace of mind on all existing and future electrical purchases. This widens the Comet customer value proposition, and encourages repeat business at Comet.

In the financial sector, banks offer memberships for a monthly or annual fee, such as NatWest’s Advantage Gold that provides customers with a package of benefits that provides greater value to their everyday lives and keeps them engaged with the brand. These benefits, such as home and travel insurance, fraud protection, and vehicle breakdown cover have a high perceived value and are sold at a significantly cheaper price than if the customer bought these benefits separately.

Astoundingly though, recent research carried out by incremental revenue specialists Collinson Latitude found that one third of publishers are yet to tap into these revenue opportunities in any way and 40 per cent of publishers said that they have never considered providing customers with membership packages.

By the way here is Janet Titterton's full post:

The existing approach that media brands use for added value memberships is focused around discounts and offers. Times+ is the best current example, as it tries to differentiate its offers by theming them around the readers’ key areas of interest, such as culture, travel and food. However, Times+ will struggle to provide differentiation and exclusivity to the discount based offering. Publishers can go much further than this to build sustainable relationships by offering mass market products and services of a high perceived value bundled into a membership, including benefits serving customer preferences such as travel or leisure.

Need to understand reader lifestyles

The true opportunity for the publishing industry is to understand readers' lifestyles, personal journeys and experiences, in the context of their brand and the customers’ perspective of where they see value to develop new commercial membership propositions. So how can publishers do this in a way that will fit with the existing business model and produce sustainable results?

Use the customer insight - publishers have a huge amount of data on their readers; after all this is what is used to sell targeted advertising space. This information could be mined so publishers can understand their different customer profiles and where they are best placed to add value with relevant product and service extensions. More importantly, they need to also understand not what their core, loyal paper subscribers would buy from them, but what their wider online readership would too.

The power of partnerships - this is key to generating greater relevance to the vast online audience, who don’t necessarily associate themselves with a specific publication. Publishers can explore different partnership models that serve contemporary needs, rather than a constant stream of one off discount offers, or links to partner’s websites. Brand extensions with commercial partner propositions that are contextually relevant, targeted to their wider readership, will enable them to retain and grow a direct customer relationship and benefit from the recurring revenue.

Package the content – the publishing industry would struggle to compete with businesses selling products such as travel insurance or flights, as they will never be able to differentiate their offering on price, product quality or keep up with innovation. Where the publishing industry has a unique opportunity is to create packages of products that their customers would need for everyday or regular experiences which is not currently being provided by others. For example, newspapers have been protecting customers from unfair travel charges and scams, and providing information on how to make the most from holidays for some time – not the airlines, hotels, car hire or travel insurance providers.

What better place to start than by creating a travel membership that provides piece of mind by offering products and services consumers need whenever they travel? This would also leverage journalists’ knowledge of how to make the travel experience easier, faster and more exclusive by supplying aspirational products and services that wouldn’t normally be easily accessible. Bundling relevant products and services also provides consumers with convenience, and publishers with the opportunity to acquire more behavioral data for refined targeting, value extension, relationship building and long term revenue.

Look for innovative ways to add value – more and more publishers are realising the value of smartphone (and iPad) apps. This is a great example of how new technology offers a way to add value to existing content that the consumer is happy to pay for, and tap in to new audiences. These innovations represent new channels to build more sustainable and profitable relationships with more customers whilst finding new ways to engage with them in their every day lives.

There is no doubt that these are challenging times for publishers, with consumers that are more demanding, harder to engage, and less willing to pay for the content they receive. But incremental revenue delivered from product extensions provides a way for publishers to not only survive, but to capitalise on the shifting media landscape, and thrive.

Enriched not electronic

2010-07-29T12:25:00.000-07:00

The new E-books, especially those for the I-Pad, have the added dimensions of embedded video. For that reason some retailers are calling the books enriched books.

And as far as the future, Katy bar the door. E-books should be able to show you video, link between parts forward and backward in the book to create new "connections", perhaps introduce audio parts -- you name it.

Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/books/29ebook.html?ref=media

Or read it all:

By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: July 29, 2010

Preview: ‘The Pillars of the Earth’
In the spring Hachette Book Group called its version, by David Baldacci, an “enriched” book. Penguin Group released an “amplified” version of a novel by Ken Follett last week. And on Thursday Simon & Schuster will come out with one of its own, an “enhanced” e-book version of “Nixonland” by Rick Perlstein.

All of them go beyond the simple black-and-white e-book that digitally mirrors its ink-and-paper predecessor. The new multimedia books use video that is integrated with text, and they are best read — and watched — on an iPad, the tablet device that has created vast possibilities for book publishers.

The start-up company Vook pioneered the concept as a mobile application and for the Web in 2009, but with the iPad, traditional publishers are taking the multimedia book much more seriously.

“It’s a wide-open world,” said Molly Barton, the director of business development for Penguin. “You can show readers the world around the books that they’re reading.”

Simon & Schuster has taken the best-selling “Nixonland,” first published in hardcover in 2008 in a whopping 896 pages, and scattered 27 videos throughout the e-book. One video is a new interview with Mr. Perlstein, conducted by Bob Schieffer, the chief Washington correspondent for CBS News. Most are news clips from events described in the book, including the Nixon-Kennedy debates in 1960 and public reaction to the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Simon & Schuster is a division of the CBS Corporation.)

Each video clip, embedded in the page, starts to play with a simple tap of the iPad screen. After pausing to watch a video, the user can go back to reading the book.

Ellie Hirschhorn, the chief digital officer for Simon & Schuster, said the intent was to use the video sparingly, at points that seemed natural to the story, so that it wouldn’t overwhelm readers.

“We set out to tell stories in a multimedia way, and to take advantage of the new technical features that allow great stories to be told,” Ms. Hirschhorn said. “It is still a reading experience.”

Grand Central Publishing, part of Hachette, released an “enriched” e-book version of Mr. Baldacci’s latest novel, “Deliver Us From Evil,” in April to coincide with the hardcover release. The e-book producers borrowed from the film industry and included “research photos taken by the author, deleted scenes from the manuscript, an alternate ending and other special features,” Hachette announced in March. Penguin’s edition of Mr. Follett’s “Pillars of the Earth” comes with video clips from an eight-part television series based on the book.

The early versions of these books are experimental, and, because they were developed quickly to compete with other publishers, some of the technology is new and unpolished. But eventually the books could regularly feature full-length movies and photo slideshows. For authors who are open to the concept, new books could be written with multimedia in mind.

Some publishers said that before long e-books with video, photos and other media could be widely available to readers as another option alongside hardcover, paperback, audiobooks and standard e-books.

Brad Inman, chief executive of Vook, said his company is working with 25 publishers to create multimedia books. “The iPad brought this to life,” he said. “Everyone knows now that they’ve got to put their toe in this water.”

Books with multimedia also allow publishers to charge a higher price. The “enhanced” “Nixonland” costs $15.99 in Apple’s iBookstore and through the Amazon Kindle store (though it cannot be read on the Kindle e-reader), an increase from a black-and-white e-book, which generally tend to be less than $14.99.

Ms. Hirschhorn said Simon & Schuster was actively developing other books to follow “Nixonland.”

“We’ll see how the readers evaluate it,” she said. “It’s not appropriate for every book, but it certainly was for this one.”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 29, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.

Curator of truth

2010-07-27T19:24:00.000-07:00

Some call it curation; I call it personalization.

Both are far beyond RSS, which was keyword based and that's all. Now when you give yourself over today to say an ICurrent.com you get stories that are about a subject, that the curator or personalizer (ICurrent.com) understands has multiple characteristics and thus is related to multiple sources that may not include keyword matches.

It's the semantic web, early in its development, and it's wonderful to see.

My example is Bob Dylan, who I have had as an alert with MyYahoo since 2003. But for the most part I get stories that have "The Times They are a-Changin' " in the lede. In other words I've gotten stories about the new trash pickup contract in New Orleans (the times they are a-changin) to the newest fashion tips out of the Paris show (the times they are a-changin) to the expectation that the Democrats will throw out the Republicans and vice versa (the times they are a-changin.)

Obviously none of those stories have anything to do with Bob Dylan except that the ledes invoked his famous song.

That's why my MyYahoo alert became something I never looked at. Once I discovered ICurrent.com and began to get stories everyday that were serious music stories that included reference to Bob Dylan I have been a happy camper, and a day doesn't go by that I don't open that email from ICurrent.com to check out the story.

More and more publishers are appreciating the semantic web

Here's a good tutorial of where we are today.

Here's the address: http://emediavitals.com/article/1005/how-publishers-curate-world-content

And the full story:
It's nothing new that many news websites augment their own content with repackaged content from around the Web, but the applications have evolved along with the technology. Content providers are experimenting with all sort of ways for editors and technology to push outside content to readers, whether through aggregation or curation (for a lengthy discussion about the difference, check out the Nieman Journalism Lab).

Curation platforms, which have moved beyond the RSS feed, provide varying levels of automation, functions and technology to suit a media company's needs. News organizations are even investing in curation platforms; the New York Daily News holds a stake in LOUD3R and The Washington Post recently acquired the personalized news aggregator iCurrent.

While publishers choose to utilize aggregation and curation platforms in a variety of ways, the main point is clear: Many media companies see benefits in collecting content from around the Web. Publishers find curation can attract and retain readers by offering the best of all content, rather than the best of just their own content. Here are a few ways publishers are deploying these platforms to add to their site's content:

Topic hubs

Topical pages have gone beyond story lists, pulling in interactive content both inside and outside of news organizations. Events such as the World Cup often inspire topic pages, as seen with the The Washington Post's interactive map powered by the curation platform Daylife.

Upendra Shardanand, CEO of Daylife, said publishers commonly use the platform to create microsites, sections and photo galleries, which can be both curated and auto-generated from sources the editor selects ― blending original authoring with real-time updates. “If you go to bed and something happens, it will be on the page,” he said.

On the continuum of editorial control versus automation, Daylife focuses more on editorial oversight to help the editor “discover and curate content to make a great page about anything,” Shardanand said. The platform also powers Forbes' Billionaires page.

Street CRED

2010-07-27T07:44:00.001-07:00

Joining ICurrent.com and Kibboko,com and DailyMe.com and the original CRAYON and others is now CRED, which advertises "Create your own
newspaper". After you click through to the homepage you will see on the banner at the top in yellow CREATE YOUR OWN NEWSPAPER.

Have a go, it's easy to use. It presents you everyday with a website homepage of stories related to your interests. You can change at will. If you click through any of the stories on your home page you are asked to register -- promising 10 stories altogether before you have to pay.

(The address is http://www.newscred.com/)

Exhaustion

2010-07-26T11:47:00.000-07:00

A Guardian writer is wondering if all the social networks have not worn us all out and that an exhaustion has set in similar to the post-2004 dot-com bust.

This is a nuanced but, I believe, compelling column.

Read its entirety at http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/jul/26/social-networking-exhaustion-charles-arthur

Here are some interesting excerpts.

So we're back at the original questions: where are all the new social networks? I think they're gone. Done, dusted, over. I don't think anyone is going to build a social network from scratch whose only purpose is to connect people. We've got Facebook (personal), LinkedIn (business) and Twitter (SMS-length for mobile). . . .

. . . The next big sites won't be social networks. Of course they'll have social networking built into them; they'll come with an understanding of their importance, just as Facebook and Twitter know that search (an idea Google refined) and breaking news (Yahoo's remaining specialist metier) are de rigueur. Nor will they be existing sites retrofitted to do social networking, despite the efforts of Digg and Spotify.

So what will they be? No idea, I'm afraid. If I knew that, would I be here writing? Hell, no – I'd be off making elevator pitches and vacuuming up venture capital. Which brings us to business models. Facebook makes its money not just by sucking up ad impressions from the rest of the internet, using its remarkably detailed targeting ability; it also gets a cut from virtual transactions using its own virtual currency. LinkedIn, similarly, can precisely target its executive base. Twitter is different again, selling its user-generated content for big money to Google and Microsoft's Bing, as well as experimenting with direct payment for its EarlyBird sales system and "promoted tweets".

The point being that "ad-supported" isn't the only game for startup revenue. The big sites of the future won't necessarily be about ads as a way to make money, and they won't be about social networks. Now, hunker down and wait. Or get out there and build it.

Of course, I would argue that personalization of some stripe will be the next iteration. And it can be argued that personalization is a form of social media. Not necessarily. If someone chooses "friends" as there primary source of personalized content, then I suppose it is a social media. But if you choose some artificial intelligence, semantic search mechanism for your personalization, that is definitely NOT social media.

Video: YouData

2010-07-25T11:48:00.000-07:00

Advertising can be annoying if it is always trying to sell us something we don't need or want. But what would happen if the only advertising we saw was advertising we wanted? Or even better, what would happen if advertisers paid us for our attention rather than a third party broker?
Well that model is here, practiced by YouData. And here is the video that explains the paradigm shift: youdata.com.

Not only can you watch the video, but you can then sign up and immdiately start being paid for advertisements that you say you would be interested in seeing.

(You can also put this in your browser to see the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZXiouF-Ins)

2000 ah-ha

2010-07-25T10:49:00.000-07:00

The Hindenberg and the Titanic, come to mind but what about the Concorde 10 years ago. Another ah-ha moment for mankind that technology is fallible.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynewspoint/20100723/ts_ynewspoint/ynewspoint_ts3218;_ylt=AoXavE1j.XssIsFwu.IRbI0N97QF;_ylu=X3oDMTFjbTQzOXI1BHBvcwMyBHNlYwN5bl9wcm9tb3NfdG9wX2JhcgRzbGsDdGhlc3RhcnRpbmdw

How did it happen?

Or watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uibb2Q5umI

Where were you?

Video: Sixth Sense

2010-07-25T10:09:00.001-07:00

Do you sometimes wish you wouldn't have to be tethered to a PC or a mobile phone or an I-Pad to see the media you want. Or do the calculations you need. Or take and crop pictures. Like magic, don't you wish you could just point your fingers at an object to get a picture? Or do the math computations on the fingers of your hand?
Sixth sense makes those wishes possible. Fundamentally sixth sense technology is pulling the virtual world out of a device (like a PC or mobile phone or I-pad) by putting it in our real, physical world.
Believeit or not, here's a video that explains sixth sense technology.

(or watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUdDhWfpqxg)

Video: Semantic Web

2010-07-25T09:59:00.000-07:00

How is it that with internet searches, the web doesn't know the difference between a "tarp" to cover over something during a rain and "TARP" the govvernment funding that entitty has been America's bank. Here is a video that explains the Semantic Web:

(Or watch this at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJfrNo3Z-DU)

Video: LuminAR

2010-07-25T08:22:00.000-07:00

The new lamp may become the light of the world.

Here is a video that describes a very practical new device for Personalizing MEdia, in particular, liberating the internet: the
LuminAR.

(Watch it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b45BpeVDx9w)

Every day

2010-07-25T08:16:00.001-07:00

Part of personalizing my media is a very simple formula that is so close to Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert's that I'll just quote her from the July/August issue of WEBmd.

The question is: What is your healthy-living philosophy?

I have a list of 10 things I try to do every day, which I have found kep me happy and healthy. I can't say it's a prescription for everyone, but this is what works for my particular organism: mind, body and soul. When I take care of these things, everything else takes care of itself. Here is the list: 1. Take a walk. 2. Write something. 3. Read something. 4.Don't eat too much. 5. Spend some time in silence. 6. Stretch. 7. Send a mess of love to somebody. 8.Drink water. 9.Mess around in the garden and 10. Floss.

I guess I would substitue "search" for "stretch" and leave out "floss."

RWW can

2010-07-23T16:46:00.001-07:00

Let me try to put things in context of the history of the web the past few years.
And if I can't, this blog can: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/beyond_social_web_internet_of_things.php

After social media like Youtube and Facebook and Twitter made it obvious to all us that we can't keep up with what is happening, we realized that our simple prejudices and biases and predilections for content were the only way out. In other words if we could prioritize all the content that was suddenly available by categorizing for ourselves what we ourselves like, then we might survive. That meant personalization.

And I love the "internet of things" phrase because that begins to hit at our next ah-ha: why not liberate the virtual world from its device prison and project it into the physical world?

Thus we have the semantic web meeting sixth sense technology.

Both of them are very physical, visceral, intuitive reactions to social media overkill. Together they are awesome.

And now for the full ReadWriteWeb blog by Richard McManus:

This blog was founded in 2003 on the philosophy of a read/write Web - a Web in which people can create content as easily as they consume it. This trend eventually came to be known as Web 2.0 - although others preferred Social Web - and was popularized by activities like blogging and social networking.

It would be easy to say that the 'social' element is still the primary part of today's Web, since the popular products of this era enable you to say what's on your mind (Facebook), what's happening (Twitter), or where you are (Foursquare). All of these are mostly social activities. But more significantly, these and other products output data that will increasingly be used to build personalized services for you.

The more data there is, the better Web services will be at delivering personal value to you. While part of this increase in data is coming from social data from the likes of Facebook and Twitter, much of it is coming from the Internet of Things and data uploaded by governments and organizations. In short: the read/write Web is now much more than the Social Web.

How We Went Beyond Social
So how did we arrive at a Web that is less about social and more about you?

It's not how much content you consume that is important, it's about what you do with data.
After the peak of Web 2.0, we (meaning all of us) began to get overwhelmed with the choice of content available. We thought we had to actually 'read' as much of that content as possible. So we watched YouTube, chatted on MySpace and Facebook, read blogs, followed lots of people on this new thing called Twitter, and so on. By the end of 2008, we were exhausted by all of this CONTENT. How could we possibly keep up?!

In 2010, we're still struggling to digest all of what social media throws at us. However, a shift has been happening since 2009 which alleviates the problem. We've begun to realize that it's not how much content we consume that is important: it's what we do with all of the social and other data available to us. The social is still important, but the resulting data is - slowly - becoming more important because it can be analyzed, filtered, mashed up and personalized.

Structured Data & Internet of Things
Two relatively new trends are driving this change.

If I was an entrepreneur or developer, I wouldn't be thinking about social anymore. I'd be thinking: How can I use all of this data and build on top of it?
The first is the increasing amount of data being uploaded to the Web by governments, organizations and people. Much of this data is being structured using Semantic Web technologies like RDFa or microformats. In other words, it is categorized and encoded with meaning that machines can process. Recent examples include U.S. and U.K. government data, Best Buy's store and product data and Facebook's Open Graph.

And then we have the Internet of Things: an evolving trend where real-world objects and 'things' are connected to the Internet via technologies such as sensors and RFID tags - everything from cars to houses to roads and more. The upshot is that the Web is about to experience a data explosion, as billions of sensors and other data input and output devices upload exabytes of new data to the Web.

How do We Use This Data?
If we add together social data from the likes of Facebook and Twitter, data from governments and businesses, and data from sensors and RFID, this is a huge amount of data. Most of it isn't for "consuming." Rather, the value of all of this new Web data will be in how it's filtered, mixed together ("mashed up") and personalized in new Web services - most of which haven't yet been built.

Adam Greenfield is one of the leading thinkers of the Internet of Things; I interviewed him earlier this year about his book called Everyware. Greenfield recently wrote a post describing a near future scenario for non-technical people using the Web. He posited a use case where his mother would be able to plan a train trip to see her son, by creating an "ad-hoc service" that tapped into the Web and utilized real-time data sources.

In 2010, his mother would have to find and "read" several different applications in order to plot her travel schedule, and some of that information isn't even currently on the Web. Greenfield envisions a near future where his mother can essentially "write" her requirements into her mobile or other device, and the Web will deliver a personalized schedule to "read." You can view a diagram of Adam's concept here (PDF).

Don't Think Social, Think Data
Successful products in the Web 2.0 era had a strong social element: YouTube, MySpace and Flickr were a few relatively early examples. In the current era of the Web, which began to form in early 2009, the focus has shifted from social to data-driven software. Successful products of this era of the Web will be ones that filter, structure and personalize this vast amount of data coming onto the Web.

So if I was an entrepreneur or developer wondering what to build for this era of the Web, I wouldn't be thinking social. I'd be thinking: How can I use all of this data and build on top of it? There are incredible opportunities out there for you.

This current era of the Web doesn't have a name, which is probably a good sign! One thing is for sure though: It's still a read/write Web - only now you're reading and writing data from much more than just social services. You're increasingly interacting with "things," organizations, governments - virtually anything that can connect to the Web.

Ah-ha moment

2010-07-22T12:18:00.001-07:00

Eduguide has a wonderful definition of an ah-ha moment.
"Experiencing an 'Ah-ha' moment can be unique and special for each individual. It's a point in time when one realizes something for the first time. Perhaps solving a personal problem or finding the answer to something that has been very troubling.

"When an 'Ah-ha' moment occurs, it is usually accompanied with satisfaction, joy, or a sense of accomplishment. Look for those special moments; they are wonderful and will be remembered for a long time.

"When an 'Ah-ha' moment happens, you will know that something special is about to happen for you."

(You can check this out yourself at http://www.eduguide.org/Parents-Library/An-Ah-ha-Moment-Turning-Points-in-Learning-127.aspx.)

That's why when people ask me to describe Presonalize Media I say it is media that create ah-ha moments. That's what all media strives to do, but media is more likely if to succeed if guided by personal input.

Conversely as more and more people understand what Personalize Media is all about, hopefully I will collect ah-ha moments from more and more people.

This was MY first ah-ha moment: When I was 19 I began to plan to drop my college deferment after receiving a Draft Number of 15, which meant I would surely be drafted to the Vietnam War the minute I graduated in 1973. However, I read an article that Thanksgiving in the New York Times that said there would be no more soldiers called up that fall, so I immediately dropped the deferment, passed my physical and waited. Sure enough no one was called up that fall of 1970, and by Jan. 1 1971, my name was at the bottom of the list and I was never drafted. Reading that article in the New York Times was my ah-ha moment. And it changed my life, I'm sure.

Community choice

2010-07-21T06:14:00.000-07:00

When it comes to Personalize Media, there may be nothing better than community bloggers.

There have been some wonderful experiments by media companies in the U.S., connecting readers to local bloggers, or using an old term, user generated content.

One example that may lead the pack, is the Denver Post’s Your Hub that first established 19 community websites soliciting and receiving nearly 90 percent of its content from local bloggers and local people and local companies in an around Denver.

Then the Post spun off weekly, zoned, print sections using that material and five years later the “experiment” is profitable and sustainable and valuable and valued by the communities it serves.

Most recently The Sacramento Bee established Sacramento Connect. (Visit /www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/leadership_blog/comments/20100720_with_sacramento_connect_the_bee_taps_the_power_of_partnerships)

Growing virally, the network of local bloggers seems to be adding some valuable content to the newspaper’s daily report.

As far as readers go, many people would like to hone their daily information diet to include local content. Bloggers, especially when made available through a well-known, trusted brand like the local newspaper, can offer those special reports.

Maybe now

2010-07-20T15:02:00.001-07:00

Ever since I first logged on to a computer, I’ve been learning what's available and what I like and don't like on the web. And yet I’m STILL spending most of my time today searching, searching, searching.

After all the time I’ve spent on the web, why doesn’t the web understand me better. Who took the ME out of Media?

How come on the web so many sites organize things according to what they think I would want? And then guess when I would want it. And How. And for what reason.

Let’s say you’re a guy who follows artificial intelligence and global politics and modern architecture and the American West. And your Blackberry.

Or you’re a gal who follows book publishing and gardening and calorie watching and family and Dobermans and the American South. And your Mac Pro.

How does one site reconcile all this?

And let’s say tomorrow you’re that same guy who suddenly discovers AroundtheWorldNews from Syntops. And you want to add that to your new I-Pad but not to your website.

Or you’re that woman who suddenly discovers Shopping.com. And you want that delivered your Mac every morning, but not to you mobile phone.

Ever since the web came along 15 years ago, people have been entertained, and frustrated.

Why do I have to keep sitting in front of a computer or staring at a mobile phone? Why can’t MEdia be everywhere. At least everywhere I am. On my shower curtain. On the ceiling in my room. On the tablecloth at the dining table. On the wall in my office.

Maybe now it can. Plan to attend the Personalize Media Conference. Visit http://www.personalizenews.com

The promise

2010-07-20T12:32:00.000-07:00

Personalization. It's what the web has always promised. Back in the stone age, when there was only the little Mac and the big DOS IBM, we began to think about personalizing our experience, even if it was only a chat group . . . or user group as we called ourselves then.

And every year the reality gets bigger. Now we’ve got Faebook and Twitter and Stumbleupon and you name it. We even have a term for that kind of personalization: social media.

But personalization has many new forms.

Now you can personalize your newspaper. There are two German companies that mix and match newspaper pages. Their software could be applied to magazines and books.

So imagine a professor choosing excerpts from multiple books to make his own creation. And his students picking their individual covers.

You can personalize your advertising with PrecisionAds. Let’s say you are a jeweler and want to reach only those people within 5 miles of your storefront who are over 50 and make more than $100,000 a year. Easy with PrecisionAds.

You can personalize your mobile phone. Let’s say you see an article in a newspaper or magazine and you want to read that story later. If it has the Primiro logo you can text the story to your phone.

You can personalize your website. ICurrent.com asks you your preferences to begin with and then watches you use the site to determine what future stories to give you.

You can personalize what comes out of your home printer, if it’s an internet ready Hewlett Packard device. Just touch the screen and print your Fandango tickets or your Mapquest directions.

In fact, you can personalize any printing. CGX Publishing, a global company, is testing all the new, web-fed variable data printers to get the best one to be able to personalize books and magazines and newspapers and brochures and event programs.

Imagine if you showed up at the theater and the program had your name and the location of your seat on the cover.

Or you ordered your tickets for a blacktie fundraiser online and the program you get when you arrived has your name, the sponsor of the table where you are sitting and the amount of your donation. And the names of the other people at the table – and what they do.

Personalization. You can’t get enough.

The four c's

2010-07-20T09:17:00.000-07:00

The internet should be more a part of our physical world.

In other words, there is no reason why digits can't be liberated from computers. Why can't I see information from the virtual world projected into my walk-around world. That's the spirit of sixth sense technology that is very much a part of the Personalize MEdia movement.

We don't want to be the slaves of computers. We want to be the partners of computers and invite them into the physical world we still spend the majority of our time in.

On top of that, we want the reception of all that metadata to be on our terms: when we want it.

Maybe I want the Boston Red Sox box scores on my shower curtain, but I want the world the Afghanistan war headlines on the wall of my room. And may be I want my emails beside my plate at the breakfast table.

Maybe I want my calendar/schedule on the refrigerator door.

And we want to choose that content carefully. Maybe only one special curated story about the latest cancer research news every day -- on my ceiling above my bed.

Choice of stories; choice of advertising; choice of platform; choice of time of delivery. (People say they worry about living in a bubble; but one of our daily choices could be "mainstream" news.)

Choice, choice, choice, choice. The four c's.

The new T.E

2010-07-18T17:47:00.000-07:00

There may be a new Thomas Edison, and he's a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab who has invented something called the LuminAR.

This robotic camera, light bulb, internet computer can screw into your table lamp and project the virtual image of a computer screen on any surface to which you can interact with touch screen accuracy.

This is another version of sixth sense technology -- pushing the virtual world into the real world and making our real world more interesting.

Watch: http://labcast.media.mit.edu/?p=129

Embed virtuality or improve data?

2010-07-17T05:51:00.000-07:00

I wonder if there are not two divergent approaches to the future of the internet.

There's the sixth sense approach, which says the world for the last 15 years has been creating a virtual reality that reflects physical reality, and needs to reverse and begin to build a physical reality that reflects the virtual world.

Here is a youtube video on that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUdDhWfpqxg

And the semantical approach that believes the problem is data itself. We move data beautifully, but the data is so poor the results are underwhelming. We need to take data to the level of information and even eventually knowledge and, don't feint, perhaps, vision. Here is a great youtube explanation of that point of view.

http://www.iiea.com/events/semantic-web-from-web-20-to-web-30?gclid=CPmny9_E8qICFSA5gwodhlE9kw

Why not solve for both?

Google aboard

2010-07-16T15:59:00.000-07:00

When Google CEO Eric Schmidt speaks the world listens.
So here is the dawning of the inevitable, long-awaited new day:

In a 16 minute speech delivered at The Guardian's Activate 2010 summit, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google since 2001, was asked what he thought of the future of newspapers: "What does the newsreading experience look like many years from now? . . . The most important thing is that it will be more personalised."

Except for the fact that the British spell personalised with an "s" and I spell it with a "z" we are, and have been for a long time, in complete agreement. If you agree register to come to the Personalize Media conference next year.

Read the complete story from the Guardian, which by the way is in a direct fight with Murdoch's Times of London, that not coincidentally today went totally behind a paywall. Black and white reactions to the web.

Headline: Google CEO: the future of newspapers is online - and mobile

Posted by Colin Heilbut on July 2, 2010 at 1:47 PM
In a 16 minute speech delivered at The Guardian's Activate 2010 summit, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google since 2001, said that the experience of reading news will move to digital devices quite rapidly - and that it will involve personalized and local news which will be alert to your interests and existing knowledge. Among the numerous trends and shifts pointed about by Schmidt during his speech, one particularly relevant note for the newspaper industry was made in regards to mobile strategy. "Mobile is the hottest area of computer technology," Schmidt said. "The smartest developers now are writing apps for mobile before they write for Windows or Apple Mac desktop operating systems. Part of that is because these devices are hugely personal to us when we use them." Schmidt also addressed paywalls, News Corp. and the future of newspapers.
Asked what he thought of the future of newspapers, Schmidt said: "What does the newsreading experience look like many years from now? I think it's delivered to a digital device, which has text, obviously, but also colour, and video, and the ability to dig very deeply into what you are supplied with. At the moment we have readers, but it's not intelligent enough; newspapers often tell me what I already know. We'll have advertising products that are much more media-centric. The most important thing is that it will be more personalised."

When asked about paywalls, Schmidt refused to issue an outright condemnation. Rather, he said that "At Google we want to offer every publisher pieces for you to do with as you see fit," he said. "Murdoch's comment [Google is a "thief and a parasite" for its indexing operation of the Times site] was really about paywalls. There's a dispute in the [news] industry about subscriptions versus advertising. We want to enable both, and let users choose. But there are many publishers with large sites which have been offered the choice to go to a paywall, but don't, because they reckon they can make it work. Others want a subscription because that's the model they're used to."

But he said that newspapers faced real challenges because "they're replacing analogue dollars with digital cents, and a lot of people are losing their jobs as a result. It's much less bad here in Britain, perhaps because of the history of newspapers here, but in the US there are unhappy people who are losing audience at a faster and faster rate."

Instead, he said, organizations should build their strategies around the internet - and especially mobile. "The corollary of 'internet first' is 'mobile first'," he said. But he said that the improved targeting of news and information, possibly with more personalized services, "opens fundamental questions: news will become more personal, because we will be reading what we know we're interested in. But is that too narrow? How does serendipity occur? Does that personalization narrow our social view? If you follow the results of studies, it turns out that can lead to all sorts of biases. I don't know the answer, but to me this is a very fundamental question."

All things considered, Schmidt's intelligent commentary and analysis did not deliver any surprises nor hints about Google's news strategies or products. The emphasis on mobile technology should not come as a shock to anyone, but Schmidt did do an excellent job of arguing for exactly why resources need to be applied to mobile as the first priority, given the disproportionate adoption and growth rates for mobile devices and the close personal relationship consumers have with them.