Journalism 2012
What will 2012 bring for journalism? Social media bubble burst? Tech criticism? Appification? http://eicker.at/Journalism2012
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Gerrit Eicker
Tablets and News
The tablet revolution: 11% of U.S. adults own a tablet, 53% get news on their tablet every day; http://eicker.at/TabletsNews
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Gerrit Eicker
PEJ: “The Tablet Revolution – How people use tablets and what it means for the future of news – Eighteen months after the introduction of the iPad, 11% of U.S. adults now own a tablet computer of some kind. About half (53%) get news on their tablet every day, and they read long articles as well as get headlines. But a majority says they would not be willing to pay for news content on these devices, according to the most detailed study to date of tablet users and how they interact with this new technology. … The survey also finds that three-in-ten tablet news users (defined for this study as the 77% of all tablet users who get news at least weekly) say they now spend more time getting news than they did before they had their tablet. Just 4% say they spend less time while two-thirds (65%) spend about the same amount of time. … Whether people will pay for content, though, still appears to be a challenge, even on the tablet. Just 14% of these tablet news users have paid directly for news content on their tablets. Another 23%, though, have a subscription to a print newspaper or magazine that they say includes digital access. … The study also finds that these early users turn to the internet as their main source for news much more frequently than the public overall, and they have a strong preference for reading and listening to news rather than watching it-again much more than the population overall. Fully 71% of tablet users prefer reading and listening versus 45% of all U.S. adults. … Among the other major findings: The revenue potential for news on the tablet may be limited. Brand is important on the tablet. Substitution is already occurring to large degrees. Incidental news reading is prevalent on the tablet. Those who rely mainly on apps for news, 21% of all tablet news users, represent a kind of power news consumer. Word of mouth is a key component of tablet news sharing. When it comes to ownership, many see the tablet computer as more of a household device to share than as a strictly personal one.”
- Who Tablet Users Are
- Tablet News Users Have Strong News Habits on their Devices
- More Positive than Negative Assessments Overall
- News is Valued but Willingness to Pay is Low
- Apps vs. Browsers
- The Power User
- The Influence of Brand
- Sources for News
- Who Pays for News on the Tablet
- The Social component – Still Emerging
- Book Reading – Popular both in Print and on the Tablet
RWW: “Interestingly enough, 40% of respondents said they used the Web browser to access to news, compared to 21% who exclusively used apps. Many bigger publishers have made developing native apps a priority, believing that they will be easier to monetize than browser-based content. Indeed, some publications have seen an increase in readership after launching HTML5 Web apps than native applications could deliver. – How the native vs. Web app debate will shake out for brands generally is yet to be determined. For the time being, those that can afford should probably invest in building both. According to Pew’s research, 31% of tablet owners use both native and Web apps to consume news.”
pC: “Either way, there is still the overall problem: only 14 percent of tablet users surveyed have paid for news on their tablets. Companies that combine app or online subscriptions with print subscriptions have been able to attract another 23 percent of tablet users to their products, but there is obviously a long way to go.”
VB: “When it comes specifically to news consumption, the results are a mixed bag for media outlets. Yes, tablet owners love consuming news and they gobble it up on the browser and news applications. But, much like the hordes of regular Internet users, tablet owners don’t want to pay for the news they consume on their iPads and Android tablets. A disappointing 14 percent of tablet owners surveyed have paid for news specifically for the tablet. Among those who haven’t already put money down, 21 percent said they would consider paying $5 a month for news while 10% said they would pay $10 a month for news on the tablet.“
Gerrit Eicker
Kindle vs. iPad
Amazon will offer a Kindle Tablet on Android: at $250 it might become a challenge for the iPad; http://eicker.at/KindleVSiPad
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Gerrit Eicker
TC, Siegler: “Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It. … It’s called simply the ‘Amazon Kindle’. But it’s not like any Kindle you’ve seen before. It displays content in full color. It has a 7-inch capacitive touch screen. And it runs Android. … Again, the device is a 7-inch tablet with a capacitive touch screen. It is multi-touch, but from what I saw, I believe the reports that it relies on a two-finger multi-touch (instead of 10-finger, like the iPad uses) are accurate. This will be the first Kindle with a full-color screen. And yes, it is back-lit. There is no e-ink to be found anywhere on this device. … So how much will the 7-inch Kindle cost? $250. – Yes, Amazon has been able to trim the cost of the device to half of the entry-level iPad. And it will be the same price as Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color, which this will very obviously compete with directly. Both have 7-inch color touch screens. Both run Android. … The interface is all Amazon and Kindle. It’s black, dark blue, and a bunch of orange. … But the key for Amazon is just how deeply integrated all of their services are. Amazon’s content store is always just one click away. The book reader is a Kindle app (which looks similar to how it does on Android and iOS now). … Oh and one more thing: Amazon has been working on a multi-touch screen/e-ink hybrid tablet device. But that’s nowhere near completion, I’m told. So for now, this new Kindle will have to do.”
TC: “I threw together the mockup above based on what he shared with me. … From this, we’ve learned at least one thing: competing with the iPad by trying to be the iPad.. doesn’t really work. … But they’re not. Rather than taking on Apple on their own court, they’re moving to keep a lock on a game they’re already kicking butt at (the e-reader market), while upping the odds that anyone weighing ‘iPad or Kindle?’ will be swayed in their favor. By launching with a 7” tablet (and only a 7” tablet), Amazon is making it clear: they don’t want the Kindle tablet to be the iPad. They want it to be everything the iPad is not. – They want it to be small, and comfortable to read in bed. This is a Kindle, after all. For many folks who just want something to read in bed or throw into their bag to read on the train, the iPad’s nearly 10-inch display can feel a bit gigantic. – They want it to be cheap.”
GigaOM: “Instead of a full-fledged Android tablet, Amazon’s new Kindle slate runs a forked version of Android under the hood that no user is likely to ever see. – The 7-inch tablet takes a cue from the Barnes & Noble Nook Color; arguably the most successful non-iPad tablet if it fits your definition of one, and likely to see a hardware refresh soon. Amazon’s tablet will use a completely customized interface, not have Google apps of any kind, nor will it access the Android Market. It will run apps from Amazon’s AppStore. … Those wanting something smaller than a tablet but bigger than a standard phone may be more interested in the newly announced Samsung Note.”
VB: “So what of the rumored 10-inch Amazon tablet? That device, which is said to run a quad-core processor and be a more direct competitor to the iPad, is scheduled to launch in the first quarter of next year if the 7-inch tablet does well enough. – Amazon may forgo releasing a touchscreen version of the traditional Kindle, Siegler says, but that’s still speculation so far. Intriguingly, he also says that Amazon is working on a multi-touch tablet/e-reader hybrid device that runs on an E-Ink screen.”
pC: “Even if Amazon is cutting out some bells and whistles out of its tablet, it is offering users a lot more: a host of usable cloud services; some free services; and a low price. This may finally turn out to be the Android(ish) tablet fit to fight the iPad stronghold.”
Gerrit Eicker
Metered Paywalls
Newspapers can tailor their pricing structure rather than use a one size fits all-approach; http://eicker.at/MeteredPaywalls
Gerrit Eicker
NYT Paywall Impact
Hitwise: The NYT paywall impact is strong. Visits -5% to -15%, page views -11% to -30%; http://eicker.at/NYTPaywallImpact
Gerrit Eicker
News Media
Rosenstiel on journalism myths: traditional news media, advertising, content, newspapers, hyperlocal; http://eicker.at/NewsMedia
Gerrit Eicker
Google One Pass
Focus Online tries charging for online articles with Google One Pass; http://eicker.at/GoogleOnePass
Gerrit Eicker
Virtual Newsstands
The struggle of magazines at newsstands continues, virtual newsstands offer a bright spot; http://eicker.at/VirtualNewsstands
Gerrit Eicker
Passive Experience
GlobalWebIndex: Open web turns to packaged internet, passive experience to rise; http://eicker.at/PassiveExperience (via @rww)
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Gerrit Eicker
GlobalWebIndex: “Social media has reached mass maturity. Today it’s no longer about massive growth but a shift of already active social consumers to ‘real-time’ technologies, such as status updates or tweets. The old view of text-based social media, defined by blogs and forums, is being surpassed, moving the impact of social media, from creating content and publishing to sharing other people’s content and ‘live’ opinions about real-world events. In short ‘real-time’ is re-orientating consumer from creator to distributor and moving the focus to traditional media and professional content. – The open browser-based web is losing out to packaged internet platforms such as mobile apps, internet connected TVs, tablets, e-readers, pc apps, gaming and video platforms. These packaged platforms are re-engineering the internet and destroying the notion of the internet being a singular entity. Crucially for the entertainment revolution, they provide professional media with the means to create sustainable internet business models, something the economics of the browser-based web totally failed to enable. – Professional ‘traditional style’ content is now a core part of the consumer online experience. Internet platforms, for hundreds of millions of consumers, are increasingly the entertainment platform of choice. This is due to continual growth of professional content in video sites (legal and illegal), the rise of ‘real-time’, and the growth of packaged platforms.”
RWW: “The report states that in the new era of social entertainment, traditional media holds the power – a change from the ‘web 2.0’ era, when the user ruled. The report argues that this will lead to a return to passive experiences by consumers. … ‘Professionals are back in the driving seat when it comes to content,’ states the report. This, it says, will lead to the Internet eventually becoming the primary mass entertainment and content delivery platform. – While that is undoubtedly true, it’s difficult to see how the author comes to this conclusion: ‘We as consumers are going back to traditional needs and demands and seeking a more passive experience.’ – The report explains that social entertainment is far more about content sharing, than creation. It goes on to suggest that this ‘light nature of interaction’ is moving the consumer back to the passive state they were in before the Internet came along. Further, that services like Facebook and Twitter turn consumers into ‘distributors.’“
Gerrit Eicker
Time: “The dream of Web 2.0 may be over. If a new report on internet usage is to be believed, social media has turned the internet into more of a passive experience again. … The change, the report suggests, is that social media is more about content sharing than content creation, turning users into passive consumers – or, worse, distributors – of others’ work. … Instead of a shift back towards professional/audience mode, this feels more like a blip as the landscape gets used to its new tools than anything else to me, but what do you think?”
Gerrit Eicker
News Relations
Armstrong: News remains important to the consumer, but where they get it from is not; http://eicker.at/NewsRelations
Gerrit Eicker 10:11 on 20. December 2011 Permalink |
NJL: “Predictions for Journalism 2012 – To close out 2011, we asked some of the smartest people we know to predict what 2012 will bring for the future of journalism.”
NJL, Carrie Brown-Smith: “The social media bubble may burst, and more predictions for 2012 – In 2012 we will see a growing gap between newsrooms that are innovating and those that are…not. – 2011 saw a number of promising examples news organizations going beyond ‘digital first’ platitudes to actually trying things and making it work, and I’m optimistic we will see this trend continue. … 2012 will be a good year for local television. … 2012 *might* see a bursting of the social media bubble, or at least convince us that it is harder game to play than we thought. – This might seem odd coming from an avid social media user who developed two new courses on it for our journalism department and who even has been christened with that dreaded ‘social media guru’ title on more than one occasion [ack]. And assuredly, I do think social media is an incredibly important tool for news organizations to use to promote their content, improve their reporting, and engage their audiences… Journalism schools will increasingly step up to the plate to play a leadership role in journalism innovation in 2012.”
NJL, Dave Winer: “We need to improve tech criticism. Here’s how. – At the end of this year I’m thinking about the need for proper criticism of software, alongside other arts like theater, movies, music, books, travel, food and architecture. It’s finally time to stop being all gee whiz about this stuff. Tech is woven into the fabric of our culture, as much as or more so than the other arts. And it’s headed toward being even more interwoven. – We all need this, on all sides of the art. As users and creators. … The goal would be to move away from the lone inventor myth and see tech projects as more like film production or a even more apt, a TV series. Software is a process.”
NJL, Nicholas Carr: “2012 will bring the appification of media – For years now, the line between the software business and the media business has been blurring. Software applications used to take the form of packaged goods, sold through retail outlets at set prices. Today, as a result of cloud computing and other advances, applications look more and more like media products. … As traditional media companies have moved to distribute their wares in digital form – as code, in other words – they’ve come to resemble software companies. … The old general-purpose web, where everyone visited the same sites and saw the same stuff, is rapidly being supplanted by specialized packages of digital content geared to particular devices – iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Kindle, Nook, Xbox – or to particular members-only sites like Facebook and Google+. … Apps are as much content-delivery services as they are conventional software programs. Newspapers, magazines, books, games, music albums, TV shows: All are being reimagined as apps. Appified, if you will. – Appification promises to be the major force reshaping media in general and news media in particular during 2012. … Appification opens to newspapers the powerful marketing and pricing strategy that the Berkeley economist (and now Google executive) Hal Varian dubs ‘versioning.’ Long a cornerstone of the software business, versioning is the practice of creating many versions of the same underlying informational product, packaging them in different ways, and selling them at different prices to different sets of customers. … We already see versioning strategies at work in the ‘metered’ programs operated by a growing number of papers… The orthodox view among online pundits has been that paywalls and subscription fees won’t work for general-interest newspapers, that people simply won’t pay for a bundle of news online. … That won’t mean the end of the industry’s struggles, but it does portend a brighter future. And that’s good news.“
Gerrit Eicker 20:47 on 20. December 2011 Permalink |
NJL, Robert Hernandez: “For journalism’s future, the killer app is credibility – We know that Content is King. There is no doubting this concept. If you don’t have ‘it,’ no one is going to engage with you. We know that Distribution is Queen. In this modern age, what’s the point of having ‘it’ if no one will find it? My prediction is that this ruling monarchy will be augmented by… a prince. Perhaps a duke? Whatever. And it’s called Credibility. … We want to trust journalism. And to do so, we need to trust journalists. – And bypassing the blogger-vs-tweeter-vs-media company-vs-journalist debate, it is going to come down to one thing: Credibility. – Can I reliably trust you to tell me what is going on? If the answer is yes, then I don’t care if you work out of a newsroom or out of your garage.”
NJL, Dan Gillmor: “2012 will be the year of the content-controller oligopoly – Journalists will start paying serious attention to an issue that will ultimately determine whether they can participate in the digital world: control. – We are moving rapidly from an era of an oligopoly of content providers to an oligopoly of content controllers: new choke points. … This consolidation, to a very few companies plus increasing government intervention, is even more dangerous – and information providers of all kinds are finally starting to grasp what’s happening. … Search engines… wire-line Internet service providers… mobile carriers… Apple… the copyright cartel… government: The forces of control are getting more powerful every day. They are a direct threat to journalism and innovation. Journalists are starting to take note – and we can only hope it’s not too late.”
NJL, Martin Langeveld: “A look back at my 2011 predictions, along with a fresh batch for 2012 – The Eurozone crisis gives way to the dollarzone crisis as Congress continues to deadlock over budget and debt issues. The Dow falters, dropping 10% by mid-year. The prospect of a President Gingrich lifts hopes briefly, but when Obama is re-elected while Republicans retain the House and retake the Senate, it sinks another 5%. Newspaper stocks fail to beat the market, but all the digital giants (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, AOL and Apple) are all in positive territory well ahead of the Dow.“
Gerrit Eicker 18:25 on 26. December 2011 Permalink |
NJL, Amy Webb: “Big data, mobile payments, and identity authentication will be big in 2012 – When Google launched its new social network Plus, it made headlines for requiring users to create accounts with their real names and identities. At the time, Google argued that people behave better when they use their real names – it even went so far as to call Plus not a social network, but a digital identity service. Some are now questioning how and when Google would be using our digital identities. Outside of social media, police departments in the U.S. have started using MORIS, which snaps on to an iPhone and enables officers to scan the irises of alleged criminals. In Brazil, police offers are starting to fit glasses with biometric cameras which can scan 46,000 data points on a face and query a criminal database in real-time. Siri, an application acquired by Apple for the iPhone, can recognize individual voices and infer contextual information based on the user. In 2012, our fingerprints may not matter nearly as much as our eyes, faces, and usernames.”
NJL, Gina Masullo Chen: “Next year, personalization platforms will bring us more choices, not fewer – News has always been about making choices among lots of information; technology just helps us make those choices more smartly. … If I were creating this future, a large component of it would include offering greater customization of news and information for readers. … People choose what they like, what interests them, what gratifies their own needs, and what fits how they see the world. – In 2012, technology may help them make those choices more quickly and easily.”
NJL, Tim Carmody: “Next year, Kindles, iPhones, and tablets will truly grow up – In consumer technology, five year cycles are really interesting. … Why does this matter for 2012? Well, besides five years of iPhone, we’re also looking at five years of Kindle. That’s two five-year anniversaries that really signal the point when mobile reading became mainstream. You could also call it the five-year anniversary of the tablet as a media device, because really, that’s what the Kindle is, form factor-wise. … With e-readers, in general, I don’t think we’ve really figured out how touchscreen reading devices are supposed to work, how to blend what we’ve learned from tablets with what we’ve learned from e-readers. … If I could make an analogy, 2011 for reading devices was like the first color/video iPod. 2012 will be the iPhone year. It seems like we made big leaps forward only because we don’t actually know what the real leap forward looks like yet.”
NJL, Burt Herman: “In the coming year, social media journalists will #Occupythenews – Social media’s essential role in serious journalism can no longer be ignored. Next year, social media journalism will finally grow up. – Journalism will be more collaborative, embracing the fundamental social nature of the Internet. The story will be shaped by people involved in the news, curated by savvy editors from diverse sources and circulated back again to the audience. This is the new real-time news cycle. … Journalists have always taken masses of information and condensed it into something digestible for readers, adding context and insights. More than ever, journalists will curate sources outside their newsrooms to tell their stories. … It’s up to the new generation of social media journalists to #Occupythenews – and to make sure society doesn’t miss the stories that, diffuse and elusive though they may be, are crucial to understanding our world.”
NJL, Rex Sorgatz: “LA is the future (kill me now) – Let’s get this out of the way: I hate LA. – I hate LA the way that any good New Yorker hates LA, with a passion bordering on paranoid psychosis. I hate the faux culture, I hate the vapid people, I hate the unctuous politics. … But I am here to preach a new sermon: LA is the Future. It pains me to say, but it’s time we all sucked up the fresh sludge spewing from the organic juice pumper. … Let’s start here: Right now, I pay over $200 per month to have 1,600 TV channels pumped into my apartment. How many of those channels do I watch? A dozen, max. – This is clearly broken. Really broken. Stupid broken. – And we all know this has to end, somehow. And we all know it will end, somehow. … But I think we can all agree that this broken system is going to be fixed, somehow. – And when that happens, the fallout for the LA-based television industry will be catastrophic. … When the collapse hits, capital will rush out of the traditional entertainment industry faster than you can say ‘Lehman Brothers.’ … It will be fun, it will be exciting. And I might even hate LA a little less.”
NJL, Vadim Lavrusik: “Curation and amplification will become much more sophisticated in 2012 – A big question for the coming year: How will the right communities get the right kind of news? – Ladies and gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build a sustainable journalism model. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster. … For the last year, much of the focus has been on curating content from the social web and effectively contextualizing disparate pieces of information to form singular stories. … Because anyone can publish content today and report information from a breaking news event, the role journalists can play in amplifying – and verifying – that content becomes ever more important. … Curation itself will continue to evolve and become more sophisticated. … The coming year will see a more balanced approach. … Information will, in this environment, inevitably reach the citizenry; at stake is the quality of the information that does the reaching. If content is king, distribution is queen.”
NJL, Steve Buttry: “From a dropped paywall to a social media Pulitzer, expect a year of transformation – We will see more newspaper-company transactions in 2012. … [P]eople with sufficient wealth appear to have bought the companies outright, taking on little or no debt. … The winner of the 2012 presidential election will work harder on reaching voters through social media than through the professional media. …Digital First Media will continue to lead the way in transforming the digital news business. … We will see some major realignment of journalism and news-industry organizations.”
NJL, Paul Bradshaw: “Collaboration! Data! 2012 will see news outlets turning talk into action – 1. 2012 will be the year we finally move away from the traditional homepage – The ‘stream’ as an interface will move from being the preserve of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to being a serious consideration for news website homepages. We’re all 24-hour news channels now. 2. In 2012, ‘Collaboration Is King’… 3. News organizations turn talk into action on data – Any news organization that is serious about its fourth estate role is building the skills to interrogate those datasets.”
NJL, Dan Kennedy: “2012 will bring ‘the great retrenchment’ among newspaper publishers – Paywalls may become more popular in 2012; that doesn’t mean they’ll be enough to save a flailing industry. … The great newspaper retrenchment may prove to be more than a dead-cat bounce. As the economy slowly improves, the newspaper business may well enjoy a semi-revival. But before long, the forces that have been undermining newspapers since the rise of the commercial web in the mid-1990s will come back to the fore. … For the most part, though, you can be reasonably sure that newspaper companies will continue to cut costs, maximize profits (or minimize losses), and do their best ostrich imitations until they find themselves under siege once again. – They’re standing up for traditional values – and what could be more traditional than failing to plan for the future?”
NJL, Emily Bell: “2012 will be a year of expanded ‘network sensibility’ – Making predictions about journalism is a hopeless business: Jay Rosen, who is much wiser than I am, said he never does it, and I salute him for that. … The network sensibility will grow in newsrooms that currently don’t tend to have it as part of their process – it is still seen in the vast majority of places as more of a ‘nice to have’ rather than a ‘must have.’ … While this use of distributed tools and new platforms continues at speed, I think we will also see some much-needed closer scrutiny on what this new reality means for journalism and its constant redefinition of products and services. … Journalists have always been very skilled at stories and projects and fairly awful at thinking about platforms. We need more engineers who want to be journalists, and we need to teach students more about the implications of publishing in a digital environment – whatever the format their journalism originally takes.”
NJL: “Amazon conquers, Patch dies, a Facebook-only outlet is born…and more predictions for 2012 – [P]redictions about the business of, and platforms for, journalism, from and platforms for, journalism, from Brian Boyer, Rick Edmonds, Kevin Kelly, Joy Mayer, Alan Murray, Alan Mutter, Geneva Overholser, Howard Owens, and Sree Sreenivasan.”