Posts tagged publishing
Gendered News
From entertainment to finance to politics to sports, the Guardian Datablog explores how women and men are published in leading UK news sources, and how often articles by gender are shared across social networks.
In the interactive they’ve produced, you can sort across different criteria as well as drill deeper into specific publications and their sections.
At a macro level, UK news publishing is much like what we see in the United States: it’s dominated by men with less than 30% of news articles published by women across the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Guardian.
Drill down a bit, or look at gender participation by subject area, and you see women dominating topics like “lifestyle” and “entertainment” and men dominating, well, most everything else.
But the Datablog isn’t just looking at who gets published, but who gets heard.
You would think it’s one and the same but with the decline of the newspaper front page — and the Web site home page — as a conversation driver, it’s the social ecosystem of readers and their sharing habits that drives audience engagement and interaction.
Via the Guardian:
Online, who gets heard is determined by an ecosystem of actors: individuals sharing on Facebook and Twitter, link-sharing communities, personal algorithms on Google News, and citizen media curators. Newspapers only offer part of the information supply; we readers decide who’s heard every time we click, share or use our own voice…
…Of course, the reach of an article is much more complicated than likes and shares. What gets seen is often dependent on the time of day and the influence of who shares a link.
The definition of likes and shares also changes. Since our measurements in early August, Facebook’s counters have been changed to track links sent within private messages. This year, newsrooms experimented with Facebook social readers and tablet apps to grow their audiences. Bernhard Rieder’s network diagram of the Guardian’s Facebook page illustrates yet another social channel for news. Publishers sometimes can’t agree on what their own data means.
Despite these limitations, data on likes and shares offer the best outside picture of audience interest in women’s writing in the news.
Read through for analysis and more about the methodology and tools used to suss out the data. As usual, the Guardian also lets you download the data so you can work with it yourself.
Image: Screenshot, UK News Gender Ranking: What They Publish vs What Readers Share, via The Guardian. Select to embiggen.
Futurecast
Yes, we know that news organizations write about events before they happen. Usually though they don’t publish them beforehand.
Image: Screenshot, the Associated Press publishes their Vice Presidential debate roundup almost two hours before it takes place.
News Kids Can Use?
Publishers of a popular Tunisian children’s magazine called Qaws Quzah (“Rainbow”) will be prosecuted for including instructions on how to make a Molotov Cocktail in a recent issue.
The Ministry for Women and Family Affairs said the article “encouraged violent and terrorist thoughts.”
Via the BBC:
The publication carried a picture of a burning glass bottle to illustrate the history and uses of petrol bombs.
The piece appeared in the magazine’s so-called Knowledge Corner.
“It is an improvised weapon that is often used in riots and acts of sabotage because it is easy to make and use,” the article explained.
The ministry for family affairs said the magazine was endangering children’s lives by encouraging the use petrol bombs “in acts of vandalism or terrorism”.
Image: The “Knowledge Corner” of Qaws Quzah with an article about the history and making of Molotov Cocktails, via the Daily Mail.
The Humble eBook Bundle
Humble Bundle, a San Francisco based startup that allows buyers to set the purchase price for “bundles” of DRM free video games, albums and ebooks, has a new bundle for the offering.
The Humble eBook Bundle contains ebooks by Cory Doctorow, Paolo Bacigalupi, Lauren Beukes, Mercedes Lackey and Kelly Link. If you pay more than the current average price, you get two more books, Old Man’s War by John Scalzi and Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Format is your choice of DRM free PDF, MOBI, and ePub formats.
We’ve seen this set-your-price model before, most famously with Radiohead’s download release of In Rainbows. What’s nice about Humble Bundles though is that not only do you get to name your price, you also get to set how the money is distributed between the creators (in aggregate), charity and to Humble Bundle itself.
Past charities have included Child’s Play, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, charity: water and the American Red Cross. The company claims they have sold over $19.2 million worth of Bundles since 2010 with $6.4 million of that going to charities.
Currently, the eBook bundle has over 31,000 sales, total payments of close to $380,000 and an average purchase price of $12.19.
Linux users, on average, are paying the most.
Image: Screenshot, the Humble eBook Bundle. Select to embiggen.
Cypherpunks
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is coming out with a book next month, co-authored with Jacob Applebaum, Andy Müeller and Jérémie Zimmerman.
Via OR Books:
Assange brings together a small group of cutting-edge thinkers and activists from the front line of the battle for cyber-space to discuss whether electronic communications will emancipate or enslave us. Among the topics addressed are: Do Facebook and Google constitute “the greatest surveillance machine that ever existed,” perpetually tracking our location, our contacts and our lives? Far from being victims of that surveillance, are most of us willing collaborators? Are there legitimate forms of surveillance, for instance in relation to the “Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse” (money laundering, drugs, terrorism and pornography)? And do we have the ability, through conscious action and technological savvy, to resist this tide and secure a world where freedom is something which the Internet helps bring about?
The harassment of WikiLeaks and other Internet activists, together with attempts to introduce anti-file sharing legislation such as SOPA and ACTA, indicate that the politics of the Internet have reached a crossroads. In one direction lies a future that guarantees, in the watchwords of the cypherpunks, “privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful”; in the other lies an Internet that allows government and large corporations to discover ever more about internet users while hiding their own activities.
After 7 Years of Litigation, Google, Publishers Cut Deal
Via the BBC:
Google has settled a seven-year legal spat with the Association of American Publishers (AAP).
The row blew up in 2005 over Google’s plan to scan and digitise books for a vast digital library.
The AAP said that the project could involve massive copyright infringement because it could make available digital copies of copyrighted works.
The settlement lets US publishers decide which works should, or should not, be in Google’s library.
This settles one of the main objections to the library project which planned to scan every book unless publishers and authors specifically objected…
…As part of the deal Google has also agreed to provide digital copies of the works that publishers and writers make available for the library.
FJP: That was a long time coming.
Amazon Studios Begins Work on Movies, Comics
Amazon’s original content arm Amazon Studios has just optioned the rights to a Kindle bestseller called Seed. Its author, Ania Alborn, is probably writing the script, though Amazon Studios provides writers the option to make the script writing process open source.
Amazon Studios is also working on a digital comic called Blackburn Burrow, and has hired Clive Barker to rewrite a script for Zombies vs. Gladiators. Looks like a lot of sci-fi and horror stuff so far.
Photo: Blackburn Burrow, Amazon.com
The Atlantic Tries Native Ads
Publishers are innovating in various ways across digital platforms. Digiday’s Josh Sternberg caught up with Jay Lauf, publisher of The Atlantic, to discuss how The Atlantic will generate digital revenue in the future:
The Atlantic, the venerable155-year-old publication, is doubling down on its approach to the new wave of digital advertising: native ads. Launched three years ago, Native Solutions creates ad programs that have the look and feel of The Atlantic’s content. The goal: help brands create and distribute engaging content by making the ads linkable, sharable and discoverable. For example, take a look at the work it did with Porsche on the image-heavy sponsored post, “Where Design Meets Technology,” which was shared 139 times on Facebook and 80 times on Twitter.
The Native Solutions programs has been so successful that it now accounts for half of digital ad revenue, which is up over 50 percent so far this year.
“A lot of people worry about crossing editorial and advertising lines, but I think it respects readers more,” Lauf said. “It’s saying, ‘We know what you’re interested in.’ It’s more respectful of the reader that way.”
Read the entire article at Digiday.
Meme 1, Newsweek 0
Tina Brown’s latest Newsweek cover does what a Tina Brown cover does best: combine provocative imagery with an inflammatory title that gets people talking about the magazine.
In this case, “MUSLIM RAGE” screams the headline with two intense men wailing in protest underneath.
The cover itself is meta, playing on the “Why do they hate us?” meme that runs through the American press. Glenn Greenwald, writing in The Guardian, captures the absurdity of the premise:
One prominent strain shaping American reaction to the protests in the Muslim world is bafflement, and even anger, that those Muslims are not more grateful to the US. After all, goes this thinking, the US bestowed them with the gifts of freedom and democracy – the very rights they are now exercising – so how could they possibly be anything other than thankful? Under this worldview, it is especially confounding that the US, their savior and freedom-provider, would be the target of their rage…
…On Thursday night, NBC News published a nine-minute report on Brian Williams’ “Rock Center” program featuring its foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, reporting on the demonstrations in Cairo, which sounded exactly the same theme. Standing in front of protesting Egyptians in Tahrir Square, Engel informed viewers that this was all so very baffling because it was taking place “in Cairo, where the US turned its back on its old friend Hosni Mubarak”, and then added:
“It is somewhat ironic with American diplomats inside the embassy who helped to give these demonstrators, these protesters, a voice, and allowed them to actually carry out these anti-American clashes that we’re seeing right now.”
That it was the US who freed Egyptians and “allowed them” the right to protest would undoubtedly come as a great surprise to many Egyptians. That is the case even beyond the decades of arming, funding and general support from the US for their hated dictator.
So, Newsweek is playing the ahistorical questions running through traditional media channels and while doing so, asks readers to chime in on Twitter with their thoughts using the #MuslimRage hashtag.
And that’s when, the Internet being the Internet, things got fun and users wrestled back the narrative:
- “Lost your kid Jihad at the airport. Can’t yell for him. #MuslimRage” — @LSal92.
- “I’m having such a good hair day. No one even knows. #MuslimRage” — @LibertyLibya.
- “So you’re telling me that in this entire sporting goods store you don’t have a single ski turban? #muslimrage” — @TomGara.
- “Ramadan in Iceland when days are 23 hours long. #muslimrage” — @iron_emu.
Coincidently, Michael Wolff recently wrote about Tina Brown and the challenges she faces with Newsweek from his new column at USA Today:
The most famous magazine editor of her generation is engaged in a desperate and operatic struggle, which almost no one anywhere believes has any chance of success, to reinvent Newsweek as a sustainable business proposition. In this, she is arguably no different from anybody else with a venerable media brand, except that Newsweek is in more dire extremis and her notoriety personalizes the fight…
…The issue was starkly simple: Could a traditional brand be reinvented in what is called a “digital first” context — and soon migrate entirely to digital — and, even more challenging, could it be reinvented by a traditional editor?
This week’s answer to that question is a clumsy MUSLIM RAGE cover with two stand-ins representing a billion-plus people. It’s analog link bait, a purposeful troll.
Yet, in a digital world where people can talk back and wrestle premises away from brands and organizations, the audience is mocking it. — Michael.
Image: Muslim Rave, via @max_read.
This is What an Advertising Revenue Free Fall Looks Like
Via Mark J. Perry:
The decline in print newspaper advertising to a 62-year low is amazing by itself, but the sharp decline in recent years is pretty stunning. This year’s ad revenues of $19 billion will be less than half of the $46 billion spent just five years ago in 2007, and a little more than one-third of the $56.5 billion spent in 2004.
Here’s another perspective: It took 50 years to go from about $20 billion in annual newspaper print ad revenue in 1950 (adjusted for inflation) to $63.5 billion in 2000, and then only 12 years to go from $63.5 billion back to less than $20 billion in 2012.
Even when online advertising is added to the print ads (see red line in chart), the combined total spending for print and online advertising this year will still only be about $22.4 billion, less than the $22.47 billion spent on print advertising in 1953.
I think “ooph” is the ongoing sound I hear an industry make. — Michael
Image: Newspaper Advertising Revenue Adjusted for Inflation, 1950 - 2012. Via Carpe Diem.
The White House Does Approve This Message
As reporters vie for access to politicians, they’ve increasingly given veto power to campaign communication staffs over what quotes appear, how they appear and to whom they are attributed.
And so it goes with Michael Lewis’ new article in Vanity Fair about President Obama.
Via the New York Times:
Like other journalists who write about Washington and presidential politics, Mr. Lewis said that he had to submit to the widespread but rarely disclosed practice of quote approval
During a discussion at Lincoln Center on Monday night with Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, Mr. Lewis volunteered to the audience that as a condition of cooperating with his story, the White House insisted on signing off on the quotes that would appear.
Mr. Lewis said that ultimately the White House disallowed very little of what he asked to use. And he described having access to the president that was unusually unfettered. About 95 percent of what he witnessed was on the record, he said.
Don’t want something to appear? Take it off the record. But that news organizations continue to play by these rules is troubling.
Let’s, for a minute, remember William Randolph Hearst’s simple adage: “News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising.”
I think we have to make clear to him and to the American people that we’re not going to accept this kind of behavior.
Leon Panetta, US Defense Secretary, on the publishing of No Easy Day, an account by a retired Navy Sea involved in the mission that killed Osama Bin Laden.
Written under the pseudonym Mark Owen, it’s been reported that the author is Matt Bissonnette. ABC News, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on SEAL book: “We’re not going to accept this kind of behavior”
‘USA Today,’ Yesterday and Tomorrow
Bob Garfield, co-host of National Public Radio’s On the Media, has fun(ny) stories about the founding of USA Today which is celebrating its 30th birthday. At the time, Garfield was the paper’s advertising and marketing columnist.
Below, he writes that the same paper that was made possible because of technology will probably also meet its demise because of technology.
Republished with Bob’s permission. The original is at MediaPost. — Peter
Have I mentioned that I am old?
Never mind the grandchildren and reading glasses. I have polyps that are legal drinking age. So, yeah, I’ve been around.
For instance, this week USA Today celebrates its 30th anniversary, and I was there on Day One. I was the advertising and marketing columnist and in the debut edition had 700 words on the official sponsorships being sold for the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, at that point scheduled for two years hence. In those days official brandedness, like Kirsten Dunst and the Commodore 64, was still in its infancy. So the lead joke speculating about the Official Pasta of the 1984 Summer Olympics was still sort of funny.
As opposed to prescient.
This was all before personal computing of any significance, and well before the Internet, but what made USA Today possible was technology — the now quaint technology of transmitting pages via satellite to a network of Gannett printing sites around the country. That, anyway, was one thing that made USA Today possible. The other thing was the vision of founder Al Neuharth, the egomaniacal genius whose ability to squeeze personal perks from the Gannett cash cow was exceeded only by his ability to squeeze operating synergies from the same Guernsey.
Only Neuharth could have pulled it off, because nobody else in his position had the necessary combination of assets: 1) the coast-to-coast printing infrastructure, 2) a board stacked with pals willing to lose a half billion bucks before making dollar one, and 3) the middlebrow sensibilities required to hit the sweet spot.
From the beginning, “The Nation’s Newspaper” was derided for the brevity of its stories, its un-gray-ladylike splashes of color and its embarrassing episodes of jingoism. Yet it quickly took hold with readers. They liked the four-color weather map. They liked the sports page. They liked the itsy bitsy little front-page stories, soon to be known as McNuggets, and the many factoid-filled charts.
They might also have liked its easy-to-read compactness, weighed down as it surely wasn’t by much bulky and annoying advertising. The big agencies in those days were extremely hesitant to buy USA Today pages for their clients, not even the spirits, cars and travel clients who — by all logic — would have been ideal. The mystery of why this should be so was solved for me one morning as I headed from Washington to New York on the Eastern Shuttle. Seated next to me was the principal of a New York agency with a very large liquor account. I asked him why the distiller wasn’t in USA Today.
“Oh, you know,“ he said. “I prefer the Times.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, it’s more in depth. And I find the color in USA Today distracting.”
“You find it distracting. You personally don’t care for it.”
“Right,” he replied, utterly oblivious to the implications. “I prefer the Times.”
I had no further questions. I just stared at him, blinking like Barney Rubble, realizing that my livelihood was in the hands of a Madison Avenue fully capable of making foolish choices for unsupportable reasons. Luckily, I wound up making a living off of that structural stupidity for the next three decades, but at that moment my sphincter surely tightened.
It tightened still further about a month later, when, while flipping through the next day’s dummy, I saw that there was a full-page Campbell’s Soup ad running opposite my column. That was awkward, because my column happened to lambaste the new Campbell’s campaign for misrepresenting nutritional data. I suggested to the editors they might want to shuffle the ad pages a bit.
They had a better idea. They spiked my column.
When they lied to me about why (“We’re just not set up to do ad criticism”), I somehow believed them. The Wall Street Journal didn’t, however. They wrote a piece that made fools of the lot of us. Only later did I discover that the whole ugly episode took place at a moment when Neuharth and the board were on the verge of pulling the plug on the whole paper.
But they didn’t. They hung in there, got their half billion back and a few billions more. Neuharth had not only a big head, but a hard one. This was immortalized when he installed a 25:1 bronze version of it in the lobby of USA Today headquarters. Within a few years, the paper became so flush that Neuharth was able to globetrot with a handful of editorial personnel to interview world leaders. It was called JetCapade, and he was derided for that, too — on the grounds of squandering millions so that he could meet foreign heads of state. That was a calumny and a lie. JetCapade squandered millions so that foreign heads of state could meet Al.
But God bless the man. His outsize ambition gave the world a successful paper that grew into a pretty good paper. Now, sadly, it is in the same desperate straits threatening all dailies. Circulation is down. Advertising has plummeted. The future is at best uncertain — all owing, ironically enough, to technology, the very thing that brought USA Today to life.
There will be no 60th anniversary. There may well be no 40th. So while I have the opportunity, permit me to thank Al Neuharth and his brainchild for the opportunity it gave me. Now I am old. Then I was 27 — a featured national journalist, a mere five years into my career. Or, as I like to think about it:
The First Official Advertising and Marketing Columnist of the Nation’s Newspaper.
Forget the Paywall, Consider the Surveywall
About 150 US news sites have some sort of paywall (give or take 150 or so). Some are hard, some are soft and some are in between.
All have been written about extensively.
But what if we looked at walls from an entirely different direction? Google’s done this with their Consumer Surveys. Instead of asking readers to pull out their wallets to access content, they’re asked to answer a single question. Think of it as a Surveywall.
Frédéric Filloux describes it like so:
Eighteen months ago — under non disclosure — Google showed publishers a new transaction system for inexpensive products such as newspaper articles. It worked like this: to gain access to a web site, the user is asked to participate to a short consumer research session. A single question, a set of images leading to a quick choice.
The solution is one that’s beautiful in its simplicity. Market research is an almost $30 billion industry. And while a lot of it is much more than having people answer surveys, a lot of it is people answering surveys.
So what if you target surveys to, say, readers of certain sections of The Miami Herald, or Wired, or Car and Driver. The researcher wins because it’s a lower cost solution than traditional outreach. The publisher wins because they’ve gained a revenue stream by running the surveys. The reader wins because her wallet stays in her pocket.
There are caveats, of course, which Frédéric outlines:
In theory, the mechanism finally solves the old quest for tiny, friction-free transactions: replace the paid-for zone with a survey-zone through which access is granted after answering a quick question. Needless to say, it can’t be recommended for all sites. We can’t reasonably expect a general news site, not to mention a business news one, to adopt such a scheme. It would immediately irritate the users and somehow taint the content.
I’m not so sure it’s unreasonable. Different, yes, but the entire digital enterprise and the economics behind it is different.
The solution though reminds me of reCAPTCHA, an initiative started at Carnegie Mellon and now run by Google to crowdsource book digitization by harnessing a few seconds of millions of users’ time by having them enter the text they see in a traditional CAPTCHA box (the first word is machine readable, the second isn’t and that’s the one that Google hopes you can decipher).
As Google explains:
About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.
In theory, the micro-surveys of a Surveywall would work similarly. With enough scale to conduct a full survey one question at a time, market researchers gain the insights they’re looking for. The publisher earns more for running the survey than it would get with traditional display advertising.
The question, as it always does, comes back to the reader.
Will she take a few seconds to answer a question, or think it intrusive, close the page and move on?
And that, most likely, comes back to the king of it all: just how valuable is the content that the publisher is providing? — Michael
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