Report on User-Generated Content (UGC) in TV and Online News

Another interesting report from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism: AMATEUR FOOTAGE: A GLOBAL STUDY OF USER-GENERATED CONTENT IN TV AND ONLINE-NEWS OUTPUT is by Claire Wardle, Sam Dubberley, and Pete Brown. 

This Phase 1 Report (April 2014) represents research that has been split into quantitative and qualitative phases with this report focusing largely on the former.  I couldn't find a timetable for when we might expect Phase II, which will focus on interviews with over 60 journalists and editors, but I'll keep an eye out for it.

Conclusions from the Executive Summary:

1) UGC is used by news organizations daily, but only when other content is not available to tell the story.

2) News organizations are poor and inconsistent in labeling content as UGC and crediting the individual who captured the content.

Our data showed more similarities than differences across television and Web output, with troubling practices across both platforms. The best use of UGC was online, mostly because the Web provides opportunities for integrating UGC into news output like live blogs and topic pages.

State of the News Media 2014

It's that time of year again.  Don't forget to check out The Pew Research Center's STATE OF THE NEWS MEDIA 2014. The Pew Center's Journalism Project has been assessing the news media since 1997 and these annual reports, chock-full of data, researchers and students have come to rely on for insight on developing trends in the news media. If you want to compare new findings to previous years click on Datasets for data (in .zip files) from 2008 through 2013.

I've raided the Overview for these six findings you can
read more about in the whole report:

1) Thirty of the largest digital-only news organizations account for about 3,000 jobs and one area of investment is global coverage. 
2) So far, the impact of new money flowing into the industry may be more about fostering new ways of reporting and reaching audience than about building a new, sustainable revenue structure. 
3) Social and mobile developments are doing more than bringing consumers into the process – they are also changing the dynamics of the process itself.
4) New ways of storytelling bring both promise and challenge. 
5) Local television, which reaches about nine in ten U.S. adults, experienced massive change in 2013, change that stayed under the radar of most. 
6) Dramatic changes under way in the makeup of the American population will undoubtedly have an impact on news in the U.S, and in one of the fastest growing demographic groups – Hispanics – we are already seeing shifts. 
One thing that confused me about this year's offering is that there is no single pdf for it. When you go to the link the Report is broken down into separate boxes that add up to the full report. Don't be fooled by the Overview page that has a pdf called Complete Report--it's only the Overview. Go figure. 

New Televsion News Archive on the horizon

CommPilings posts are usually about resources; this one is about the promise of a resource. According to a recent story in Salon.com, the collecting obsession of a devoted Philadelphia-area librarian, Marion Stokes, may result in the largest television news archive to date--some 140,000 VHS tapes of network, cable, and local news programming between 1977 and 2012.  Librarian Roger Macdonald of the Internet Archive has taken on the collection which will be digitized and indexed for all. Not sure when it's slated for completion but the project has begun and, well, it's the Internet Archive (!) which already delivers a serachable database of the last four years of television news (2010-2013).

Of course the most famous television news archive is the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, a searchable abstracting service for national television network news broadcasts, 1968-present, with CNN and NBC broadcasts available as RealMedia video streams from 1998-present.  Unlike the Internet Archive initiative, it cannot post all of its footage online for free; researchers have to borrow clips on DVD for a small fee.

Communication scholars and historians certainly appreciate all of these archival efforts--it will be interesting to see the vision of Marion Stokes come to fruition, hopefully not too far from now. 

CNN Transcripts in More Than One Place

CNN has been good about archiving their transcripts over the past decade. You can find them, organized by program, at CNN.Com/transcripts.  But for the greater good of historical digital preservation these transcripts, 2000-2012, have been snatched up by the Internet Archive here, as announced by their by their Just In Time Grabs team.  Love this explanation of their initiative:

The hardest part about our transient, shallow world wide web is the terrifying swiftness in which data disappears. To this end, Archive Team members have often bravely strapped on miner's helmets and flashlights, dove into the flaming wreckage of a dying site, and grabbed a copy for all of time. Some of these rescues, consisting of what we could grab, are being saved here.

LexisNexis Academic also carries CNN transcripts but it's tricky telling what years of coverage they provide. They do have transcripts for certain shows going back to the early 90s. You have to go into the Browse Publications section and under transcripts click on the information icon for individual genres--financial, entertainment, international--to see what programs they carry and years of coverage.

Pew's News Media 2012 Annual Report

Don't forget to check out The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Media 2012 for lots of interesting findings and data.

From the press release:

A mounting body of evidence finds that the spread of mobile technology is adding to news consumption, strengthening the appeal of traditional news brands and even boosting reading of long-form journalism. But the evidence also shows that technology companies are strengthening their grip on who profits, according to the 2012 State of the News Media report by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
More than a quarter of Americans (27%) now get news on mobile devices, and for the vast majority, this is increasing news consumption, the report finds. More than 80% of smartphone and tablet news consumers still get news on laptop or desktop computers. On mobile devices, news consumers also are more likely to go directly to a news site or use an app, rather than to rely on search — strengthening the bond with traditional news brands.

The full report is freely available here.

Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive

The Internet Archive hosts a television archive of the events of September 11 called Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive.

A resource for scholars, journalists, and the public, the Archive includes over 3000 hours of international news coverage from 20 channels over a seven day period, 9/11 through 9/17, 2001. The intentional coverage includes broadcasts from Mexico City, London, Beijing, Baghdad, Paris, Ottawa, Tokyo, and Moscow.

You can also watch the presentations of 10 speakers at the recent Learning From Recorded Memory: 9/11 TV News Archive Conference that was held in August 24, 2011.

While the Vanderbilt News Archive has coverage of the major US networks during this time, the non-proprietary nature of this collection is invaluable to folks outside University communities. The inclusion of international coverage, though limited, is also a plus.

I guess I should have posted this last month closer to the anniversary, but archives are about timelessness as much as timeliness!

September CommQuote

This month's quote is from a t-shirt. From the September 12, 2011 issue of The New Yorker (page 75). The magazine is available to the Penn community electronically and also in paper in the Annenberg Library.

Latest issue of Media, War & Conflict on the CNN Effect

The April 2011 (Volume 4, 1) issue of Media, War & Conflict is devoted to the CNN Effect. Interestingly, one of the pieces is on Japanese foreign disaster relief in the 1990s as related to the CNN effect (Van Belle and Potter).

Articles include:

The CNN effect reconsidered: mapping a research agenda for the future, by Piers Robinson

Time to move on: new media realities - new vulnerabilities of power, by Nik Gowing

The CNN effect reconsidered (again): problematizing ICT and global governance in the CNN effect research agenda, by Steven Livingston

Did the Global War on Terror end the CNN effect? by Babak Bahador

Media and foreign policy in central and eastern Europe post 9/11: in from the cold? by Ekaterina Balabanova

Japanese foreign disaster assistance: the ad hoc period in international politics and the illusion of a CNN effect, by Douglas A Van Belle and David M Potter

Good Things From Pew

The Pew Research Center's s Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released its eighth report, State of the News Media 2011

Among this year's e features is a report on how American newspapers fare relative to those in other countries, the status of community media, a survey on mobile and paid content in local news, and a report on African American media. Each year the Report identifies key trends. Six stand out entering 2011:

• The news industry is turning to executives from outside. The trend has a scattered history. The complex revenue equation of news -- that it was better to serve the audience even to the irritation of advertisers that paid most of the bills -- tended to trip up outsiders. It spelled the end, for instance, of Mark Willes at Times Mirror when he let advertisers dictate content. With the old revenue model broken, more companies are again looking to outsiders for leadership. One reason is new owners. Seven of the top 25 newspapers in America are now owned by hedge funds, which had virtually no role a few years ago. The age of publicly traded newspaper companies is winding down. And some of the new executives are blunt in their assessments. John Paton, the new head of Journal Register newspapers told a trade group in December: "We have had nearly 15 years to figure out the web and, as an industry, we newspaper people are no good at it." A question is how much time these private equity owners will give struggling news operations to turn around. One of these publishers told PEJ privately that he believed he had two years.
• Less progress has been made charging for news than predicted, but there are some signs of willingness to pay. The leading study on the subject finds that so far only about three dozen newspapers have moved to some kind of paid content on their websites. Of those, only 1% of users opted to pay. And some papers that moved large portions of content to subscription gave up the effort. A new survey released for this report suggests that under certain circumstances the prospects for charging for content could improve. If their local newspaper would otherwise perish, 23% of Americans said they would pay $5 a month for an online version. To date, however, even among early adopters, only 10% of those who have downloaded local news apps paid for them (this doesn't include apps for non-local news or other content). At the moment, the only news producers successfully charging for most of their content online are those selling financial information to elite audiences -- the Financial Times is one, the Wall Street Journal is another, Bloomberg is a third -- all operations aimed at professional audiences, which means they are not a model that will work for general interest news.
  
• If anything, the metrics of online news have become more confused, not less. Many believe that the economics of the web, and particularly online news, cannot really progress until the industry settles on how to measure audience. There is no consensus on what is the most useful measure of online traffic. Different rating agencies do not even agree on how to define a "unique visitor." Does that denote different people or does the same person visiting a site from different computers get counted more than once? The numbers from one top rating agency, comScore, are in some cases double and even triple those of another, Nielsen. More audience research data exist about each user than ever before. Yet in addition to confusion about what it means, it is almost impossible get a full sense of consumer behavior -- across sites, platforms, and devices. That leaves potential advertisers at a loss about how to connect the dots. In March 2011, three advertising trade groups, supported by other media associations, announced an initiative to improve and standardize confusing digital media metrics called Making Measurement Make Sense, but the task will not be easy.
  
• Local news remains the vast untapped territory. Most traditional American media -- and much of U.S. ad revenue -- are local. The dynamics of that market online are still largely undefined. The potential, though, is clear. Already 40% of all online ad spending is local, up from 30% just a year earlier. But the market at the local level is different than nationally and requires different strategies, both in content creation and economics. Unlike national, at the local level, display advertising -- the kind that news organizations rely on -- is bigger than search, market researchers estimate. And the greatest local growth area last year was in highly targeted display ads that many innovators see as key to the future. Even Google, the king of search, sees display as "our next big business," as Eric Schmidt, its CEO, told the New York Times in September.
  
• The nature of local news content is also in many ways undefined. While local has been the area of greatest ferment for nonprofit startups, no one has yet cracked the code for how to produce local news effectively at a sustainable level. The first major concept in more traditional venues, the push toward so-called "hyperlocalism," proved ill-conceived, expensive and insufficiently supported by ads. Yahoo!'s four-year old local news and advertising consortium has shown some success for certain participants but less for others. There are some prominent local news aggregators such as Topix and Examiner.com, and now AOL has entered the field with local reporting through Patch. Whether national networks will overtake small local startups or local app networks will mix news with a variety of other local information, the terrain here remains in flux.
  
• The new conventional wisdom is that the economic model for news will be made up of many smaller and more complex revenue sources than before. The old news economic model was fairly simple. Broadcast television depended on advertising. Newspapers depended on circulation revenue and a few basic advertising categories. Cable was split -- half from advertising and half from cable subscription fees. Online, most believe there will be many different kinds of revenue. This is because no one revenue source looks large enough and because money is divided among so many players. In the biggest new revenue experiment of 2010, the discount sales coupon business led by Groupon, revenue can be split three ways when newspapers are involved. On the iPad, Apple gets 30% of the subscription revenue and owns the audience data. On the Android system, Google takes 10%. News companies are trying to push back. One new effort involves online publishers starting their own ad exchanges, rather than having middlemen do it for them. NBC, CBS and Forbes are among those launching their own, tired of sharing revenue and having third parties take their audience data.
  
• The bailout of the car industry helped with the media's modest recovery in 2010. One overlooked dimension in the year past: A key source of renewed revenue in news in 2010 was the recovery in the car industry, aided by the decision to lend federal money to save U.S. carmakers. Auto advertising jumped 77% in local television, 22% in radio and 17% in magazines. The other benefactor of the news industry, say experts, was the U.S. Supreme Court: Its Citizens United decision allowing corporations and unions to buy political ads for candidates helped boost political advertising spent on local television to an estimated $2.2 billion, a new high for a midterm campaign year.

Make sure you check out Who Owns the Media (a section of this year's State of the Media), an interactive database of companies that own news properties in the United States. You can use this site to compare companies, explore each media sector, or read profiles of individual companies.

Aanother new report of note from Pew is: How mobile devices are changing community information environments by Kristen Purcell, Lee Rainie, Tom Rosenstiel, Amy Mitchell.

Report on the Media and the Immigration Debate

This is not a new report, folks (sorry), but it's still well within the statute of limitations for importance. The Brookings Institution's Governance Studies program teamed up with the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California to investigate the role of the media (mostly television news, newspapers, and blogs) in the ofttimes incendiary issue of immigration. They published their findings in a 2008 83-page report which is divided into two parts. The first and largest part is devoted to a content analysis of media coverage of immigration since 1980 with greater emphasis on recent years. The second section is composed of two essays, one focusing on coverage for one year (2007), the other on the role of public opinion in the debate. The Report does not hold out much hope for the media playing a role in resolving the crisis which, though the message is bad, is at least honest.

Report on the Media and the Immigration Debate is freely available in PDF.

Introducing Media Cloud

Media Cloud is a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University that provides new and evolving tools to quantitatively examine the news media as an information ecosystem. Newly launched the Project's objectives are ambitious. They are:

• Develop an open database of the topics of all stories from thousands of sources
• Build lightweight, interactive tools that allow casual users to easily ask the database questions
• Publish open APIs that give other researchers full access to the database
• Publish the code for the system under a free software license
• Publish our own research using the database, including studies on media signatures, meme propagation, and geographic attention profiles

From the March 11 press release:

Researching the nature of news, and media information flows, has always faced a difficult challenge: there is so much produced by so many outlets that it is hard to monitor it all. Researchers have used painstaking manual content analysis to understand mass media. On the web, the explosion of citizen media makes such an approach far more difficult and less comprehensive. By automatically downloading, processing, and querying the full text of thousands of outlets, Media Cloud will allow unprecedented quantitative analysis of media
trends.

Today's launch allows a first view into some of what is possible on the Media Cloud platform. At http://www.mediacloud.org you can generate simple charts of media coverage across ources and countries. The actual capabilities of the system are much greater, and the Media
Cloud team is actively looking for other researchers who will bring their own questions as the tools are further developed. Ultimately, Media Cloud will provide open APIs that can support variety of lines of inquiry.

Visit the Media Cloud site, try the visualizations, share your research ideas with the team, and sign up for the Media Cloud mailing list to hear about functionality enhancements and other project developments.

Pew's State of the News Media 2008

From the Project for Excellence in Journalism of the Pew Research Center, just out: The State of the News Media 2008, the fifth edition of the annual report on the health and status of American journalism. The report combines original research and aggregated data on all major sectors of journalism, identifying trends, marking key indicators, noting areas for further inquiry and providing a resource for citizens, journalists and researchers.

October CommQuote

This month's quote comes from the Ian McEwan's novel Saturday.

"He takes a step towards the CD player, then changes his mind for he's feeling the pull. Like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. The possibility of their recurrence is one thread that binds the days. The government's counsel - that an attack in a European or American city is an inevitability - isn't only a disclaimer of responsibility, it's a heady promise. Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know...With the idea of the news, inseparable from it, at least at weekends, is the lustrous prospect of a glass of red wine."

--Ian McEwan
Saturday (Anchor Books edition, 2005) p. 180

Iran's PressTV

PRESS TV is the first international Iran-based news network to broadcast in English on a round-the-clock schedule. Based in Tehran and state-run, it is staffed by media professionals from around the world. On the website it describes its goal as "to present a deeper analysis of current affairs, aiming to show the other side of the story. " It goes on to describe its larger vision as threefold: "to break the global media stranglehold of western outlets, to bridge cultural divisions pragmatically, and (three) to highlight the versatility and vitality of political and cultural differences, making up the human condition." The site features news articles and the opportunity to watch live coverage.