In January I made the following presentation to the Association for Journalism Education, talking about how digital technologies can be used to facilitate research. Let me know if you have had any similar experiences with using digital technologies in research yourself.
The Daily Telegraph has more stories submitted to Digg, the social news website, than any other daily newspaper site.
Times Online may be winning at StumbleUpon, but the Telegraph has:
The graph shows how many pages have been submitted for each site that made the Digg ‘front pages’ (ie proved sufficiently popular).
It’s based on an analysis of newspaper site pages submitted to Digg (which also suggests that the reason for the success of the Telegraph and Mail is that their users are more likely to Digg than those of other newspaper sites).
Newspaper site Diggs
I recorded this at the Society of Editors conference in November, so forgive my tardiness. This is Donald Martin, a representative of UK training organisation NCTJ talking about the results of a survey they and partners PTC, BJTC and Skillset conducted into employer and university perceptions of skills needed by journalists:
Gap between what news recruiters get and what they want from Paul Bradshaw on Vimeo.
More about the panel this was part of on the Society of Editors website.
Yet another survey came out this month providing comfort to those who still refuse to believe that new media forms like blogs represent a genuine threat to their businesses.
Only 18% of people questioned trusted “personal blogs”, while 39% trusted radio or magazines and 46% print newspapers.
I get this sort of stat thrown at me every time I speak to rooms full of journalists. It’s a meaningless stat, reflecting nothing. You trust what you’ve learned to trust, whether that’s one paper over another, one broadcaster over another, or one blog over another. I don’t trust “newspapers” – I trust one or two. I don’t trust “blogs”, I trust the ones I’ve communicated with.
And that’s where individual blogs have an advantage: they can have a personal conversation with the reader. The author can enter into discussion, add corrections and links. Their trust is built on a relationship, not on a brand.
More interesting in this research are the 3 sources which come out as more trusted than mainstream media: Emails from people we know (how many of us feel we ‘know’ a particular blogger?); consumer reviews (a staple of blogs); and, curiously, portals/search engines (links). And why do people trust these more than ‘radio’ or ‘newspapers’?
I once had a job interview with a national broadcaster where I was asked about the then-current Lewinsky-Clinton scandal. When I replied that I felt it was time to move on, the interviewer frowned. I didn’t get the job.
This interview came to mind this week when I read Journalists and the information-attention markets: Towards an economic theory of journalism by Susanne Fengler & Stephan Russ-Mohl.
According to them, my opinion on the Lewinsky story meant I was something of a journalistic spendthrift.
Because Fengler & Russ-Mohl’s paper argues that, just as we treat publishers and newsroom managers as economically motivated, we should do the same for journalists. Continue reading
Interesting research from (ahem) Yahoo highlighted in Search Engine Land suggests that there are actually areas where users don’t go straight to Google – and makes encouraging reading for local news organisations. Continue reading
The final part of the results of my survey of blogging journalists relates some of the findings to wider research into blogging and journalism, and also looks at some of the differences between sectors and industries.
Blogging has grown and developed considerably in the years since the studies of journalism blogs by Robinson (2006) and Singer (2005) – indeed, three-quarters of respondents had only started blogging since that research was published (in that time the BBC, for instance, expanded from its first blog in December 2005 to 43 in less than a year (Hermida 2008 [PDF]))
Respondents frequently spoke of a rapid transformation by their employers from resistance to blogs to wholesale adoption, in which commercial considerations have played an important role. These ranged from search engine optimisation (blogs help improve the rankings of news websites on search engines such as Google), to “bringing readers back more often”; “a cheap way of getting lots of content online and … resulting ad impressions” (Respondent 113, UK, freelance), to a perceived opportunity to make money, and a way of protecting against the threat from citizen media and the declining state of the news industry itself: Continue reading
The 4th part of the results of my survey of blogging journalists looks at how blogs have affected how news production is affected by blogging.
The area where respondents most often identified a change in news production was in the rise of a looser, more personal, and less formal writing style, echoing the findings of Wall (2005). Respondents talked of finding their “voice”, being more informal and “creative”. For some this fed back into the mainstream news vehicles, particularly for broadcast journalists whose work previously involved less writing. Continue reading
It’s exactly what you’d expect. With advertising budgets shrinking in the credit crunch, agencies are looking to spend that they have more wisely – and this research suggests that means away from from print, and towards the web: Continue reading
The third part of the results of my survey of blogging journalists looks at how blogging has affected how stories are researched.
As journalists move onto gathering information for a story, the scope of easily accessible sources is made broader by journalists’ involvement in blogs. Continue reading
Online Journalism Blog 