Fresh useful insights for people advancing quality, innovative and sustainable journalism
You might have heard: According to Breaking News’ Cory Bergman, the traditional narrative of trading print revenue for significantly smaller revenue from mobile may no longer be true
But did you know: Facebook suggests mobile users could be just as valuable as desktop users, but local publishers are still catching up (Poynter)
Facebook’s year-end report for 2015 showed that engagement and revenue per user is trending higher as more of its audience shifts to mobile, which Cory Bergman says is evidence that mobile users are worth much more than many predicted. But in the world of news publishers, mobile value isn’t quite there yet: While The New York Times says that mobile makes up 22 percent of its digital audience, Rick Edmonds reports that a regional publisher is only seeing mobile ad rates at $3 per 1,000 impressions, with mobile ad revenues only making up 1 percent of total revenue.
+ Noted: Twitter is now putting “recommended” tweets at the top of users’ timelines: Around a dozen tweets will be shown, and users currently have to opt in to see the recommendations, but it is expected to become the default at some point (TechCrunch); The New York Times is ending its tech blog Bits, but will continue Bits’ email newsletter, special sections and daily reports (New York Times); McClatchy reports 11.7 year-over-year drop in Q4 advertising revenue, which can be partly attributed to brick-and-mortar stores’ own losses to online retailers (Poynter); Mount St. Mary’s student newspaper adviser is fired after a controversial article that quoted the university president comparing struggling freshmen to bunnies that should be drowned (New York Times)
News outlets are learning that vertical video is more effective on mobile, but there’s no consensus on the best way to create it (Nieman Lab)
As mobile continues to grow, news publishers are learning from apps such as Snapchat and Periscope that vertical video is more effective for mobile viewing. But what they’re not sure of is how exactly to create vertical video. Some organizations simply have staff rotate their phones and film the video vertically, but others shoot the video horizontally and then adapt the footage for a vertical screen. Joseph Lichterman says both approaches have problems, such as how to put a camera on a tripod sideways or how to film a video horizontally while making sure it can be readjusted into a vertical orientation.
+ After analyzing more than a billion Facebook posts, BuzzSumo is sharing insights for increasing Facebook engagement: Shorter posts, as well as posts with questions and images, receive higher levels of engagement, embedded videos receive six times more engagement than videos that link to YouTube, and more (BuzzSumo)
Why Trinity Mirror is aggregating news from other publishers for its new app (Digiday)
Trinity Mirror’s newest app does something not a lot of publishers’ news apps do: Perspecs features up to 10 curated stories from other publishers, published as a daily edition. With each story, three different articles will run with opposing viewpoints, representing the left-leaning, neutral, and right-leaning perspective on the story. Trinity Mirror’s head of product, regionals, apps and email Darren Sher says: “The idea is to offer news analysis beyond what’s breaking and provide different perspectives on the news. … The point is, there are usually three sides to any story.”
Facebook says captions can increase a video’s view time by 12 percent (Business Insider)
Facebook’s director of ads product marketing Graham Mudd says 40 percent of Facebook’s video ads do not effectively communicate their message unless sound is turned on. Facebook is trying to fix that by introducing auto-captioning for video ads. Advertisers previously had to embed their own captions or upload caption files, and the automated captions can be previewed before publishing. But importantly for all publishers, Facebook has found in its own internal tests that having captions increases video view times by 12 percent.
Political reporters put too much effort into predictions instead of focusing on issues (Gawker)
Three months into its rebranding as a politics site, Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan says political reporters really know nothing. Instead of focusing on policy issues, Nolan says political reporters are putting too much of their efforts into trying to draw conclusions that often turn out to be wrong from statistically insignificant samples of voters and campaign events: “We live in a world in which people with no inherent expertise in anything at all (reporters like me) are expected to be able to produce grand insights into the future behavior of one hundred million demographically diverse people based upon how energetic the crowd of five dozen at the last Jeb Bush town hall meeting was.”
A new report from Local News Lab explores lessons for local news in revenue and community engagement (Medium)
In the Local News Lab’s latest report, a series of six essays document the project’s own learnings in areas such as revenue, community engagement and philanthropy. Some questions tackled include “How might communities be more active participants in local news?” and “How might newsrooms, working with communities, better represent and respond to the diverse needs of local people?” The essays are available to read on Medium (linked above), and the full report is also available for download as a PDF.
The post Need to Know: Feb. 11, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.
from American Press Institute http://ift.tt/20qu3NA
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment