Principles of American Journalism: An Introduction by Stephanie Craft & Charles N. Davis

Author:Stephanie Craft & Charles N. Davis [Craft, Stephanie & Davis, Charles N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

In a chapter entitled “The Trouble With Traffic: Why Big Audiences Aren’t Always Profitable,” the researchers break down the problem:

At its most basic level, advertising is a numbers game. A news organization needs a certain number of readers or viewers, and the more it gets, the more ads it can sell and the more it can charge those advertisers. Users also spend varying amounts of time with the magazine, newspaper or broadcast, and the more time they spend, the more an advertiser values the audience.

So we can boil it all down to numbers: (1) numbers in terms of eyeballs and (2) numbers in terms of engagement, or time spent with the media product.

Digital platforms are great at the first part of the numbers game. News sites pull in millions of online readers, every day. The problem is, chasing eyeballs is an outdated way of thinking about audience.

Where we once thought of the product itself as the basis of revenue— that big stack of magazines waiting to be mailed, or that truckload of newspapers—in the digital world, consumption of media is the basis for revenue. Engagement itself has become the measuring stick for assigning value to content, modifying the dual-product model you learned about in Chapter 4.

By chasing large audiences rather than deeply engaged ones, news organizations are sacrificing advertising revenue in the short term for what they hope is a more lucrative relationship with the reader in the long term. Publishers who have a “direct relationship with fans can push better contextual advertising”—that is, ads that relate directly to a user’s habits and interests. In the meantime, how to pay for all of that journalism?

5.1 The View from the Pros: How the Job Has Changed

When I first started at the New York Times in 2003, the newspaper was located on Times Square and the building had a library. Several weeks after being hired, I remember visiting that library—a stodgy, whispering place manned by a dapper gentleman who only ever wore bow ties. I had been sent to the library by a Metro desk editor and told to consult some obscure electoral and city maps that apparently were only to be found in hard copy. Even then that dusty room felt like a throwback. It also carried a gravitas I expected from the paper of record. Now, neither the headquarters in New York nor the newspaper’s D.C. bureau has a library. Those maps—and virtually everything else—are online.

The Internet has radically expanded journalism’s horizons. I’ve used Skype to interview factory workers in remote areas of Bangladesh. I have sent blast e-mails to nearly a thousand human rights lawyers globally to query them all at once on a story that had to be filed the same day. I tried a fun reporting experiment recently with a magazine piece I wrote about the stories hidden within people’s personal passwords. The topic was one that seemed to have the potential to resonate with readers globally since virtually everyone has to deal with technology and passwords in daily life.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.