Hard News Still Matters?

A report out this week argues that hard news is a bigger draw for online newspapers than celebrity fluff.  That's good news, if true.

Newspaper websites get more ad revenue from articles about serious stuff like the Gulf oil spill than from traffic bait like stories on celebrity scandals, according to an analysis by Perfect Market, a company that aims to help publishers become more visible and profitable on the web. 

In the good news/bad news take:

• The "hard news audience," while small, heads to newspaper websites.
• Newspapers don't have to pander because (1) it's embarrassing and (2) it apparently doesn't work.  Those infatuated with celebs are probably getting it at TMZ.
• Hard news kinda still matters.  CNN, for example, is always behind Fox, except when the miners in Chile were being pulled out.  On important hard news stories, people still go more to credible sources.
• But ... is the core hard news audience large enough, and willing to spend enough, for real news?

One telling graph from the story:

Lindsay Lohan's trouble with the law, Mel Gibson's rants and celebrity divorces didn't compare with any of those, according to Perfect Market, which said it considered more than 15 million news articles from 21 news sites that use its technology, including the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. Its analysis factored both the amount of traffic that articles got and the ad revenue for those articles for every thousand page views.

Odds and Ends

Online Vs. Print

I blogged earlier about Slate's little experiment in which a couple of journalists got their news for a few days from print and a couple who got their news only online. There is an audio here of their discussion after the experiment. Listen for a long time (only moderately painful) and you'll struggle to hear a conclusion or answer other than the sense of frustration by both sides as to the limitations of using only one source. I think that sums it up nicely. Today's informed individual relies on a gumbo of print, online, television, and radio, but these are not real people talking, they're journalists, so I doubt the frustrations they felt would be shared by a typical person.

Today's Idiot Box

This columnist, with ties to my college. Read it and weep for cogent thought and the English language.

Good Blog

A doctoral student blogs about research here. Good stuff. The latest piece discusses research on interpersonal networks. I'd like to see more PhD students doing this sort of thing, in part as a mental exercise, in part sharing significant research with the rest of the world.

Tax Cuts and Trust

And speaking of significant research, a Public Opinion Quarterly piece examines the role of political trust in support for tax cuts. Trust plays a significant role among liberals in support of tax cuts, but not so much among conservatives and moderates (who, let's face it, tend to like them anyway). As an aside, if I'm reading the tables correctly, the more knowledgeable you are, the less supportive you are of tax cuts. That's kinda interesting. Unfortunately the authors did not include media variables.

Slate's News Experiment

Michael Kinsley of Slate poses this experiment: two journalists will spend one hour a day reading print newspapers, two will spend one hour a day getting their news online, but not shovelware or aggregators, so that leaves out Google News or Huffingtonpost but does include sites like Politico.

This goes for three days, then he gathers them back to discuss their experience. They're really doing this.

The headline for this piece reads Who's Better Informed, Newspaper Readers or Web Surfers? so I assume political learning is one of the examined outcomes, along with the overall experience, the frustrations, the good and bad, and of course the ugly, of getting news in more or less one fashion.

Let's set the record straight. This "highly unscientific experiment," as Kinsley calls it, is highly unscientific to the point of being silly. It's more of a vaguely interesting gimmick than anything else.

There's one published study that looked at the differences between people who read the New York Times online versus those who read the paper version. This controlled experiment randomly assigned people to one of two groups (print vs. online of the Times) and examined differences in learning and other factors. Print came out ahead (I can't lay my hands on the link, but I'm fairly certain it ran in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly).

Any differences have to do with the way we read, the way we approach online versus ink on paper. It's more than mere differences of medium, it's differences of motivation. We simply approach a screen differently, almost at an unconscious level, and subtle differences emerge.

This is a bit more PhDweeby than Kinsley wants, of course. The gimmick study will be fun for the discussion that emerges, but beyond that the results are meaningless. After all, they're looking at very different sources AND very different media. That, budding methodologists, is a confound of confounding proportions.

The News and the Kindle DX

I've been playing a few days with the Kindle DX, the new larger Kindle from Amazon especially designed for students and newspaper readers. No, I didn't buy one. I'm one of three faculty with a grant that purchased some to study whether the gizmos have a chance to help newspapers.

I like the thing.

I've been reading the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which is nice since the AJC quit distributing it's dead-tree version to the Athens market a few months ago.

We'll be handing the tablets to people with a subscription to the AJC to study how appealing real people find this way of reading the news. In fact I emailed three major players at the AJC to see if they'd like to participate -- given we're studying their newspaper and they might find the results kinda important -- and I didn't get a single response. Not even a "no thanks." And they wonder why they're struggling. Sheesh.

Now that I've nailed the navigation, I really kinda like it for reading the newspaper. Not as much as I like printed paper, but it's okay. Bad side: only one update a day. Good side: I really don't want to look at my Kindle all day long. And I've yet to read a book on one, so I can't say much about that experience.

Will the Kindle save newspapers? I'm guessing not, but for a small, select audience -- one that loves reading and perhaps travels and needs to take one slim piece of hardware rather than lug a bunch of paperbacks -- this has promise of at least helping, of creating a small revenue stream. The bad news for papers is Amazon often asks for 70 percent or more of the small subscription fee.

How does this fit with what people know? Obviously, any increase in news consumption is good, and for me the Kindle has made available a lot of state news I missed, mainly because I'm not so much a fan of reading a web site for news beyond a check for updates. No, the Kindle is for people who immerse themselves in the reading experience, which leads to far more knowledge about public affairs than mere exposure to television. But for the Kindle to succeed people will need to see that it is good not just for news (which won't be enough of a draw) but also for other stuff, like books and magazines and whatever else they can squeeze into the thing.

But yeah, I kinda like it. Then again, I didn't have to spent over $400 to play with it.

Changing ... for the Worse?

A Pew survey of online journalists includes this:

Journalists who work online are more optimistic about the future of their profession than are news people tied to more traditional media platforms, but at best their optimism is an uneasy one, according to new survey of members of the Online News Association produced by the Association and the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

These online news people also believe that the internet is changing the fundamental values of journalism -- and more often than not for the worse.

Damned depressing when even the online journalists are uneasy about the quality of online journalism. The chief culprit is perceived declining accuracy, due in part to the need to quickly post items in a 24-hour news cycle. Now a caveat ... most of these people work in "legacy" online sites, meaning they're tied to mainstream, previously print, news organizations. Not sure you'd get the same results from people who have only worked online and who work for only-online news sites.

And there's positive news. Loosening standards, yes, but also more voices being heard. That's a good thing, assuming the voices make sense.

As to what people know, much of our future knowledge depends on a these serious news sites finding a way to make a buck so we can afford to have journalists on the streets, keeping an eye on our major institutions. TV ain't gonna do it, not by a long shot. The local TV is about bleeding and leading, the cable guys about partisan shoutfests, and the major alphabet soup guys (ABC, CBS) are about, well, not sure what the hell they're about.

Summing Up IV

This the fourth in (maybe) five installments this week to sum up what we know about the relationship between media use and political knowledge. Monday it was TV news, Tuesday entertainment faux news programs, Wednesday I discussed radio.

Today -- newspapers.

You know, those smushed-tree and ink things they quaintly toss on driveways in your neighborhood. That old guy down the street, he gets one. Hobbles out every morning in his robe, stoops down and groans while farting, hobbles back to his kitchen table to suck down coffee and figure out what the hell happened in the world yesterday.

That's a newspaper -- yesterday's news tomorrow.

I love papers. I worked at three daily newspapers in my unstellar journalism career. Covered cops and courts and politics and government and schools and a bunch of other stuff. Took pix. Wrote features. Even did some obits. Had a helluva time, but that's all beside the point here, which is how do newspapers fit in with political knowledge.

If you read previous studies you find this nice, modest, statistically significant relationship between reading the newspaper and what people know. In part this can be explained by the demographics of newspaper readers: older, more interested, more educated. In part this can be explained by the way we approach print as an active process versus how we approach the screen, a more passive process. In part it's the depth of information on a newspaper's front page and inside pages, far more than you get from TV. The old saying was that you'd find as much info on the front page of a newspaper than in 20 minutes of TV, and that's kinda true and kinda false, but it's also beyond our discussion here.

BUT ... and this is a major but, the way newspaper journalists tend to write stories, via the inverted pyramid, makes it difficult for young or uninterested readers to figure out what the hell is going on. A summary lede is fine and I love it dearly, but it sucks for some readers who do not have the context or background knowledge to understand what it's talking about.

Now here I'm talking the paper version, not the online version, but there's a cool study that compared the same exact NYT story in print and on a screen. They measured knowledge from reading the same exact story. And found ... (drum roll please) ... that people learned more from the print version. Holy dominance of print, Batman! Why? I believe again that it has everything to do with the way we approach a printed product versus one on the screen (or boob tube). There is some work to support this.

Anyway, put newspaper exposure into a multivariate model, control for all the other usual suspects in predicting political knowledge, and you'll often find newspaper reading still holds some significance. Small, modest, but often statistically significant at that magical p<.05.

But as newspaper reading drops, and online grazing replaces it, we'll see these relationships disappear in future studies.

Why? Because people will say they read newspapers online, but that exposure will reflect grazing that we all tend to do online versus a deeper, longer soak we tend to do on paper, and also will reflect the seriousness we read a paper product versus a screen product. In the long run, the relationship between "reading news" and political knowledge will -- in my humble estimation -- disappear.

Watch for it.

Newspaper Trends

If not for the fine folks at the Pew Center I'd be stuck on some days for something to post. They come through again.

The chart at the right shows the trend over the past two years from print to online. According to the report:

Overall newspaper readership declined in spite of an increase in the number of people reading online newspapers: 14% of Americans said they read a newspaper online yesterday, up from 9% in 2006. This includes those who said they read
only a newspaper online (9% in 2008), as well as those who said they read both print and Web versions of a newspaper (5%). These numbers may not include the number of people who read content produced by newspapers, but accessed through aggregation sites or portals such as Google or Yahoo.

What People . . . Trust

It's well established that trust in various institutions, including the news media, has seen a steady decline. No news there.

But you might think the wacky, wild west world of the Internet would boast higher credibility ratings than the evil mainstream news media.

Nope.

In the Pew Center's latest big report on media consumption, there's an interesting table on page 60 (of 129 pages!) with the title: Most Online Outlets Not Considered Credible. The highest online ratings go to aggregators like Yahoo or Google, which basically repurpose content from mainstream news media (a fancy way of saying they use other people's stuff rather than do their own news gathering).

The other four online "news" sites don't score quite so well. Asked how often you "believe" these sites, the responses were:

Drudge Report 7%
Salon 7%
Huffington 6%
Slate 4%

Ouch! For comparison, Google got only 13% believability, Yahoo 11%. Most newspapers doubled this, with the Wall Street Journal the highest at 25%.

The Drudge/Salon/Huffington/Slate group does about as well as People Magazine and a little bit better than the National Enquirer.

Says a lot, I think.