Author: @jmproffitt

tech nerd, media critic, snarkmaster my hat tips and finger wags are my own

Twitter at the top 100 U.S. newspapers

We were able to find multiple Twitter accounts for all of the top 100 newspapers using common sense searching techniques. However, only 62% of the newspapers included links to at least one of their accounts from their website. In many cases, these links were buried on the site and difficult to track down. In addition, this means 38% of the newspapers are actively using Twitter, but haven’t yet integrated their presence with their website in even a minimal way.

56% of newspapers maintained a directory of their Twitter accounts on their website. This directory from the Los Angeles Times is a good example of the form these listings usually took. Many of these directories were quite extensive, listing dozens of accounts.

via bivingsreport.com

I wonder what the numbers would look like for the top 1,000.

Good to see some innovation in this space.

Yelvington on paywalls and community

I recently told public broadcasters, er… I mean public service media folks, to ignore the paywall option. Don’t do it. And while I stand by that assertion generally, the invaluable Steve Yelvington has a much more nuanced take in his piece Thinking about a paywall? Read this first.

It involves this little chart, and there are lessons for those that would create both a popular general web destination and an online community, all in one. Highly recommended.

Local TV ad revenue down 27% in Q1-3 of 2009

For the first nine months of 2009, network TV was down 10.7%, syndicated TV was down 2.8%, and local broadcast TV was down 27.4%, producing a total broadcast TV loss of 15.7%.

via tvb.org

Some of the downturn is the loss of election advertising revenue, but not all of it. I can’t wait to see the 2010 vs. 2009 numbers next year. All predictions are pointing downward, though. If all you do is broadcast, and you don’t really care about building community, this is your future.

FINAL CUT: The Future is Public Service Media

Here’s the final cut of my recent presentation for WOSU Public Media in Columbus. This time I’ve got a video I created myself plus a complete set of slides and links back to all the original material.

In this case, the video is a revised presentation deck with a brand new voiceover track. This way, if you couldn’t see or hear the presentation clearly in the video shot at WOSU, now you can get the slides and the talk directly.

First, the video, then I’ll follow up with a final collection of links.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8326319&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=ff9933&fullscreen=1

Final Cut Presentation Material

Additional Material

Leaders are lame, Builders rule / The Builders' Manifesto

Matt Taibbi & Nick Kristof vs Tom Friedman & Maureen Dowd. Tom and MoDo are textbook examples of leaders in journalism; churning out column after column that challenge the conventional wisdom and set the agenda. Yet, that’s not nearly enough to save journalism — let alone the New York Times. Matt and Nick, in contrast, are (re)building the institution of journalism for the 21st century, by utilizing the power of the Internet to reconstruct relationships with readers, publishers, and sources.

via blogs.hbr.org

Tons of great thinking in this new Umair Haque post. The snippet above is a mere taste — the full article explains what’s wrong with leadership today and why we need to encourage buildership to create a new and better businesses, communities and even politics.

Public media “leaders” need to give up the leadership role and take on a “buildership” role. Or find people that can do it.

Public Media's 'Dreadnought' pulling into port at KETC

Run, don’t walk, to Robert Paterson‘s blog to read his new post on the transformation in progress at KETC in St. Louis.

No one knows exactly what forms public service media companies will take in the future, and it’s likely that several successful forms will appear. But KETC looks to be the first in the nation to have commissioned the construction of a new model.

Paterson has been working with KETC since before the launch of the Facing the Mortgage Crisis project, which started at KETC and then expanded to 30 more public broadcasters across the country with the help of the CPB. He’s been lucky enough to work with CEO Jack Galmiche and crew and to see this transformation up close. The plans — physical and logical — are remarkable.

What KETC is doing is revolutionary in the public broadcasting world. While the particulars may not fit every station nationwide, the themes should. Whether or not each element in the plan is “perfect” is irrelevant — the most important thing is that they’re experimenting, all within a reformulated goal. KETC is getting passionate about public service media, and not merely public broadcasting.

Read that post. It’s insightful and exciting.

Treasure trove of mobile Internet statistics

In my recent presentation, I used lots of slides from an October presentation by a Morgan Stanley analyst on the explosive growth of mobile Internet usage — the devices, services and applications that are part of the transformation of web information and data from fixed desktop usage to always-on-in-your-pocket usage.

Since that preliminary report, Morgan Stanley has released 3 more documents in the series, all free to the public. What an amazing service from a company I’d expect to be especially guarded in handling a nicely curated and analyzed data set!

There’s a good bit of slide repetition in the set, and the printed report is largely a rehash of the slides, but each format might be useful to you in different ways.

Here’s what they offer…

  • The Mobile Internet Report Setup (PDF, 104 slides)
    This is a “condensed” version of the findings and it sets you up for looking at more detailed data.
  • The Mobile Internet Report Key Themes (PDF, 671 slides)
    This is the big kahuna — the complete set of slides that can make your head spin. Some slides are repeated quite a bit, so it’s not really 671 slides, but still… it’s a lot of info.
  • The Mobile Internet Report (PDF, 426 pages)
    This one is setup in more of a printable fashion, with a narrative up front and slides presented in a two-up fashion for many, many pages.

If you don’t have the patience to look through all this material (or even some of it), check out the six key takeaways that Morgan Stanley presents on their intro page. I don’t agree 100% with every conclusion, but it’s great thinking to consider very seriously.

Additional links from WOSU presentation

In prepping my presentation for WOSU Public Media last week, I spent a lot of time reviewing other people’s recent presentations, stories, blogs, data and so on. Really, I read stuff every day related to digital media, so tracking it all back down is kind of hard. But I wanted to make sure I gathered a list of links and other resources folks could review if they wanted to dig deeper than my presentation alone allowed. So here they are, in no particular order…

From Broadcast to Broadband: Redesigning public media for the 21st Century
Discusses how public media must change to meet the challenges of a 21st century media universe. Jake Shapiro, PRX and Ellen Goodman, Rutgers; presented at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Note: The pie chart showing CPB expenditures is incorrect. There’s an extra $71M included in the TV programming slice that shouldn’t be there.

The Future of News
This was a conference held at MPR in St. Paul, MN in November 2009 bringing together journalism leaders and pundits from public and commercial media in all formats. Lots of video and other resources. Props to Julia Shrenkler for tons of work on this one.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Michael Rosenblum offers a critique of the folks that appeared at The Future of News, as linked above.

A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009 (Jeremiah Owyang)
A frequently-updated list of social media statistics, including links, for all the major services.

The Chaos Scenario (video)
The Chaos Scenario (blog / book)
Bob Garfield, co-host of NPR’s “On the Media,” has written a book and built a wide-ranging presentation on how current media companies are faced with a chaotic world that’s changing the fundamental models of media economics. It’s a long video, but a good one.

Continue reading “Additional links from WOSU presentation” →

Video from WOSU Presentation

Thanks to WOSU Public Media for shooting some video of my presentation last week!

It was, predictably, dark in the room so the screen was visible for the audience, so you can’t see me very well. But at least you can see how much of the presentation went. Sadly, the video recording stopped just as I was getting to the news recommendations in the presentation.

I hope to do a voiceover version of the presentation this weekend that will have super-clear audio. In the meantime, here it is…