News: Nielsen's Total Audience Measurement

http://www.adweek.com/news/television/first-look-nielsen-s-total-audience-measurement-and-how-it-will-change-industry-167661

Multiplatform audience measurement

Displacement effect --

• Is it important? 
• Different approaches
• Medium-centric (The more time spent on medium A, the less time spent on medium B)
• User-centric (The more time spent on medium A to fulfill some needs, the more time spent on functionally similar media)
• How to measure it?
• Direct question (Are you spending more or less time on medium A because of medium B?)
• Absolute time (w/o considering overall media budget)
• Relative time
• Likert Scale (e.g., frequency of use)
• Longitudinal data (e.g., Brown sisters -- 40 years of photo data and how the NYT promoted the story on social media)
• How different measures lead to different conclusions?
• Exercise: Mobile news

Multiplatform news consumption --

• Getting complicated (see Niesen's new approach to multiplatform TV consumption)
• The repertoire approach (TV channels, Websites, cross-media media use for specific needs)

Beyond use, what other variables are of interest?

If you build it, they may not come

After reading this week's articles, I couldn't help but wonder why the legacy newspapers don't listen to their customer bases more? As Chyi (2015) points out, "if digital natives are prone to news in digital formats, they should have dropped the print edition of their campus newspaper by 2011. However, results collected through a national survey of nearly 200 U.S. college newspaper advisers indicated that the print edition reached nearly twice as many readers as the Web edition on a given day." I think this example is indicative of newspapers not learning from their loyal readership.

On the other hand the digital native publications don't have to play by the same rules. They don't have long-standing guilds (though some now have unions) to factor in to their plans or print operations. They were made specifically for the web and have more or less mastered the art of making money on digital content: Make a lot of stuff, make it cheap, and blur the lines between your content and the advertisements. And of course, make sense of your analytics, more specifically what your customers are demanding.

Digital Natives and News Consumption

I was particularly interested to read about "digital natives" and newspaper consumption. Contrary to popular belief, Chyi (2015) showed that "digital natives" do not necessarily prefer online newspapers to their print editions. For example, a national survey of US college newspaper advisers indicated that their students overwhelmingly preferred to read the print edition of the college newspaper. Other studies found that while older people were more likely than younger ones to read a print newspaper, the penetration of a given print newspaper was higher than its online penetration even among young people. That said, whether the news is in a digital or print format, young people are less likely to find news interesting or relevant for them (Lee & Chyi, 2014). They prefer entertainment over news. Chyi encourages newspaper managers to acknowledge that print is their asset and digital is not their forte. I tend to agree, but I am also concerned that in an attempt to attract more young readers to news websites, these websites may display even less news and more content related to entertainment and non-public affairs.

Readings for 10/19/15

I really enjoyed reading this week's articles. Whereas Dr. Chyi’s study indicates that digital news is not replacing newspapers yet, Lee and Leung’s study indicates that the Internet is displacing all traditional media (i.e. newspapers, television, radio, and magazines) rather than supplementing them. According to Lee and Leung’s study, Internet users for news/information and entertainment do not spend more time with functionally similar traditional media for the same purpose. Their findings reject the “more-more” hypothesis as suggested by the user-centric approach. The Internet is shown to have an overall displacement effect, and not a single instance of a “more-more” situation occurred in the use of traditional media among Internet users. The ‘‘more-less’’ scenario is seen across all traditional media.
In contrary to Lee and Leung’s study, Yuan’s study supported the user-centric model. She looked at the old and new media for the news audience from the repertoire-oriented approach, hoping to provide more fluid and dynamic analysis than the dichotomous distinction between the substitutive and supplementary relationships. Her focus on media repertoire was particularly interesting as I see it personally applying to me: for example, setting favorites on my Internet. I think the repertoire-oriented approach will greatly depend on how much effort I have to put into when using new channels. Her study only focused on news. I wonder if it would be the same for other media content, such as entertainment.

Some might argue that whether or not new media replace or supplement old media would depend on multiple factors, given they provide similar functions. However, how can different media serve the same needs and functions? As Marshall McLuhan once said, “Medium is the message,” different media platforms provide distinct senses and require audiences' physiology to function differently. Although the media content might be the same, audiences change their attitude when interacting with different media platforms.
The amount of using the Internet will vary in each society depending on how developed and fast the Internet is. For example, Korea is the most wired country in the world according to the world statistics. Basically, there’s free high speed wi-fi wherever you go including subways. Because of this, there are many online-related burgeoning industries (and big conglomerates of course) coming up with innovative ways of delivering content via unprecedented media platforms. For example, there’s a new form of media called “web drama,” which is relatively very short (about 10 minutes per each episode) compared to the traditional drama shown on an old medium, television. This is increasingly getting popular in the K-drama industry mainly because about 99% of all young Korean people have a smartphone with web streaming capabilities.

Multiplatform audience measurement; displacement effects; the repertoire approach

In Lee and Leung's (2008) article, the displacement effects of the internet is discussed in multiple aspects: mediumcentric, usercentric, more-more, and relative proportion of time spent on media. Although I can see how displacement effects can occur depending on the variety of medium offered or users' preferences/media consumption behavior, and the amount of time spent on a specific medium; I cannot see how the authors could have hypothesized "more-more" as opposed to "more-less". This goes against their next hypothesis of time as a relative proportion out of a total number of time spent on all mediums. For example the second hypothesis reads:

          H2: The more time Internet users spend on news and information, the more time           they spend on the functionally similar traditional media (e.g., newspapers, radio,             and magazine) for their news and information needs.

However, according to relative proportion vs. absolute time spent on media, one would see that "relatively," if one were to spend more time on a single medium, then he/she would be less capable of spending time on another medium. A "more-more" would never result in a displacement effect, thus should not be used to measure displacement effects. This is also supported by medium-centric approach.

I liked the idea of both medium and user-centric approaches but leaned more towards the latter. New mediums will always arise but it's acceptance and use will always depend on the user. I believe that substitution is solely dependent on the users. Furthermore, since mediums have different purposes and satisfy different needs, I believe supplement will occur more than substitution.

Also, Yuan (2012) suggests media convergence is due to the change in the news media landscape. However, I think that another large role that attributed to the move to digital and mobile media technology is the push for green initiatives and pro-environmentalism. In conjunction with the advancements in technology, environmentalists realized that everything can be moved into the digital space, reducing the need to further harm the environment. The 21st century is a time where everything is eco-friendly, green and organic. With such times, things such as digital receipts, paper-less billings, re-usable canvas grocery bags, etc. have emerged. Likewise, newspaper has gone digital also. If this hadn't happened and news content only stayed on paper, I think substitution of newspaper could have been avoided. However, now that the same content is available more conveniently and in a more environmentally friendly form, there is no need to linger onto folds and folds of paper anymore. However, the greying baby boomers, who make up a large portion of the population, may continue to support printed newspapers out of habit.

Movie time!

The "real" audience-driven model of content creation through "big data":
2010 ISOJ Keynote speech (Demand Media): https://vimeo.com/20938653 (Start from 16:17)
-- They're recruiting freelancers.

On "built-in obsolescence" and "slow news": Justin Lewis featured in Consumerism & the Limits to Imagination (Start from 21:10 Bubka Principle)