Week 2: Audience Problems in State of Media

Below are three "audience problems" I identified in the State of Media 2015 report.

In the section titled "Top 10 Digital News Entities,"  8 out of the 10 top sites give away their content for free. Only the NYTimes and USA Today require a subscription and that is after they give away a certain amount of free content (the NYTimes also gives away all video content for free). However, revenues continue to be sluggish and declining for newspaper and cable news. It goes without saying, offering free content is not a winning strategy for the legacy publications. Digital native publications, and local news however are certainly benefiting from this strategy as advertisers are flocking their way.


On Pg. 26 of the State of the Media report, the chart on the right side of the page is very telling. Most of the readership/viewership of newspapers, "are those that are with more education or more income, and are white." I see this as an audience problem, because as the country becomes more racially integrated and the older generation dies off, newspapers need to do more to attract a more diverse audience willing to pay for their product. Secondly, as newspapers pour resources in to building up their digital businesses, it is amazing to see only a relatively small fraction of their viewership comes in the way of digital devices (ICTs) while mobile ad revenue has gone up. In other words, digital strategies appear to have a terrible return on investment.

Bleeding, Not Dying: Challenges to the Newspaper Industry

Newspaper circulation in the United States fell around 3% from 2013 to 2014, and the average user stayed on a top newspaper website only for three minutes per visit. These are the main audience-related issues that caught my eye when I read Pew's fact sheet on the newspaper industry. While the findings suggest that the industry is struggling, it is too early for eulogies.

Millions of Americans still consume newspapers, and most of them prefer the print

editions. Readership data suggest that 56% of those who consumed a newspaper in 2014 read it exclusively in print, and 27% sometimes read it in print but also on desktop or mobile devices. The remaining newspaper consumers relied exclusively on desktop or mobile devices. In addition, more than 80% of the newspaper ad revenue in 2014 came from print. Although the report does not address the readership by age groups, it seems that there is still considerable demand for print newspapers. Publishers should devise their strategies accordingly.

However, in order to attract young readers, newspapers need to gain visibility on

social media, which have become major traffic drivers to online publishers. As the social media editor of The New York Times said at the 2014 International Symposium of Online Journalism, around 70% of the newspaper's followers on Facebook are not more than 34 years old. Rather than relying on the online newspaper's homepage, many followers only consume stories that were posted on social media. This may be one of the explanations for the short time that the average user stays on a newspaper website. A possible way to face the challenge is creating partnerships with tech companies, such as Facebook, which has recently announced deals with publishers, including The New York Times, to deliver select articles "instantly" on mobile apps. The newspaper is not dead yet. It is both in print and on social media. 

Post 1: Identify some “audience problems” from the State of News Media or other industry reports

An audience problem from the State of News Media could be that the audience was not segmented and treated as one big group of people. Although the report shows a general trend of prime-time viewership, evening audiences, morning audiences, tv news viewership, etc. the report would better serve its readers by segmenting each area further and providing more specific audience groups.  For example, what kind of people make up the evening audiences and why may this group prefer evening network news broadcast over prime-time television? If digital new sites are accessed more by mobile than desktop now, why might that be? Perhaps this can be accounted for by the change in technology so what is the age range for those who access news sites on mobile versus on a desktop? Will the scene change as laggards catch up with the adopters and the majority? Due to audience segmentation, general trends no longer serve a critical purpose. For advertisers, having a target audience is essential so an inclusion of such information would help to improve this report. 

Audience Problems

After reviewing the five key takeaways from the State of the News Media report and a few pages from the full report, I noted a few audience problems.

First, as mentioned in the very first takeaway, while more digital news traffic is coming from the mobile-using audience, they are not spending as much time on the site as desktop users. This could create a problem if advertisers ask for more than just a headcount of who is visiting the site. What good is a 60,000/day visitor count if they bail after 20 seconds? Did they even see the advertisements on the page?

http://www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/newspapers-fact-sheet/

Next, I was fairly surprised at the low percentage of digital adoption of newspaper readership. I was certain that more print subscribers would at least utilize a portion of the web services but more than half still claim they only read the printed product. This can cause a problem if the paper is trying to push a digital package to its advertisers or trying to justify spending on staffing or technology for the digital desk.

Finally, something that jumped out to me was the podcast section of the report. The author says "NPR reports that downloads of their podcasts were up 41% in 2014." However, I want to know what that percentage would be without the immensely-popular Serial podcast (See http://www.wsj.com/articles/serial-podcast-catches-fire-1415921853). The audience problem I see with their statistic is how many of that 41% came on board solely for Serial and are now back to their non-podcast-listening lives? Or, what was the adoption rate thanks to the popularity of the podcast?

Audience problems

Exercise: Identify some “audience problems” from the State of News Media or other industry reports/

Among all ranges of audience groups, I’d like to specifically delve into the Millennials, also known as the Digital Natives. Although the world relentlessly shouts the end of newspaper era, in fact, people are consuming more news than ever with unprecedented privileges of having access to various news platforms (Poindexter, 2012). The way Millennials consume news, however, differs from the audiences of older generations. With their mobile devices at hands and shorter attention span, their news consumption is more customized and instant, seeking news that only interests them; hence, news comes to them. What’s problematic with the way Millennials consume news is that they are accustomed to reading short stories or only headlines to get the gist of the stories; therefore, lacking a full contemplation of news. They accept news stories at face value because they are reluctant to engage in a deep critical thinking in today’s fast-paced society. Studies (e.g. Pew Research Center, 2010) show that Millennials have higher educational level, but I wonder whether they are better at distinguishing legitimate news sources and getting various news stories to broaden their perspectives of the world than audiences of other generations.