Brought to you by Olympics

Olympics are coming, and with it BBC News. Guardian Newspaper is reporting that Chinese authorities stopped blocking BBC News in English. The BBC website in Chinese is still blocked, but many find ways around the blocs. China has 210 million citizens with internet access, but most do not speak English.

But this is not an end to Chinese censorship. Last week, Guardian reports, China blocked all foreign coverage of disturbance in Tibet. Yahoo, Guardian and YouTube were all affected. Guardian described it as a “deliberate act of unacceptable censorship.”

Even though, censorship is still strong, but allowing Chinese citizens to access BBC is a small step in the right direction.

Paranoid searcher

Yesterday, as I was nonchalantly browsing through the Internet looking for ethical dilemmas to write about, I stumbled on myself. I literally did. There was a website, www.veromi.net that gave me indigestion. The website had me, it had all my addresses and my “potential roommates,” which included my parents and my husband. The website had all my places of employment.

I began to think that Internet does give us access to the world of information, but the trade off is ourselves. I use google.com about two hundred or more times a day. I look for everything from doctors ratings to jobs online. However, recently I found out that Google has the worst privacy practice out of top online destinations. A report came out in 2007 by London-based Privacy International, which assigned Google the lowest grade in privacy. The group described Google in the following terms, as the company “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility in privacy.”

The other companies that were surveyed, including Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL did not reach the same “height” as Google to “achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy.”

Google responded by saying that they aggressively protect the privacy of their users. But do they really?

Maybe in our new Brave World my searches will be sold along wit my address and “roommates.”

Reuters profits tumbled 13% to $542 million

Paidcontent.org analyzed operating results from Reuters. Here are bits and pieces of their analysis:

The operating profit was up 14% to ($579 million), and revenue was up 1.5 percent to ($5.16 billion). Reuters media division generated $341 million in revenue, grew 6%. The growth Reuters says was fueled by ‘strong growth in online syndication and advertising.”

Tom Glocer said in his analyst presentations “This is the last we’ll do as a standalone entity ... It feels like Chinese new year here today. The results are a fitting end to this chapter in the Reuters story.”

Glocer said that the new ThomReuters will be a 90% digital business.

http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-earnings-reuters-07-profit-dips-on-home-strait-to-thomson-merger/

Long Tail of BBC through iPhone

BBC had struck a partnership with iPhone to make its iPlayer TV content available on iPhone. The service offers on-demand shows, which aired within the last seven days. The service is still for UK customers only.

Many others news and entertainment content providers are courting Apple. More on this to come…

Tribune company marriage between TV station and newspaper:

Sun-Sentinel and WSFL-TV, in South Florida are merging into one entity. TV station will move into newspaper newsroom.

"This strategy is unprecedented in a major U.S. market," Sun-Sentinel President and Publisher Howard Greenberg said in a news release. "This gives our print, broadcast and interactive operations the opportunity to work together to develop unique content and programming in a variety of areas. Plus, with this combination, there will be no better way for advertisers to reach more people with a consistent message."

Tribune said that with the merger of two entities it would have better market coverage and increase efficiency for advertisers.

I am sure that this is only the first out of many unifications between TV and newsroom sister properties.

23% growth in online spending

eMarketer lowered its forecast predictions for online ad growth to 23%. A downward revision from Novembers forecast of 28.5%. The revision is than due to a recession. Through 2012, eMarketer predicts robust growth in rich media/video advertising, from 9.7% share in 2007 to 18.5% in 2012.

David Hallerman, a senior analyst with eMarketer said that the popular websites on the Internet will have problems monetizing their traffic, "for example, the most popular sites in social networking where the amount of traffic and the amount of ad dollars don't match up. Maybe they won't," Hallerman said.

"While a foundering economy will certainly affect online ad spending, accounting for the revised estimate, the Internet will support continued ad spending growth even as other media may falter," an eMarketer statement says.

The growth in online spending still outpaces all other media spending, and traditional properties will likely shift more resources into this growing market.

CNN is the top media property

Nielsen-Netratings, released February ranked unique visitors on news sites. CNN Digital Network, which includes Sports Illustrated topped the list with 37MM UV’s, followed by Yahoo!News that had 35MM UVs. I did some digging and the whooping number of UVs can be explained by the search optimization that CNN is doing with the help of Inform.com

1. CNN Digital Network - 37,181,000 - 0:40:11
2. Yahoo! News - 35,274,000 - 0:23:10
3. MSNBC Digital Network - 34,013,000 - 0:29:50
4. AOL News - 21,119,000 - 0:36:14
5. NYTimes.com -18,975,000 - 0:33:29

January numbers for comparison:
1. Yahoo! News - 36,074,000 - 0:23:58
2. CNN Digital Network - 35,598,000 - 0:41:58
3. MSNBC Digital Network - 35,410,000 - 0:30:00
4. AOL News - 23,732,000 - 0:31:12
5. NYTimes.com -20,461,000 - 0:35:47

Interview with the Wire Service executive

For privacy reasons, I'am concealing the name of the executive and the company that he works for. RA (initials of the indivdual) is a online video executive with experience in SEO and advertising. I only had 10 minutes of his time, but we will continue this discussion next week.

I wanted to find out from RA what are his thoughts on the future of traditional media. Here are some of the questions I posed to him:

1. What are the key industry challenges as you see them? ( audience fragmentation, advertising competition due to cable and online, rise of online usage and etc)
RA: Audience fragmentation due to Internet and cable TV. Until about 25 years ago, three networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) owned the entire US TV audience. The widespread distribution of cable TV networks changed the industy landscape. The big advantage that broadcast networks still retain is "reach." For advertisers that want to reach the entire public, vs. concentrated effort broadcast networks are still the best.
Internet revealed the Achilles heel of TV-based advertising in general: its loose correlation to driving sales.

2. What will help traditional media with the challenges they are facing?
RA: News is becoming a commodity. What will help traditional media is finding the business models that are right for them, and understanding that they will no longer get 20% margins on their products. News is more like milk now than like oil (years ago), you take the cost and add a percentage to it. So media companies, are becoming supermarkets, and they should not expect to make 20-30% margins on their product, but 2 0r 3%. I forsee that news companies will need to use hybrid business models, like NYT did with NYT select.

3. How will online video help TV networks and wire service handle the industry challenges?
RA: Online video helps engage the viewer with the website, but the people that watch online videos are not the ones that come to newspaper websites. So newspapers will struggle with video viewership.

4. What should the online video business model look like? ( ad supported (brightcove model, cash, or combo)
RA: They should be hybrid models

Hulu is live to everyone

The much promised and long awaited competitor to youTube is live and public. Hulu, a joint venture between NBC Universal and Fox, now offers content from over 50 media companies. According to Fortune investors, poured $15 million into development.

The joint venture did what was thought to be impossible, united rival media companies under one platform. Hulu still did not recruit ABC and CBS, but Hulu said that they still have conversations with the two networks.

Download $1 billion in online revenue

For my day-job, I had to understand the makeup of traditional vs. online revenue. For most traditional media properties, the revenue allocation is 95% from traditional sources (print, broadcast) to 5% for online. New York Times generates 90% of its revenue from advertising in print, and 10% from online.

As you can imagine, I was really surprised by Walt Disney Co announcement that they expect to collect one billion dollars in revenue from online content in 2008. Walt Disney CEO, Robert Iger said that the company has been “fairly aggressive” in its expansion to new media. Disney used tactics that need to be used more by traditional media- they advertised their online property over broadcast shows.

Still, online accounts for less than 3% of companies’ revenue, meaning Disney has ways to go.

Myopic study by Magid

Hearst- Argyle and Magid completed a research study of habits of 25-54 year olds. The study drilled down on the effectiveness of ads in TV newscasts. “Respondents reported that ads on local TV news drive greater product/service awareness than those within any other program type,” reads a press release previewing the results.” The study also looked at TV websites. “After search engines, local TV news websites are the most frequently used for local news and weather.” Interestingly, online video viewing is high on local TV news websites, “online video viewing of local TV news content is higher than that for any other genre,” 37% for local news compared to 31% each for cable news and primetime programming.

I looked at the study and found a key flaw in it, the study isolated the local news viewers (25-54), which is a broad group, and any statistician would tell Magid they need to do a better job with their sample. Not surprisingly, the study found that generally the myopically selected sample trusts the local TV. The study limited the sample of viewers to a naturally biased sample. If they would pick a sample of 20 to 30 year olds, the results would be drastically different.

Some nuggets from the press release:

- Viewers are more engaged with local news than most other genres;

- 55% of respondents cite TV as their primary source of news information, followed distantly by the Web (26%), and print newspapers (14%);

- Local TV news is more “DVR-proof” than other program formats; most viewers watch local news live, and even when they record these programs they are less likely to fast-forward through them;

- The greater loyalty audiences have toward local broadcast TV news is a factor in the effectiveness of advertising within the genre, and, in a key finding, respondents reported that ads on local TV news drive greater product/service awareness than those within any other program type.

· Other research findings point to a strong linkage between leading local television news brands and the Web:

- After search engines, local TV news websites are the most frequently used for local news and weather;

- Online video viewing of local TV news content is higher than that for any other genre – 37% for local news vs. 31% each for cable news and primetime programming, 24% for reality TV video and 23% for broadcast network news;

- Among weather sources on the web, local TV websites are the “most important source” for weather information;

- Among the online population, local-news viewers are relatively affluent technology adapters: 44% have DVRs, 32% have HDTV sets.

Trust in traditional media is eroding

http://www.zogby.com/methodology/readmeth.dbm?ID=1277

A survey, recently completed by Zogby poll measured the perception of media bias and a profession of journalism. Zogby is reporting that confidence is continuing to slip and the perception of media bias and partisan divide is on the rise. Those factors combined with more than 20 years of growing skepticism about journalists, and news companies. Zogby reports that public has come to view the news media as less professional, less accurate, less caring than before.

Public views news industry as not the industry involved in the “public good,” but regular businesses. News outlets, in order to deal with fragmentation, are prone to design and produce content to attract crowds, like Lost, Survivor. Bloggers, as was seen with Dan Rather, highlight the failures of journalists and further undermine the credibility of news industry.

Public skepticism is growing.

The number of Americans with a favorable view of the press, for instance, dropped markedly in 2006, from 59% in February, to 48% in July.

The number of Americans that believe what news organizations tell them continues to drop. Zogby measured over 20 outlets the only ones that did not decline were Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, people’s local paper, the NewsHour on PBS, People magazine and the National Enquirer.⁵

A quarter of Americans believe most television outlets. Less than one in five believe what they read in print. CNN is not really more trusted than Fox, or ABC than NBC. The local paper is not viewed much differently than the New York Times.

Perception of bias is also the issue, Americans who feel that their daily newspaper has become worse, for instance, the number who blame bias, and particularly liberal bias, has grown from 19% in 1996 to 28% in 2006.⁶

One big change is that more people now feel they can get what traditional journalism offers from the Internet, and that, too, is a challenge for the press, one that may be accelerating faster than declining trust.

Other findings from the survey include:

• Although the vast majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism (64%), overall satisfaction with journalism has increased to 35% in this survey from 27% who said the same in 2007.
• Both traditional and new media are viewed as important for the future of journalism - 87% believe professional journalism has a vital role to play in journalism's future, although citizen journalism (77%) and blogging (59%) are also seen as significant by most Americans.
• Very few Americans (1%) consider blogs their most trusted source of news, or their primary source of news (1%).
• Three in four (75%) believe the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.

New European network focuses on younger audience

Euranet, is the name of the new radio and internet project that will commence broadcasting on 31 March 2008. It is a consortium of sixteen radio stations from thirteen countries. The group includes international broadcasters like Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Deutsche Welle and Radio France International. But there are also regional and local stations, often from new EU member states. Radio Slovenia International and Polskie Radio from Poland are also part of the project. A major aim is to inform young citizens about the European Union. Unlike earlier forms of co-operation among radio stations, the Euranet programs will be common productions. Initially Euranet will broadcast in English, Spanish, French, German and Polish. The station will be paid for by European funds and will cost about five million euros per year.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3150682,00.html