2/19/2012Local TV News. Calculating the Trust FactorI am going to assume that most readers of The247Newsroom are local television news people. And, yes, I know what happens when you assume. But I think that's a reasonable assumption. I am also going to assume that most of you therefore already know that local television news is the leading source of news for most Americans. Well, not that you necessarily needed it, but the latest poll from the Harris Interactive Survey not only confirms that but says that local television news is the most trusted source of news. That's cool, but that's not the big news. No, you will find the big news when you dig down into the numbers.First though let's talk about the overall picture. According to the Harris poll, nearly three quarters of Americans (73%) says they trust their local TV news "will get you the news fairly and accurately" either some (51%) or a lot (22%). Before you go bragging about it though, keep in mind that's only four points ahead of radio, Internet news and information sites, and local newspapers, all of which were voted trustworthy by a little more than two thirds (69%) of the public. Low man on the totem poll were national newspapers (60%), then network TV news (61%) and cable TV news (64%).Where it gets interesting is when you look at the degree of trust. Local TV news scored significantly higher than any other news source when asked if they had "a lot of trust" versus "some trust." A fifth (22%) said they had "a lot of trust." That's four points ahead (18%) of the next highest group -- local newspapers… you know, those people that tell you they do real journalism and you don't. Okay, you can start bragging again. Radio and Internet sites scored lowest (14%) on this point, only slightly behind cable and network TV news (15%) and national newspapers (16%). Where it gets even more interesting though is when you perform a simple arithmetic function. What you do is you subtract the percentage of people who don't trust a particular media outlet from the percentage who do trust that particular media outlet. When you do that, the story for local television news gets even better. Remember that three quarters (73%) who trust local TV news? From that subtract the roughly one quarter (23%) who don't trust it, and you get a net of half of the American public (50%) who are more positive than negative about local TV news. National newspapers and Network TV had the lowest positive ranking, with only a quarter (26%) of the American public ending up on the plus side for them. Cable TV news was actually higher with a third (34%) ending up in the positive column. Local newspapers (at 42%) were eight points behind local television. Despite the low scoring in terms of "a lot of trust," both radio and the Internet netted out a better overall score with radio the second highest net positive (44%) and the Internet the third highest (43%).Interestingly, people who identify themselves as Democrats trust the media much more than people who say they are Republican or Independents. I say "interestingly" because the difference is not just a couple of points, but double digit differences. For example, four out of five Democrats (83%) trust their local TV news operation. That's well ahead of Republicans (73%) and Independents (72%). The political differences are even more dramatic when you look at the national media. Less than half of the Republicans (47% and 46%) trust Network TV news or National newspapers while more than three quarters (79% and 77%) of Democrats trust them. Independents were in the middle with just under two thirds (61% and 60%) saying they trust Network TV news or National newspapers.The report also breaks out the numbers in terms of so-called Echo Boomers (18 - 35), Gen X (36 - 47), Baby Boomers (48 - 66), and (you have to love this term), Matures (67+). I've already thrown tons of numbers at you. So I won't add to the mathematical mayhem with more of that. Suffice it to say that the generational breakout is pretty well what you would expect.There are two things in the report that you might not expect though. Going back to the political breakout, the report says only six percent of Independents say they trust the Internet to get them the news "fairly and accurately." Two thirds (66%) of Republicans and three quarters (78%) of Democrats trust the Internet. I know many news people are math impaired, so let me state it another. Eleven to thirteen times as many Republicans and Democrats trust the Internet as Independents. In fact, nowhere in the charts did I find another number that low for anything - making me wonder if the Harris people made a mistake. (This is also the point in the article that I should add a disclaimer about the Harris survey. Because it is a self selected panel of willing participants and not a random survey, it is not considered statistically scientific. Even the survey group itself admits it, when it says, "no estimates of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.") The other unexpected thing in the report comes when you look at the national media included in the survey. The report asks consumers about their trust in NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, NPR, Fox News, Associated Press, Reuters, MSNBC, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, Time, New York Times, Washington Post, Yahoo News, The Daily Beast, and the Huffington Post. For the record, ABC and NBC scored the highest (63%) in terms of percentage of people who trust them, ahead of CNN (61%), the Associated Press and PBS (59%) and Fox News (54%). Yahoo News scored the highest (53%) in term of Internet sites while the Huffington Post scored the lowest (33%) not just in Internet sites but out of all the news organizations cited. Which brings me back to my point about the unexpected thing in the report. Look at the list again. Read it aloud. Now, tell me - what's missing. I'll be curious how many of you see it. Okay, if you didn't see it, here it is. CBS is not on the list. Now, there may be others that you would think should be included on the list. But one of the big three? The home of 60 Minutes, Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite? The network which, according to their promotion, "created original reporting"? Not included?Now, I am going to assume (there, I go again using that word) that you find that equally odd. What is not odd though is that, despite all the questions and concerns raised by critics, local television news remains the most trusted source of news. Researchers have found that people will criticize the amorphous "general public" as being uninformed or misinformed but believe steadfastly it doesn't apply to them. In the same way, they will criticize the "news media" in general as being biased and unfair, but still believe their local media is not. Now, it's up to us to prove them right.Editor’s note: Readers can find more postings by Michael Castengera and back issues of his Message from Michael newsletter at the website,http://newsprofs.blogspot.com/If you have a comment or want to reach Michael Castengera, you can email him at Castengera@gmail.com2/10/2012Huddling Around Computers For Super Bowl XLVI Super Bowl XLVI marked yet another media milestone. True, it had 111.3 Million viewers, making it the largest audience for any Super Bowl so far. But that's not it. And, true, the commercials topped the $3.5 Million mark, making them the most expensive spots so far. But that's not it either. No, the milestone that media scholars will be discussing fifty years from now is that this was the first game streamed legal and live online for free. Both NBCSports.com and the NFL.com provided viewers the option of huddling with their computers instead of sitting in the television stands of their living room while NBC through Verizon also allowed viewers to intercept the action on the mobile sidelines. At this point, it appears that they scored a touchdown, despite a few fumbles along the way. (And, yes, this article is going to be packed with puns and play-on-words.) There was another milestone of sorts, according to my advertising friends. And that is that virtually all of those expensive, specially-produced, got-to-be-memorable advertisements running in the Super Bowl also ran online in full or in part two weeks before the game. But the reason I pick the live streaming as the milestone event is because of a report, ostensibly on television, by research and marketing firm Accenture which shows that consumers have reached "a state of hypermobility… (with) ubiquitous app-etite." Cutesy phrases aside, you're probably saying, "whoop-de-do, no big surprise there." But buried inside the report are the figures that do make the point startlingly clear, with no cutesy phrases needed. In the past two years, the percentage of consumers watching broadcast or cable TV, or movies and video on a TV, in a typical wee has "plummeted" from 71% in 2009 to 48% in 2011. That's the first fact that'll grab your attention. The second fact from the report that'll grab your attention is that in a typical week 33% of consumers now watch shows, movies or videos on their PC's. Folks, that means there's only a 15% difference between those watching on a TV and those watching on a computer. Add to that the fact that another 10% are watching such programs on their smartphones, and the gap becomes even narrower. And, as those cheesy commercials say, "wait, there's more."The Pew Research Center reports that between mid-December and early January the number of people with a tablet computer nearly doubled, from 10% to 19%. Not related to the theme of this article, but as a side note, the number of people with e-readers also doubled during that period. As a side note, another report by research firm TNS titled Orange Advertising Network in Europe says its research shows that tablets are "cannibalizing" BOTH TV and PC usage. Going back to the Accenture report, it shows that the number of people planning to buy a TV this year has dropped. Although it's only three percent (from 35% in 2010 to 32% in 2011), it may be indicative of a general trend because it is true of regular, HD and 3-D TV's.Now, for a little perspective, while the live streaming of the Super Bowl is a milestone, the impact at this point is pretty minimal. NBC issued a news release saying that analyses by online measuring firms Omniture and mDialog shows that 2.1 Million unique visitors watched online, making it "the most watched single-game sports event ever online." All right, for all you math-impaired readers, 2.1 Million compared to 111.3 Million translates to just under two percent. Now, in fairness, that does not include the National Football League's own streaming efforts which they dubbed "a tremendous success" even though no exact figures were supplied. (Or, at least none that I could find.) And, also in fairness, it should be noted that the online streaming was, of course, competing against the better quality TV version. So, in essence, it was "second screen viewing" as the analysts put it, and not the primary or "at work" viewing that usually benefits online streaming numbers.Still, that is not exactly going to have advertisers clamoring at the door. Yet, websites MediaPost and ReelSEO calculated the price of the online adds at $55 per CPM, which is $20 more than the cost of the uber-expensive on-air adds.For those of you who like specifics, here are a few details on the online effort. According to figures supplied by various sources, including TVbytheNumbers, there were roughly 4.6 Million video streams. The online viewing translated into 78.6 Million minutes, which (here I go again) converts to 1.3 Million hours which, based on a four-hour game, is 300,000 people. Okay, I know, way too much number crunching. Anyway, actually, the average site visit time was 39 minutes. One of the more interesting numbers is that there were 1.8 Million "user generated camera switches." That's where you, the viewer, can switch which camera to watch, which was pretty cool.Decidedly less cool was the actual viewing experience. My colleagues at the Grady College of Journalism had both the NFL Live streaming site and the NBC Live TV show running. The online version was (probably intentionally) three to four minutes behind the Live TV. More problematic, the video locked up several times, and there were audio dropouts at several points - all of which serves as a reminder about the challenging of having big enough pipes to make online streaming work.Now, for even more perspective on the 'new media' version of the Super Bowl, let's look at the social media, and the word that comes to mind here is the one I stole some time ago from Inspector Gadget - Wowser. As the game ended, Twitter was recording an average of 12,233 posts per second, which Brian Stelter of The New York Times Decoder Blog, says is "the most for any English language event in the six-year history of the social networking service." It is also three times the pace set at last year's Super Bowl (4,064 posts per second). Even more dramatic is the amount of search activity generated by this year's Super Bowl. According to the official Google Blog, Searches during the Super Bowl were 122 times higher than the average the week before. And, for the benefit of my advertising friends, the point about putting ads on-line BEFORE the actual game really is a milestone as well. According to YouTube, the ads (some of which ran in full, some of which ran as teasers) were viewed 30 Million times before the Game. I think that's called "getting the bang for your buck."One last piece of perspective on all this. In 1967 when the first Super Bowl aired, there were the three big networks and the game actually aired on both CBS and NBC. That only happened one other time, in 2007 when the game aired on those two AND, making its impact felt, the new NFL Network aired the game as well. Another major milestone in the media history of the game. That was also the year that The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Carol Burnett Show and Ironsides debuted. It was the only game that was not a sell-out despite the fact that there was a television blackout in the Los Angeles market where it originated. All of the broadcast tapes of the original game were destroyed because back then, tape was so expensive that the networks wiped the tapes and re-used them. Some small excerpts exist, along with video shot by the NFL itself, although no-one is quite sure what's in the NFL archives. And, oh, yes, one last thing Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35 - 10. I couldn't find any information about the ad rates at the time, but tickets were $12 apiece, which several newspapers editorialized was outrageous, and the players on the winning team got $15,000 while the players on the losing team got $7,500. The figures for today's players are $88,000 and $44,000. Editor’s note: Readers can find more postings by Michael Castengera and back issues of his Message from Michael newsletter at the website,http://newsprofs.blogspot.com/If you have a comment or want to reach Michael Castengera, you can email him at Castengera@gmail.com1/8/2012News Organizations On Twitter’s Most Followed ListOnly five news services made it into the top 100 list of most followed Twitter accounts, and to make the cut they had to produce four, five and six times more Tweets than the celebrities and personalities who dominate the list. Out of the top 500 most followed Twitter accounts, there were 19 news accounts that made the cut, although that’s not counting ‘news personalities’ who Tweet. Still, not bad when you consider that many of those news operations have more Twitter followers than viewers or readers. Not just more. Much more. For example, according to the numbers compiled by website twittercounter.com, CNN scored the top spot (at #27) out of all the news groups. Its ‘breaking news’ account has more than 6 Million followers. That is 20 times more than what they get on the average day which, in the latest ratings, puts their total daytime audience at 317,000. Even the regular, non-breaking-news CNN Twitter account has ten times that amount with nearly 3.5 Million followers. Fox News didn’t make it into the top 500. Even more interesting, none of the Fox ‘news personalities’ made it to the list either, although three of the CNN personalities did – Larry King, Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Surprised? Me, too.Especially since, as you may know, the Fox personalities out-draw the CNN personalities three, four and five to one in terms of on-air audience. In the latest ratings, for example, Bill O’Reilly had more than 2.1 Million viewers compared to Anderson Cooper’s 431-thousand. But Anderson Cooper can claim more than 1.9 Million Twitter followers. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow may lose to Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity on air (roughly 1.4 Million for him and 800 Thousand for her). But she has 2 Million Twitter followers. And Hannity? Well, I couldn’t find him anywhere on the list.Other news organizations can boast similar results from the Twitter Counter numbers. The New York Times was the second highest ranked Twitter news service with 4.2 Million followers putting it at number 60. That is four times more than the newspaper’s audited circulation, which is roughly 917 Thousand. So, the Times can claim a victory (of sorts) over the Wall Street Journal, which is the leading national newspaper with a circulation of slightly more than 2.1 Million, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation. The Journal came in at #454 in terms of Twitter followers with 1.3 Million people getting its news tweets. Surprise number two (at least for me) in the numbers was USA Today. It has the second highest circulation – 1.8 Million which is double the Times circulation – but it didn’t make it to the Twitter Counter list, even though the USA Today management has put a lot of emphasis on its digital media efforts.But to get back to my main point, what also was interesting to me when I crunched the numbers was that news organizations did massive amounts of tweeting compared to the celebrities and other personalities. For example, the most followed Twitter account in the world is that of Lady Gaga who has an astounding 17.7 Million followers. Folks, that is more people than 46 of the country’s 50 states. Only four states (California, Texas, New York and Florida) have more people. That is more people than 180 countries in the world. Yet she only has 1,208 Tweets, according to the Twitter Counter figures. Just for the record, that is a total of 169,120 characters. Talk about hanging on her every word. And that is about normal for the celebrities. Shakira who came in at number on the list with 12.3 Million followers only tweeted 1,222 times. Katy Perry who is the third most popular twitter with 13.5 Million followers tweeted a little more, 3,633 times. Justin Bieber, at number two with 16.1 Million followers, tweeted more often – 12,752 times. As did number four, Kim Kardashian, whose 12.3 Million followers received 9,974 tweets. But none of them can compare to the number of tweets sent out by news organizations.The biggest “news tweeter” in the world is BBC World News which sent out an astonishing 103,226 tweets as of the last count. The second biggest – and surprise number three for me – Metro TV News which is an Indonesian news service, and which sent out a more-than-robust 94,981 tweets. The New York Times was the third highest, according to my analysis, with 76,743 tweets. While other news organizations sent out significantly less, all of them, as I said earlier, sent out dramatically more than any other Twitterers. By way of comparison, here are some of the leading celebrity tweeters and the number of tweets they sent: Oprah Winfrey (1,611), Marshall Mathers (175), Just Timberlake (654), Charlie Sheen (737), Jim Carrey (2,904), Ryan Seacrest (5,924), Mariah Carey (3,044) and Conan O’Brien (727). Again, keep in mind, these people have an average of 5 Million followers. Now, here are the leading “news twitterers” and the number of tweets they sent: CNN Breaking News (14,315), CNN (22,575), BreakingNews.com, which is a worldwide breaking news site and which also made the top 100 list, (63,445), Time.com, which made it to #98, (33,530), BBC Breaking News (3,820), CBS News (25,803), NPR Politics (17,855), Good Morning America (21,843), and ABC News (37,192). Anyway, you get the point, although I will candidly admit I am trying to figure out “the point.” What do the numbers tell you? Part of the explanation for the numbers is that the same mandate that applies to your website applies to your twitter account -- and that is that you have to provide fresh material often. Part of it is pretty basic -- there is more news than there are celebrity tidbits to share. And part of it is demographic and socio-economic. We consultants will tell you that a major part of it is branding and name recognition. But explain why the significantly more viewed Fox News gets insignificant numbers on Twitter and on its website compared to CNN. Or why the New York Times beats out the Wall Street Journal. It’s especially puzzling when you consider that all of them claim to embrace the new, digital media world. It may simply be the difference between the two words -- embracing and understanding. You may know “how” to do it, but do you know “why” you do it. Even more important, you may be able to digitize your content, but can you monetize it. In the end, that is what will matter for most news organizations.Editor’s note: Readers can find more postings by Michael Castengera and back issues of his Message from Michael newsletter at the website,http://newsprofs.blogspot.com/If you have a comment or want to reach Michael Castengera, you can email him at Castengera@gmail.com12/22/2011Google’s Zeitgeist Report 2011How The World SearchedThe United States has Casey Anthony. The world has Melania Rea and Salvatore Parolisi. People in the U.S. were worried about Osama bin Laden. People in the world, not so much. The world wanted to know more about Fukushima. The U.S. was more interested in Hurricane Irene. But everybody -- people in the U.S., and the whole world -- wanted to know about Rebecca Black. At least, according to Google’s annual report on what people searched for this year, that’s true. The California teenager and her squealing song Friday was the “fastest rising search”, meaning she and it showed the greatest increase in interest, in the world. When I first introduced readers to the song, it had an amazing 13 Million views on Facebook. The latest count puts it at a staggering 167 Million views worldwide. Feeling a little stunned, are you? Well, prepare to be even more amazed by the report, but for a different reason.Google calls its report “Zeitgeist” which roughly translated from the German means “spirit of the times.” And as the mother-of-all-search-engines, Google is in a unique position to provide insight into the “events, news and people who shaped the year.” But the approach they’ve taken this year has resulted in a strange concoction of issues and some equally strange definitions of news.First, here’s what made both the American and world lists of “fastest rising” searches -- Ryan Dunn, Casey Anthony, Adele, and Steve Jobs along with teenage ‘singer’ Jessica Black.Further proof of the power of Jobs (as if you need it), his iPhone5 made both lists, but oddly his iPad2 made the world list but not the U.S. list. Here’s another ‘oddity.’ Google’s newly launched Google-plus made both lists. In fact it was the second fastest rising search, just behind top rising search -- Rebecca Black. Okay, a brief pause in this article as all of you cynics comment. Done? Okay, let’s move on to the rest of the story. We already noted one of the major differences in the overall category of fastest rising searches that Fukushima made the world list but not the American list while Hurricane Irene made the American list. Video game Battlefield3 made the world list, but didn’t make it to the American list. Instead, Americans were more interested in Pinterest, a sort of ‘virtual pinboard’ where people share items of interest. I know all you readers of the247newsroom know who Casey Anthony and Steve Jobs are but maybe not some of the others. Not to insult anybody’s pop culture cool-ness, but just so we’re all on the same page, Ryan Dunn was one of the performers on the reality TV show Jackass who died in a car accident, while Adele is the 22-year-old British singer who overcame vocal issues to be an international singing sensation. Now, as to Melania Rea and Salvatore Parolisi… well, as far as I can tell, it appears to be an Italian love triangle gone bad, with Parolisi believed to have killed his wife, Melania. And, no, I never heard about any of this, but according to Google, it scored the third highest increase in interest of any news story in the world. And even weirder, the story was the ‘fastest rising’ news search in Italy, but it did not even make the list of ‘fastest rising’ overall searches in Italy, and it didn’t make any of the ‘fastest rising’ searches in Germany, France, the United Kingdom or anywhere else in Europe as far as I can tell. So, how did it become the third fastest rising news search in the entire world? You’ll have to ask the Google engineers.While you’re asking them that, ask them why there is no ‘news’ search category for the United Kingdom and China and a few other places. There is a ‘news’ category for fastest risings searches in Germany, France, Italy, Japan and India, but it is only one topic. In the United States, there is not only a ‘news’ category but also eight sub-categories under news, and it is a mix of ‘fastest rising’ searches and what appears to be ‘most searched for.’ That’s yet another oddity. Google mixes the two together sometimes, so you have to be careful what you’re comparing. Anyway, the sub-categories under news are – politics, news sources, presidential candidates, job-related searches, economic issues, recalls, political scandals and “YouTube news searches.” Yes, three news items, all dealing with politics. But that’s not the ‘funny’ part. The ‘funny’ part is ‘news sources’ and ‘YouTube news searches.’Under news sources, the top ten fastest rising searches are YNN Austin, Before it’s News, The Advocate, Bartaman, Newswatch 16, State Gazette, UK Daily Mail, Columbus Ledger, and USA Today News. Congratulations to my friends in Austin, Columbus, Georgia, and Scranton for making the list. But you have to ask the question – how did their news efforts deserved to be named to the top ten in the country? It’s because they were the “fastest rising”, not “most searched.” And as to the YouTube news searches, the report just verifies what most of us suspect – that nobody goes to YouTube looking for news. Here’s a clue. These are the search terms which made the top ten in YouTube News: Obama, Who Says, News, Alex Jones, Ron Paul, Bush, Obama speech, Berlusconi and AKB. To help you out a little here, Who Says is a song sung most famously by John Mayer although Selena Gomez has a version as well. And AKB, which is actually AKB48, is a “Japanese female idol group.” But, aside from that, look at those other searches – News? Bush? They’re telling us that ‘news’ is the fastest rising search item in… news. Hmmmm. And Bush. Not George Bush. Just Bush. One word. The point is what do those search terms say about the searchers’ news knowledge or interest?In the end the Zeitgeist report does provide insights, but what kind of insights? Maybe, with its emphasis on ‘fastest rising,’ it’s telling us that interest in news is very fleeting. Or, maybe, with its huge amount of data, but very little information, it’s telling us that there really is a need for news curation, some one to decipher what it all means. Someone like me and you, the readers of the247newsroom. Editor’s note: Readers can find more postings by Michael Castengera and back issues of his Message from Michael newsletter at the website,http://newsprofs.blogspot.com/If you have a comment or want to reach Michael Castengera, you can email him at Castengera@gmail.com
© Tom Petner 2012
Michael Castengera Comments
Michael Castengera
MICHAEL CASTENGERA is a newspaper
reporter, turned television reporter, turned news
manager, turned news consultant, turned
university teacher.
He started out as a newspaper reporter, first
while living in Australia, and then for
newspapers in Orlando and Jacksonville,
Florida. He made the cross over into television
reporting in Jacksonville, going to work for
Post-Newsweek’s WJXT.
Since then he has worked in virtually every
position in the newsroom, including reporter,
assignment editor, producer, managing editor,
assistant news director, news director and,
finally, station manager. His career has
covered markets large (Miami and St. Louis),
medium (Jacksonville, Fort Myers, Oklahoma
City and Lexington, Kentucky) and small
(Beaumont and Corpus Christi, Texas).
He cites as career highlights, investigative
reports into police abuse, tornado coverage in
Oklahoma and riots in Miami, being at the birth
of the first 24-hour news station (KMOV) and
heading up what was, at the time, the highest
rated news affiliate in the country (WINK).
It was while he was station manager and news
director in Fort Myers that he made the cross
over into consulting, working with Audience,
Research and Development of Dallas as a
senior strategist with a variety of stations
around the country.
He now is a senior lecturer in Digital and
Broadcast Journalism at the Grady College of
Journalism at the University of Georgia. In
addition to that, he runs his own consulting
company, Media Strategies and Tactics.
Clients include media groups in America as well
as in India.
Feeding the 24/7 News Cycle
