Overall Internet penetration among adult Americans (U.S. only) today is 70 percent. Home broadband penetration stands at 74 million people, or 37 percent of adult Americans, according to a Pew Internet & American Life report released in March. Broadband users appear to be voracious news consumers (both online and off). The report includes nice charts to ponder.
Among all internet users, 22% report going to foreign or non-traditional news sites at least once, and 25% of broadband users say this…. Most (54%) Internet users who have gotten news online have registered at a news site. Only 6% of Internet users have paid for news content (video clips, articles, or news broadcasts).
There’s also a significant rural (24%) / (sub)urban (39%) divide in broadband penetration; details in another Pew report.
And finally, what about the big picture? OECD tells us that Icelanders have more broadband per capita than anyone, followed by South Korea (no surprise there). The U.S. is No. 12 among OECD countries. We are said to have 16.8 broadband users for every 100 inhabitants. (Korea: 25.4 per 100.)
The data indicates [sic] that 38.6 million home and work Internet users visited at least one of the New York Times Company-owned sites or launched a New York Times Company-owned application during the month, and each person spent, on average, a total of 15 minutes and 37 seconds at one or more of their sites or applications.
Fascinating to see that while The New York Times Company is No. 10 on the list of most-visited parent companies, none of its properties appear on the list of top 10 brands (which were Yahoo!, Microsoft, MSN, Google, AOL, eBay, Amazon, MapQuest, Ask Jeeves, and Apple).
The Editors Weblog has a decent roundup of recent online journalism tidbits today: The obligatory blah-blah about citizen journalism, a good point about the increasing fragmentation of search (especially as related to online video), and a well-deserved dig at the Pulitizers’ back-door approach to online.
Good stuff about international online journalism (Spain and China). The anticipated explosion of online advertising.
Nothing about multimedia or interactivity, though.
What the hell is the point of having this means of communication if we are not going to write about what people need to know? We can write about dating when we have our freedom back.
Journalism isn’t just information-gathering; it’s taking a bushel-basket full of information, some of it conflicting or unclear, and weaving it into an informative, interesting whole that meets craft standards for fairness and accuracy.
Most people don’t care to be journalists, but many of us can and will occasionally commit an act of journalism, and it would be useful for people to understand some of the principles that have served the professionals, and their audiences, so well for so long.
I’m with Gillmor on this one: You might commit an act of journalism without being anointed as a journalist. The public would be better served by a frank discussion of what journalism is than by a lot of bickering about who is a journalist.
Dinesh Wagle said, “Part of a journalist’s job is to identify the things that people need to know. That is our responsibility, and it is a kind of power that we enjoy.”
Let’s separate the joy of power from the act of journalism. It’s surely more important to figure out, really, what people need to know. And then tell them the truth about it.
David Carr got it wrong when he analyzed the meaning of the Star Tribune’s reaction to employees taking copies of the newspaper without paying for them:
There is an implicit broader message. If the people who make the paper believe that an electronic version of the product is just as good as the one readers pay for, why bother subscribing? This month, Jack Shafer, the media columnist for Slate, suggested that the new, improved Web site of The New York Times had persuaded him to stop paying $621.40 for an annual subscription.It is one thing to beaver away, building out a digital gallows. Given reader habits and industry trends, that kind of innovation is required. But at some point — perhaps when reporters are denied access to newspapers — publishers are saying something else to their employees and their readers: What you’re holding has no value. (The New York Times, April 17, 2006)
First, I’ll offer my two cents and agree that I think it’s strange to charge the employees for copies in the newsroom. I’ll add that when I worked at The Washington Post (1993-1995), the firm policy was that no employees got a free subscription. I paid full price to get the paper I worked for delivered to my home. But when I was “the late man” on the desk, I took a free copy of the early edition home with me. And when I came in to work each day, I picked up a free copy as reference for any folo stories that might appear in my queue that day.
The Post gave me a free hardcover dictionary and a free copy of the stylebook to use at work too. I wonder whether the Star Tribune now charges for those as well? We could see a new acronym: BYOD (bring your own dictionary).
This is nothing new. Many newspapers deny their employees the basic tools of their jobs. For example, a photojournalist from a mid-sized Southeastern U.S. daily e-mailed me to say his newspaper had insisted he learn Flash and start producing multimedia for the Web site. They even agreed to send him away to a one-week workshop! But when he asked them to upgrade from Flash 5 to Flash 8, the newspaper refused. That $900 for software was just more than the accountants could squeeze out. (Maybe their reporters still use manual typewriters too.)
Now that you’re either amused or angry, I’ll return to David Carr’s conclusion that the message of the Star Tribune’s “nothing free” policy is that the newspaper “has no value.” Not at all. The message sent and received is that the employees of the Star Tribune have no value — to their employer.
They are expected to work longer for no extra pay, do more with no extra resources, work weekends and holidays (as journalists always have), watch their marriages crumble under the stress and their retirement accounts grow by inches instead of miles — and, oh, yes, plunk down that 25 cents every day so that McClatchy does not go bankrupt.
The other message — which maybe Carr was also trying to get at — is that the dead-trees version of the newspaper is, in fact, too expensive to produce. Involved are not only almost unimaginable quantities of paper (there is nothing in the world like seeing the presses roll for a large daily newspaper) but also barrels of color ink, people running the presses and driving the trucks and — don’t forget — the rising price of oil. Circulation to far-flung suburbs is sucking millions out of the industry, and yet, that’s where the most coveted readers live.
The online edition of the newspaper is both savior and destroyer, angel and devil, friend and enemy.
The online edition is what will allow a newspaper company to break the bonds of the truck drivers’ unions, the paper mills, the subscribers’ complaints about soaking wet newspapers on the doorstep. If you could only get rid of that printed version, you could save … millions of dollars!
The problem, of course, is that your online readers aren’t paying.
Look, I buried the nut graf:
There are many, many reasons why people refuse to pay for the online edition of a newspaper. A big reason is that the online edition of most U.S. daily newspapers is slow, cumbersome, overwhelming and awkward — especially when compared with other Web sites that people use frequently.
Another reason is that the local newspaper’s Web site is often really bad at covering local issues, or at least bad at putting them forward in a way that seems relevant and interesting.
A third key reason is that if the stuff on the home page is not local or unique, why wouldn’t I just go straight to a better newspaper’s Web site — or to BBC News?
But instead of worrying about stuff like that (although the Strib does have one of the best online sites among U.S. newspapers; please look at their Slide Shows as well as the home page) — one newspaper company is worried about getting an extra 25 cents out of each newsroom employee.
Reading up on the 2006 Pulitzers, like any good journalist can’t help doing, I got curious about one of The Washington Post’s four Prize-winners, a three-part series about attempts to bring democracy to Yemen. So I go to The Post and type “yemen” into the search box, and what do I get? Nothing.
That is, I get about 10 stories about today’s Pulitzer announcement, and I get one little stray blurb thing “About the Series,” but NOT the series itself.
The Journerdism blog has three recent posts about this and related problems (here and here and here) — the basic idea is that search, among other things, is much better at other sites, and as a result, newspaper sites just seem bad, slow and clueless in comparison.
Yes, search is one more thing that newspaper Web sites really ought to study. Usable URLs would be nice too.
