Nieman Journalism Lab |
- What’s New in Digital and Social Media Research: How Facebook rumors spread, and the rise of the collaborative news clip
- Building an analytics culture in a newsroom: How NPR is trying to expand its digital thinking
- Does having native advertising make a news site less credible? This study, at least, suggests no
| Posted: 30 Apr 2014 11:25 AM PDT Editor’s note: There's a lot of interesting academic research going on in digital media — but who has time to sift through all those journals and papers? Our friends at Journalist’s Resource, that’s who. JR is a project of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and they spend their time examining the new academic literature in media, social science, and other fields, summarizing the high points and giving you a point of entry. Here, John Wihbey sums up the top papers in digital media and journalism this month. While high-level speculation continues on the future of news and information, research studies are providing a more under-the-hood look at the practices of journalists, outlets, and the digital networks in which they operate. Here’s a recent sampling from the world of academic journals and conferences. For a look at the bleeding edge of ideas, also check out new research papers on using “crowd workers” to generate encryption keys and the social costs of “friendsourcing” questions and information. “Rumor Cascades”: From Facebook and Stanford University, prepared for the 2014 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. By Adrien Friggeri, Lada A. Adamic, Dean Eckles, and Justin Cheng. The researchers start by identifying known rumors through Snopes.com, the urban legend reference site, and analyze how nearly 4,800 distinct rumors circulated on Facebook. Among the rumors studied, 22 percent were related to politics and 12 percent involved fake or doctored images. It appears that false rumors thrive on Facebook: In the entire Snopes database of rumors, 45 percent are flat-out false, while 26 percent turned out to be true; in contrast, 62 percent of rumors on Facebook are false and only 9 percent prove to be true. Interestingly, the authors note, “true rumors are more viral — in the sense that they result in larger cascades — achieving on average 163 shares per upload whereas false rumors only have an average of 108 shares per upload.” Some rumors are shared hundreds of thousands of times. Even when people discover the falsity of a rumor and delete their reshare, it does not appear to affect the unfolding cascade. Friggeri, Adamic, Eckles, and Cheng note the fast-moving, highly sudden nature of these information cascades. The “popularity of rumors — even ones that have been circulating for years in various media such as email and online social networks — tends to be highly bursty. A rumor will lie dormant for weeks or months, and then either spontaneously or through an external jolt will become popular again. Sometimes the rumors die down on their own.” The paper does propose a mechanism to explain these sudden “mystery” flare-ups, however. “It would be interesting,” the researchers conclude, “to examine whether rumor flare-ups are fueled by the presence of individuals who have never been exposed to the rumor, or whether, to the contrary, the rumor relies on those who know it well to retell it when prompted.” “Coproduction or cohabitation: Are anonymous online comments on newspaper websites shaping content?”: From Western Washington University, published in New Media & Society. By Carol E. Nielsen. Based on a substantial national survey of 583 journalists conducted in 2010, Nielsen explores how media members feel about anonymous comments on their articles, and whether or not they find them useful. The data show that “35.8 percent of journalists reported that they ‘frequently’ or ‘always’ read comments on their own work, 29 percent reported they ‘sometimes’ read comments on their work, and 35.2 percent reported that they ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ read comments on their work.” About three-quarters of journalists surveyed said that online comments should not be anonymous. Nielsen quotes one reporter who gave some qualitative feedback: “Those who post are free to lie and vent without accountability. The result is that online comments sabotage the credibility and dignity of the entire news organization.” Just under half of respondents (45 percent) “slightly or strongly agreed” that they should not respond to online comments, though three-quarters agreed they should respond to set the record straight with regard to factual inaccuracies. Most journalists surveyed said it was not because of a lack of time that they forego reading comments, rather it’s because they don’t think it’s worth it. “While 53.5 percent of journalists responded that comments sometimes showed them a new perspective, only 8.4 percent said that frequently or always happened and 38.1 percent said that rarely or never happened.” Comment forums are for readers, as far as most journalists are concerned. “This study,” Nielsen writes, “concludes that journalists have viewed readers not as coproducers, but rather as users cohabiting the platform.” “Customer orientation on online newspaper business models with paid content strategies”: From Carlos III University of Madrid and the University of Texas, published in First Monday. By Manuel Goyanes and George Sylvie. The study sets out to examine how news organizations measure customer satisfaction and respond to preferences with their paid content strategies — “paywall, metered model, freemium or the various sorts of virtual kiosks.” Goyanes and Sylvie analyze Britain’s The Times and the Financial Times, as well as Spain’s El Mundo. They base their conclusions mostly on 2012 interviews with digital, marketing, and sales representatives at the news outlets and available internal documents. How aggressive are these organizations in responding to the wants and needs of customers, and what factors seem to influence their strategies? The Financial Times boasts a data analysis team of 25 — five in London and 20 in Manila, allowing the outlet to begin to “differentiate content over different devices and time slots.” Meanwhile, the Times allows comments on the platform only from registered users, “avoiding ‘information noise’” in terms of user feedback. Customers now get “more personalized attention” than ever. At each outlet, there are “intense processes of innovation, experimentation and testing of new business and product campaigns and practices.” The case studies show an “enhanced effort to develop and have online tools — e.g., registration, comment feedback and social media — to supplement the traditional vehicles of market studies, reader panels, etc., and deliver additional, analyzable reader data.” The authors conclude, however, that “despite the strategic planning of media groups employing paid content strategies, the economic uncertainties and discrepancies on their adoption indicate that charging for content remains an option of an experimental nature,” and other revenue streams, such as print editions, remain crucial to supporting the business. “Embedding content from Syrian citizen journalists: The rise of the collaborative news clip”: From California State University Northridge and UCLA, published in Journalism. By Melissa Wall and Sahar El Zahed. Analyzing the way that The New York Times’ blog The Lede incorporates Syrian citizen journalistic video, Wall and El Zahed coin the term “collaborative news clip” to describe the joint gatekeeping and shared framing news process that takes place. They examine 82 blog posts from 2012, which used a total of 162 citizen videos. Citizen videos were more often labeled a “clip,” as opposed to professional videos, which were frequently called a “report.” Only 14 were in English, or had subtitles or a mix of Arabic and English. Most have no beginning-middle-end structure, instead existing in the middle of the story. “Productive usage of the Syrian citizen videos requires context and place specific knowledge,” Wall and El Zahed conclude, “a level of understanding that The Lede achieves in part by turning to insiders, activists within the conflict, to help with their selection and explanations. In this way, The Lede provides a means for Syria’s citizen journalists and their supporters to have a louder voice on the Web pages of a major world news outlet. In the process, some narrative power may be shifting to a tier of citizen-activists who create and/or identify local content.” “A Digital Juggling Act: New Media’s Impact on the Responsibilities of Local Television Reporters”: From Ithaca College, published in Electronic News. By Anthony C. Adornato. This case study assesses how workflow issues play out for TV journalists who now must do much more than just standup reporting in front of an on-scene camera. Based on in-depth interviews with eight television journalists of varying levels of experience who operate in a medium-sized Northeast media market, Adornato offers granular detail on reporters’ experiences. The reporters generally felt that social media was useful for newsgathering. However: “Reporters were increasingly being asked to verify information that people were posting online; sometimes, this meant they were spending valuable time investigating rumors.” Daily responsibilities generally increased because of the pace of social media: “Reporters did not — and could not — wait for the 5 p.m., 6 p.m., or 11 p.m. broadcasts to deliver information about stories,” he notes. “Reporters recognized the audience expects information in real time and across multiple online platforms.” Adornato reveals other challenges that are likely common to many local television reporters.”Reporters found the process of getting information to the Web team and others involved in the traditional news broadcasts cumbersome,” he writes. “Because of the lack of a coherent internal communications, reporters often had to carve out critical time to relay information to different coworkers — Web staff member, producer and assignment editor.” The TV reporters also found themselves “hard pressed to relinquish control of the story to the Web team. Instead, they spent a significant amount of time editing the Web version of their stories.” On the whole, the journalists interviewed said they believed social media channels brought them closer to viewers; their “ongoing interactions build a level of trust and credibility with the audience.” “Twilight or New Dawn of Journalism? Evidence from the changing news ecosystem”: From the Reuters Institute, University of Oxford, published in Digital Journalism. By Robert G. Picard. Picard, a media economics and policy expert, furnishes a high-level overview of the industry changes at hand. He emphasizes that the “practices of journalism are shifting from a relatively closed system of news creation — dominated by official sources and professional journalists,” and that this is “not undesirable because it means that fewer institutional elites are deciding what gets attention and how it is framed than in the past.” However, he also warns that newer media institutions are “able to skew the availability of news and information through search, aggregation and digital distribution infrastructures. These are creating new mechanisms of power and a new class of elites influencing content.” In terms of changes for the business model, Picard puts recent shifts in historical perspective: “What is clear is that news providers are becoming less dependent on any one form of funding than they have been for about 150 years.” This is also potentially a welcome change, as it reduces the “influence of commercial advertisers that significantly influenced the form, range, and practices of news provision in the 20th century.” Still, we cannot take quality news for granted. “We are experiencing neither an end nor a new dawn of journalism; we are experiencing both,” Picard concludes. “The historical, social and economic contexts of the changes occurring in journalism indicate we are in a transition not a demise of journalism.” Photo by Anna Creech used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Building an analytics culture in a newsroom: How NPR is trying to expand its digital thinking Posted: 30 Apr 2014 08:28 AM PDT Being a digital staffer at a traditional news organization means doing digital work, sure — but it often also means serving as an evangelist for the web. That can take a mixture of convincing, cajoling, and showing by example.
Strengthening that new culture started with something small: a daily email. The messages laud good work from NPR staffers, point out ways to do things better, and highlight experiments at other outlets. (Last month, Kramer started posting the emails online for all to see.) Now reaching about 450 people inside NPR — including top management — the emails have led to other staffers sending Kramer examples of their own work, as well as links that they think would be worth sharing with their colleagues. Today, NPR unveils the next step in that culture building: an analytics dashboard designed for NPR staffers to learn more about how readers and listeners are connecting with their work online. "We started [the newsletter] several months ago, and I think that this product that we're developing is an extension of that," Kramer said. "It allows us to learn and hopefully share with our newsroom. I do think you have to think about the culture of your newsroom before introducing a product." Now, if you’re a web maven, an analytics dashboard might seem downright boring. But small things like an email or a dashboard can be powerful in building culture.
NPR runs its development schedule in two-week cycles, and Kramer pitched her bosses on the idea to develop the dashboard in February. She was given six weeks — three cycles — in March and April to build it.
“We're certainly not as big as many of our competitors,” said Patrick Cooper, NPR’s director of web and engagement, who was among the group who approved the project. “At the end of the day, we're a nonprofit and we have to be as efficient with our time as possible.” NPR already uses Google Analytics and Chartbeat to monitor its analytics. (Another part of the social media team’s work is to build small tools to make sharing easier; one of those is a bookmarklet to add Google Analytics tracking codes to the end of URLs.) While those off-the-shelf products are useful, Kramer and Bryan said they can be complicated to understand and don't always provide the best information. Instead, they wanted to create a dashboard that allows NPR to use the data to inform their content decisions. NPR doesn’t introduce any new form of measuring analytics with its dashboard; rather, it takes existing information and presents it in a way that’s more easily digestible. It clearly shows where a story’s traffic is coming from, how it’s being shared on social media and elsewhere, and whether readers are interacting with embedded audio or slideshows. The dashboard was designed to answer simple questions: How much attention is this story getting? How are people getting to this story? Who posted this story on social media? The dashboard will be housed online and information from it will be sent out in a daily internal email, Kramer said.
"We wanted to try to bring together an abstraction of the best data we can pull together for our journalists, so they can look at it quickly and understand more about the audience and then make better informed decisions on the content side," Bryan said. In developing the product, Kramer, Bryan, and Scott Stroud, a user experience designer at NPR, met with representatives of The New York Times, BuzzFeed, the Atlantic, the Huffington Post, USA Today, and The Guardian to better understand how those outlets approach analytics. After touring other newsrooms, the team developing the dashboard met with the head of every show and desk at NPR and shared what they’d gleaned on the email listserv as well as in a lunchtime talk. "This kept everyone in the loop and invested in the process," Kramer explained in that ISOJ talk:
Keeping in mind those contingencies and the need to adapt to the company's culture, BuzzFeed's analytics dashboard was a main inspiration for the NPR team, Bryan said. "Following their lead, we're looking at the impact of social on our traffic and trying to better understand that and where people are coming to us from," he said. The BuzzFeed dashboard, a version of which is publicly available, shows the site's traffic figures and highlights the role of social networks in generating traffic in an easy-to-understand way. Another takeaway from their newsroom visits? Relative data is just as important as absolute data. "We know a politics story isn't going to do as well as a pop culture story necessarily, so how do we create a measure that allows us to see success for what it is," Bryan said. Though the data from NPR's finished project won't be shared publicly, they are planning on meeting again with the other organizations they met with to share the finished dashboard and share the lessons they've learned through the development.
The initial dashboard is a barebones version of what they'd ultimately like to get done. Eventually, they envision a version of the tool would allow users to easily share information with each other. And while the current dashboard will focus on individual stories, they’d like to build it out to an aggregate level to view information on specific blogs, topic pages, or even the NPR homepage. "What our vision is for it and what will get built will be two different things," Bryan said. "When we get to the end of the six weeks we've been given, we'll have a good product for the newsroom to use, but we'll have a good roadmap to build it out further." Photo of NPR newsroom by Ted Eyan used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Does having native advertising make a news site less credible? This study, at least, suggests no Posted: 30 Apr 2014 07:00 AM PDT Native advertising is providing an ever-larger chunk of digital revenue for publishers these days. But despite (or perhaps because of) the money, lots of journalists are still squeamish about the topic. They worry that, at its core, native advertising is about tricking your reader into reading an ad and thinking its editorial content. Why would a reader who feels duped by a news brand ever want to return to it? That’s the question that led Patrick Howe and Brady Teufel of Cal Poly to publish a research paper titled “Native Advertising and Digital Natives: The Effects of Age and Advertisement Format on News Website Credibility Judgments.” Howe, an AP journalist turned academic, said he heard experienced journalists worrying about the declining quality of advertising and the potential ethical dilemmas of native advertising. “When I would go and talk to people, particularly journalists, almost everybody I would talk to — these are your New York Times-reading, NPR-listening crowd — almost everyone was convinced that it would be a disaster because people would feel tricked, and that they would take it out against the news organization,” he says. “That this is dirty pool, and news organizations shouldn’t do it.” Howe devised a study of around 250 respondents, split between two age groups — half were between 18 and 25, the other half were over 45. He then wrote a survey that tried to determine whether the presence of native advertising affected how respondents viewed the credibility of a news source, comparing reactions of younger respondents to those of older respondents. In the past, Howe says, the majority of studies in areas of information processing and credibility judgment have been conducted by people who have an interest in the advertising side. “The news in particular has been so bad about gathering information about their users online, and making good use of it, it always feels a generation behind in terms of doing what all the smart people on the Internet are doing,” he says.
“On the news side, we’ve got advertising doing applied work, and interesting work being done by economists at the 10,000-foot level,” he says. “Advertising is a huge part of the experience of consuming news, and yet there’s almost no research from news scholars into its effects.” To construct the project, Howe collaborated with Teuful, whose expertise is in design, to construct two faux news site homepages. Using a mockup of a BuzzFeed page, Howe and Teufel exposed respondents to both native advertising (see the Columbia Sportswear ad at middle right):
and traditional display advertising (in the same slot):
Howe hypothesized that there’s be a substantial gap between how younger and older readers viewed the credibility of the site — but that’s not what happened. “I was so surprised by that result that I ended up going back in a panic and checking all my coding,” says Howe. “I really didn’t think that made any sense to me at first blush, and I’m not sure I have a handle on the explanation.” In fact, people in both age groups felt more or less the same about the credibility of the two sites, regardless of what kind of advertising it displayed. Young people were slightly more likely to recognize native advertising as an ad, but what they saw did not influence their judgment of the site. Older viewers, meanwhile, tended to find the news site more credible no matter what, suggesting that older readers of digital media are more trusting and less judgmental than their younger counterparts. “It could well be that the younger people knew this was a BuzzFeed ripoff, and the older people thought this was an anonymous news source,” Howe acknowledges. But he said qualitative responses about what contributed to the respondents opinions suggest, at least anecdotally, that older readers approach online media differently. (These responses were not published as part of the paper.) “The older people were just a little nicer! This is purely my sense of things, but the younger people were just harsh. They would say things like ‘Garbage news.’ ‘Too busy.’ ‘Gossip format.’ ‘Looks flashy.’ Older people were more likely to say things like ‘images and headlines and the overall look.’ ‘The overall appearance.’ ‘They cited sources.’ ‘The content and design.” They were more big picture. Young people were more like, ‘That one thing sucked,’” Howe says. Young people were also slightly more likely to recognize sponsored content as advertising, Howe found. “Younger people are more used to a world where advertising comes in all kinds of formats. They know there’s product placement in television shows and movies. They know the first returns on a Google search are [often] paid for. They know that there are sponsored tweets and Facebook ad posts. I think they’re more aware that advertising doesn’t always look like advertising.” But there’s a catch-22 at the center of all this. A reader who doesn’t notice a native ad is an ad is also unlikely to notice the brand that’s paying for it. It’s that tension between normal editorial content and brand messaging that’s at the heart of the native advertising boom, and it’s unclear how sustainable that inflow of money can be as native becomes just another advertising format. Of course, Howe and Teufel’s study is a small one that can’t be readily extrapolated to the entire online news business. For Howe, the most important next step is finding readers who do feel somehow violated by native advertising and studying their reactions. “I don’t know how to do that yet,” he says. Howe also says a public relations professional who buys native ads suggested he study advertisers instead of readers and try to parse their motivations. He’s also interested in finding a way to conduct a study that includes a more natural media discovery and consumption process — for example, using A/B testing to measure audience behaviors like engagement against different advertising types. There’s also interest in studying other native formats, like sponsored sections. “We’ve got a huge problem that at least in the last few years has really threatened journalism in general, yet there really aren’t a lot of people trying to help in academia,” says Howe. “I want to be one of those people. I don’t necessarily want to serve the publishers, but I want to serve journalism.” Illustration by The Illustrated Press. |
When 
| You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |