How new media has changed journalism Part 1

It’s a real must-read for those who are in some way relevant to media and journalism. The book contains relevant data about the features of media consumption, efficiency of new publishing strategies and detailed critiques of new media technologies. Publishing extracts from the book. The whole book is free to read here.

Today user generated content published in social networks, compete in efficiency with the materials of the professional media. The user always wins, but creates a thick veil of information noise. To break through and seize the audience’s attention is becoming increasingly difficult.

Fascinated by the production of entertainment content that attracts a lowly reader, you can lose a loyal audience. Media with great zeal pursue attendance (growth hack), forgetting about the value of the material. We click on the teasers that cling to the title or illustration, but bright wrapper is often hidden dummy. The amount of content, as plagiarism is growing exponentially, and the reader learns the concept of digital detox. Soon the audience will wonder: why do we even have a media if we are able to produce content of similar quality.

The task of the journalist is available and truthfully convey information to the reader without burdening politically correct rpm. “Sensation” can be instantly spread via the Internet publications throughout the world, and in the rush no one checks its authenticity. The main argument of the guilty editors: “I posted the news because it published forged N [a large and reputable news Agency]”. But there are working people, and therefore, no one is immune from mistakes.

The essence of the journalist — to tell stories.

But just to stand on a street corner and shout into the void is not enough. You need to collect the audience and apply the theme in such a way that people listened to the end. Armed with metrics you will be able to figure out how to do it. Speaking about the audience and its properties, user behavior, we must understand that is impossible to fix a standard and build on it.

But in order to make meaningful their work changing with the industry audience, you have to know the basic measures, the history of the evolution of the audience of new media, their development tendencies and be able to predict the future. Responsibility for quality, high impact audience behavior equally:

journalist; producer (whose job is to promote the resource as a whole and each separate publication in particular); the developers of the site, its mobile version and mobile application designers.

One of the classic errors in the promotion materials within the site and on affiliate and advertising resources — hobby “suzunobu” slogan.  The abuse of “yellow” stroke, deliberate distortion or “play on words” inevitably disappoint the user and perceived as “dummy”. In this situation, once won “click” deprives the publication of the following organic transitions.

The level of involvement becomes crucial today.

Publishers and producers appreciate not only and not so much the number of readers/ viewers/listeners, but the efficiency of behavior of the user (reader, viewer). The concept of audience engagement goes hand in hand with the concept of loyalty of the audience, but not always identical.

The producers could describe a certain user is involved in something like this:

This is an information maniac, several times a day visiting all the platforms on which broadcasts to the publication, including social media and info arena, from all devices (laptop, smartphone, tablet, watches, etc.) registered on the site, participating in campaigns and surveys using paid services and reacting to advertising, actively commenting the content. He share content from the website and the mobile version, as well as in groups of the publication in social networks, sending links to the publication in groups, messengers, participates in contests and sweepstakes, sending photos and videos and participate in offline events, knows the authors and main headings notified in advance about special projects and new products, actively talks about them on his page in social networks and friends for dinner.