Journal of Digital Research & Publishing
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Journal of Digital Research & Publishing | 1 Contents 4 Spreading the message: How social networks and paywalls can save 95 Old news? Are new technologies causing news reporting to change track publishers or simply speed up existing trends? Brett McKeehan Suzanne Stebbings 12 Are social network websites breeding antisocial young people? 103 Internet @Censorship.com Alanna Bromley Dan Lin 19 Content curators: The DJs of the web 110 Why is“Human flesh search” only popular in China? Claudine Pache Jingsi Wei 26 Connecting with a click: Using social media as a new marketing 118 Digital library: A long way to go strategy Hui Zheng Xingya Zhou 125 From parlours to pixels: How the digital revolution is changing the way 34 Hesitations and difficulties in setting up a corporate wiki we read Marie Louisa Althans Angela Shetler 43 Born to be wired: The advantages and disadvantages for Australian 134 Poetry and the digital age: Friends or foes? children growing up in a digital age Stephanie Littlewood Amanda Nicholls 141 Has the e-book caused the death of the printed book? 52 Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right* Xiaoxiao Hua Cobie Dellicastelli 149 DNA match identification of copyright works system 61 Will newspapers survive in the digital age? Shen Chao Kokkai Ng 158 What do you love? The optimisation of personalised searches 72 Is microblog changing the way we read news? Monica Moruzzi Mina Yizhen Wang 80 Journalism 2.0: The business of news Paul Giannakis 86 Death to the watchdog? The Fourth Estate in a 2.0 world Natasha Parsons 2 | Journal of Digital Research & Publishing Journal of Digital Research & Publishing | 3 Although the decay first set in decades ago, this decline has been aggravated in recent years by the rise of the web. The take-up has been blinding: over just Spreading the message: How 10 years US papers shed a combined 10 million copies a day as more and more readers turned to the internet for their content fix. In Australia, the circulation of social networks and paywalls our leading newspapers plummeted 2 per cent in the final three months of last can save publishers year alone (Lee 2010). Publishers now tend to suggest the internet is both the problem and the opportunity — younger people read newspapers less because Brett McKeehan they get their news online, with the industry benefiting from rapid growth in digital readership. Despite news websites being nowhere near as profitable as the printed product, readers want access to everything, they want it now – and they want it for ABSTRACT free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if Newspaper companies are still finding their feet – and profit margins – in the digital newspapers’ profits vanish, their product will too. environment. Not bound by the delivery limitations of newspaper products, at its purest All is not lost, however: focusing on the limitless referral power of social networks level content is now effectively borderless. Naturally this presents new problems for publishers: notably, how to ensure maximum exposure of their product. The further as well as limited content subscription systems – known as paywalls – offers serious content spreads, the greater the potential audience. Social networks, which hinge on sharing potential. The word gets out, revenue come in; this is vital as newspaper companies content with ease, are an effective way of maximising audience potential. Using academic seek to overcome cumbersome publishing methods in a digital age in which local, sources, this article analyses the challenges newspaper companies face in a digital society state and national borders are increasingly irrelevant. now dominated by peer-to-peer communication. It also investigates the strength of weak ties, which is why social networks have such vast potential for distribution. Finally, with many media organisations considering content paywalls, it suggests ways providers can THE MODERN MEDIA LANDSCAPE better harness such networks and embrace people as the new distribution power. It’s no surprise that publishers are getting increasingly desperate. In August the Chicago Tribune, a newspaper with a 160-year pedigree, offered two years of its KEYWORDS Sunday edition for just $US20 – or a loss-making 19c an issue – to secure long- Newspapers, Social networks, Digital media, Content distribution, Facebook, Paywall term subscribers (Zorn 2011). Essentially, the Tribune is trying to hold on to its critical mass. When its Sunday circulation falls below a certain level, key advertisers will stop using the paper to spruik their product. Given the revenue they generate, the withdrawal of enough advertisers would likely be the paper’s death knell. It’s a INTRODUCTION plight echoed at print sites across the world, so much so it has even been predicted “A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself,” said legendary American playwright papers will be officially extinct by 2043 (Meyer 2004, p.16). Arthur Miller in 1961. His words came towards the end of a golden era of print journalism: circulation was soaring as papers set the news agenda for the rest of The key advantage publishers have is the actual demand for news appears the media. In 1950, the average daily total paid circulation for United States daily undiminished. In the US, a recent survey revealed less than a third of 3000 newspapers was 53.8 million (Newspaper Association of America 2010), equivalent respondents claimed to have read a newspaper the day before – down from almost to 123.6 per cent of all the nation’s households at the time (US Census Bureau, half a decade earlier (Pew Research Center 2010). Meanwhile, the number of 2011). Yet by 2009 the circulation average had plummeted to 45.7 million, or a people who claimed to have read news from a digital source including websites, mere 36.7 per cent of households once population rises are considered. Echoed mobile devices, email, social networks and podcasts in the previous 24 hours rose across Australia, New Zealand, western Europe and Latin America, the figures from 11 per cent to 44 per cent. This suggests the appetite for journalism is holding make grim reading for publishers. firm, and it is the delivery and revenue mechanisms of existing digital products – combined with flagging interest in newspapers themselves – that are flawed. 4 | Journal of Digital Research & Publishing Journal of Digital Research & Publishing | 5 While most newspaper companies were quick to join the digital revolution by not only receiving media from many sources but are also modifying and copying offering content for free and relying on in-page advertising, their balance sheets what they receive, and redistributing to others. This represents a fundamental struggled with the transition: a print reader currently generates up to 20 times change from the way media companies have operated: for the first time in history, the advertising revenue as an online one (Jenkins 2006). Most media companies on a mass scale, the means of production and distribution for information and established their sites as straightforward extensions of their brand in a format entertainment products are finding their way into the hands of consumers. typical of the ‘destination web’, in which all content is packaged and contained within and readers are expected to visit habitually. But digital readers tend by be This “invigorated folk culture” created by and among individuals and groups, transient by nature; ‘power users’ – those who return more than 10 times a month according to Benkler (2006, p.177), “seems to invert the mass-media model in that to any given website and spend more than an hour there in that time – make up it is driven heavily by what dense clusters of users find intensely interesting and just 7 per cent of the total users on the world’s top 25 news websites on average engaging, rather than by what large swathes of them find mildly interesting on (Olmstead et al 2011). This transient quality means online readers are more likely average”. For publishers this must be utilised rather than feared, with the public to access content outside their usual channels, and it is therefore worthwhile for demanding to be recognised as a community that participates in the news rather publishers to explore other avenues for distribution if they want to grow their than an audience that receives it. If publishers expect people to pay for content, a audience. truly engaged audience offers the best hope – and social networks, which feature tools to share and comment about content easily between friends, offer the best Also, quality digital content cannot be free forever. With online readers used to mechanism to get the extended exposure necessary to entice those readers. accessing content without paying, the introduction of a paywall scheme poses natural headaches. But the basic economics of the digital publishing environment means they must be pursued as a revenue source for publishers. The mood is WHY THE REFERRAL POWER OF SOCIAL NETWORKS IS SO certainly changing – since 2009, at least 50 major newspapers (Janda 2011) around IMPORTANT the world have also started charging for online journalism with Slovakia this year Internet communication enables people to share information, opinions and data becoming the first country to erect a digital ‘iron curtain’ encompassing nearly all faster and more easily than ever before. Basic computer hardware and an internet of its main media outlets. connection means a single click of the mouse can now facilitate the spread of information from one user to many – similar to traditional mass media but without the one-sided distribution system. These connections contribute to the network HOW READERSHIP EXPECTATIONS HAVE CHANGED society, which Manuel Castells defined in 2001 – years before the creation of social Historically, publishers combined the processes of content creation, aggregation networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter – as “a society where the key social and distribution.