Tag Archives: The Independent

New research: the US audience for British news

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My City Uni­ver­sity col­league Neil Thur­man has been busy look­ing at the impact of Brit­ish news web­sites in the United States. And maybe it’s time for the tip­ping of web pages into the Second Life equi­val­ent of Boston Harbour.

Here’s what he found:

- Online, the BBC News web­site gets more US read­ers than Fox News, USA Today, and the LA Times; and the Guard­ian more than Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal in their home markets.

- UK news web­sites stud­ied received an aver­age of 36% of their read­ers from the US, although that fig­ure is as high as 73% for some.

- The Drudge Report was the most import­ant refer­rer of US read­ers to UK news web­sites, account­ing for 25% of traffic.

- Google referred about 8% of US traffic and Google News 7%.

- The stick­i­est UK sites with Amer­ican read­ers ranked:

1. BBC News
2. Telegraph.co.uk
3. theSun.co.uk
4. Guardian.co.uk
5. FT.com
6. Times Online
7. Independent.co.uk

- There was an indir­ect link between sites’ suc­cess on Google News and the prac­tice of pub­lish­ing copy straight from wire services.

- Sites like theSun.co.uk and Times Online saw con­sid­er­able poten­tial in their inter­na­tional audi­ence. On the other hand the edit­or­ial dir­ector of Asso­ci­ated News­pa­pers’ web­sites saw little value in inter­na­tional read­ers and “would rather have a hun­dred per cent UK audience.”

- Over­seas read­ers’ promis­cu­ous behaviour — “[they come and look at] one page a month and then go away again” (Stu­art Kirk­patrick, Scotsman.com) — was cited as a bar­rier to mon­et­iz­ing the over­seas audience.

- The editor of theSun.co.uk spec­u­lated that their global read­er­ship may be chan­ging their news val­ues: “our break­ing news…seems to have recently developed slightly more of a global feel.”

It’s out in a journal soon, but a pre-print ver­sion is avail­able from Neil’s fac­ulty page.

The best line on journalism…

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My old favour­ite pro­fes­sional aph­or­ism is this: a journalist’s duty is to betray. It neatly and bit­terly encap­su­lates the moral, emo­tional and intel­lec­tual prob­lems of report­ing. But it’s not a tag to be repeated with pride, more of a dirty indus­trial secret.

Last night Mohamed Chebaro, of Al Arabiya and a vet­eran of inter­na­tional news report­ing, came up with my new favour­ite line: a journalist’s loy­alty is to their inform­a­tion. A major chord replaces a minor.

Mohamed was speak­ing at a debate I was for­tu­nate enough to chair at City Uni­ver­sity last night titled Journ­al­ism and the Middle East: Free Speech or Pro­pa­ganda? — an event made pos­sible by a lady called Joan Tully.

On the panel too:

Stu­dents from City (some drawn from the region) and the New­house School at Syra­cuse Uni­ver­sity heard:

  1. A strong endorse­ment of the pos­it­ive role played by Israel’s media in Israeli soci­ety from the Arab media
  2. An optim­ism about the role of journ­al­ism in open­ing up debate across the region
  3. An appre­ci­ation of the secur­ity threats to press freedom
  4. An aware­ness of the respons­ib­il­ity of the pub­lic to attend to report­ing from the region

And much, much more besides…

In praise of podcasts

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Podcasts get a shot across the bows from ‘viewspa­per’ editor and accom­plished con­tro­ver­sial­ist Simon Kel­ner:

Kel­ner is endear­ingly con­temp­tu­ous of multi– plat­form journ­al­ism, espe­cially when it comes to pod and vod­casts. “I’ve never met any­one who ever listens to pod– casts,” he explodes. “When I saw in the Tele­graph ‘Get your pod­cast of Simon Hef­fer dis­cuss­ing David Cameron’s latest policy announce­ment’, I thought you’ve got to be jok­ing! I’m not con­vinced that they’re the future.” [Guard­ian]

Kelner’s right about Heffer’s chances of mak­ing it onto an ipod. But he’s wrong about podcasts.

My daily com­mute into Lon­don Can­non Street brims with City types with their head­phones full of Wake up To Money, BBC Five Live’s 5.30am take on the fin­an­cial mar­kets. In Janu­ary it got over 100,000 monthly down­loads. Kel­ner may not have the resources to fill a daily half hour for Britain’s belea­guered and under­val­ued fin­an­cial com­munity. But over at the Beeb…

Update: After some search­ing I can’t find a Simon Hef­fer dis­cuss­ing David Cameron’s latest policy announce­ment pod­cast. Shane Rich­mond might know if such a pod­cast ever exis­ted or if it was merely SK’s flight of rhet­or­ical fancy?

Is there a media campaign against UKIP?

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Let me make a con­fes­sion. I have no sym­pathy for the polit­ical goals of the UK Inde­pend­ence Party (UKIP), a right-of-centre Brit­ish minor­ity party, with a pro­foundly anti-European bent. When this week a UKIP sup­porter men­tioned that there was a media cam­paign against his party — well, the words ‘para­noid’ and ‘delu­sional’ came pop­ping into my head.

But I had a quick trawl back through three months of stor­ies with UKIP head­lines and here are the none-too-scientific res­ults of the total word count:

news­pa­per %
Tele­graph 31.4 (15.4% news / 16.0% opin­ion)
S Tele­graph 20.1 (16.2% news / 3.9% opinion)

Times 12.4 (9% news / 3.4% opin­ion)
S Times 6.8

Daily Mail 9.0

Inde­pend­ent 8.6

Guard­ian 5.5

Express 4.1 (4.1% opin­ion)
S Express 0.6

Mir­ror 0.8

Sun 0.7

UKIP fas­cin­a­tion is def­in­itely highest at the Tele­graph group with 51.5% of all cov­er­age, but over half the Daily’s cov­er­age is op-ed. How­ever, con­spir­acy the­or­ists take note, not all the opin­ion is neg­at­ively slanted towards UKIP — with sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tions by Simon Hef­fer in favour of the UKIP’s key positions.

But if there is a con­spir­acy, it’s a silent one. The Kip­pers only mer­ited 21,601 words in three months…do I sound sorry? I am sorry. Really.