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.

News: “a really expensive, exhaustive exercise…”

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Mitchell Steph­ens in the Columbia Journ­al­ism Review has seen the future of journ­al­ism. It’s the Inde­pend­ent:

The Inde­pend­ent is a ser­i­ous Eng­lish national daily in a mar­ket with three other ser­i­ous national dailies. So the Inde­pend­ent, look­ing for an edge, has begun devot­ing most of its front page, weekly­like, to a single story — a story covered with con­sid­er­able per­spect­ive and depth, a story in which the paper is not shy about exhib­it­ing a point of view. The Inde­pend­ent weighed in recently, for example, on the debate on global warm­ing with this head­line, and a pic­ture of a large wave, dom­in­at­ing its front page: “Tsunami hits Bri­tain: 5 novem­ber 2060.”

Simon Kel­ner, the paper’s editor in chief, explains that his under­stand­ing of the situ­ation of the daily news­pa­per “crys­tal­lized” dur­ing cov­er­age in Eng­land of the Amer­ican pres­id­en­tial elec­tion in 2004. The Inde­pend­ent repor­ted and inter­preted the res­ults along with the other papers. “It was a really expens­ive, exhaust­ive exer­cise for us all,” Kel­ner recalls. Yet the next morn­ing news­stand cir­cu­la­tion actu­ally fell. For up-to-the-minute res­ults people had turned instead to the radio, tele­vi­sion, and the Inter­net. How­ever, he explains, “The next day the Inde­pend­ent pub­lished twenty-one pages of ana­lysis and inter­pret­a­tion of the elec­tion — and we put on fif­teen per­cent in sales.”

Kel­ner got the mes­sage. “The idea that a news­pa­per is going to be peoples’ first port of call to find out what’s going on in the world is simply no longer valid. So you have to add another layer: ana­lysis, inter­pret­a­tion, point of view.” Kel­ner now dubs his daily a “viewspaper.”