Mobile-First Journalism

Producing News for Social and Interactive Media

Steve Hill, Paul Bradshaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138289307
• eBook ISBN: 9781351972383
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Media publishers produce news for a full range of smart devices – including smartphones, tablets and watches. Combining theory and practice, Mobile-First Journalism examines how audiences view, share and engage with journalism on internet-connected devices and through social media platforms.

The book examines the interlinked relationship between mobile technology, social media and apps, covering the entire news production process – from generating ideas for visual multimedia news content, to skills in verification and newsgathering, and outputting interactive content on websites, apps and social media platforms. These skills are underpinned with a consideration of ethical and legal concerns involving fake news, online trolling and the economics of mobile journalism.

Topics include:

• understanding how mobile devices, social media platforms and apps are interlinked;
• making journalistic content more engaging and interactive;
• advice on how successful news publishers have developed mobile and social media strategies;
• adopting an approach that is entrepreneurial and user-centered;
• expert interviews with journalists, academics and software developers;
• learning key skills to launch and develop news websites, apps and social media outputs.

Mobile-First Journalism is essential reading for journalism students and media professionals and of interest to those studying on courses in social and new media.

1Understanding the user

This chapter will cover:

•The relationship business

•What is social media?

•Status in the community

•Isn’t all news social?

•Smartphone addiction

•Mobile and social media – two sides of the same coin

•Personalised, portable, social and always on

•Mapping the mobile and social media landscape

•Mobile wars

•Technology and identity

Introduction

Journalists have a responsibility to serve their audience. Talk to any newspaper or magazine editor and they will be able to list the average age, gender, social class and typical occupation of their readers. Traditionally, this information is gathered using reader surveys or audience focus groups.

If magazines have ‘readers’, then mobile websites and apps have ‘users’. Analytics software is used to collect data on a website’s most popular stories, page views, location of the user and the social media sites that generate the most traffic, etc. Google Analytics (analytics.google.com), which is free, is one of the most popular tools for monitoring news websites.

Throughout this book we encourage you to have a user-centred approach to your journalism, which takes into account the interactive nature of mobile and social media output. Having people view your content (a measurement known as ‘reach’ on social media) is one thing, but a user interaction with content is better. ‘Engagement’ is used to measure the number of shares, comments or other interactions with our journalism content on social media. We can also measure ‘dwell time’ – the time spent viewing an article online. This data allow us to build up a picture of the user and the content they find useful.

This chapter seeks to understand how modern users not just view, but engage and interact with digital content. People do all kinds of things on their mobile devices and much of it isn’t related to journalism at all. Mobile games, rather than media brands, dominate the Apple Store and Google Play top ten charts. Two classic examples of addictive and popular mobile games are Candy Crush and the augmented reality game Pokémon Go.

We use the term ‘user’ rather than ‘audience’ in this chapter. The term audience is problematic as it suggests passivity, i.e. a group of people passively watching TV in their living rooms. It is a model of media that presents the audience as the ‘child’ and we, the journalist, as a ‘parent’ who is ‘teaching’ the children what they need to know about the world. In fact the classic advice for feature writers is often ‘show, don’t tell’ – we should allow the reader to experience the story through action, words, thoughts, senses rather than summarising the facts of the story.

Many theorists have outlined this changing producer–user relationship. Academic Jay Rosen (2006) coined the phrase ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ over ten years ago. Henry Jenkins (2008) described user participation as being an integral part of what he referred to as ‘the new economy’. The ideal media consumer was ‘active, emotionally engaged, and social networked’, according to Jenkins.

Clay Shirky (2008) said mass media is shaped like a megaphone – content is ‘broadcast’ from a centralised location to a large audience made up of passive receivers of content. A radio show or article in a print newspaper cannot be changed, altered or interacted with by the audience. Social media and mobile technology encourages far more interactive modes of communication. Users switch between creating their own content (photos, videos, etc) and publishing it. They share gossip with their friends and consume content created by mainstream media brands, such as the BBC and CNN, all in a single day.

•Mass media content – viewed by ‘audiences’

•Digital content – engagement and interaction by ‘users’

A shift has taken place from a ‘focus on individual intelligence, where expertise and authority are located in individuals and institutions, to a focus on collective intelligence where expertise and authority are distributed and networked’ (Hermida, 2012).

We have moved from information scarcity in the pre-web days to information oversupply. The fact that social media are global, forever changing and allow anyone to publish, makes understanding them problematic. Journalists today are ‘sense-makers’ – explaining the importance of events to users who are being bombarded by information, much of it of dubious quality.

The relationship business

Facebook has always known it is in the user-relationship business, not the content creation business. It aims to connect people, e.g. groups of friends together or users with advertisers. Facebook doesn’t create much content itself. It likes to leave that bit to its users or content providers. Social media companies often claim to be merely platforms for others people’s content, rather than media publishers.

The journalism business

If you want to annoy a journalist, refer to the news, features and packages she or he produces as ‘content’. Most journalists pride themselves on the fact they will try to ‘break’ stories and influence the public debate. The word ‘content’ suggests they are creating stories solely to fill a space online or to generate advertising revenue, hence the quality of the content really doesn’t matter.

In 1994 the Daily Telegraph was the first UK national newspaper to launch a website – the Electronic Telegraph. Like many newspaper sites back then, it was little more than text and images from one platform – the printed paper – shoved onto to another platform – the web.

The Telegraph is in the journalism business – it invests in news production, employs professional journalists and seeks to ‘break’ exclusive stories. It embodies public sphere journalism much like the BBC, Guardian and The Times. But traditional media – print and broadcast – must also realise that they are now in the online relationship business and must engage at a much deeper level with their users.

Jeff Jarvis, the journalist and academic, has criticised traditional media companies for focusing on counting audiences rather than developing deeper relationships with the communities of interests they serve.

Print publishers cherish their lists of subscribers – the names, addresses and bank details of people who have the publication delivered to their homes. Subscribers are, by definition, the most loyal readers of a publication. Instead of picking up the magazine in a newsagent one month, but perhaps not the next – subscribers get the magazine delivered every week or month.

In fact looking at magazines in pure business terms, the subscriber list, along with a strong brand, are the two most valuable things a print publisher possesses. Sadly over the last 20 years, once loyal readers have become increasingly disloyal. They have cut their magazine subscriptions and have moved to accessing content for free online. But for decades the levels of engagement with print readers has rarely gone beyond collecting names, addresses and bank details.

The relationship business

Clay Shirky (2008) said mass media is shaped conceptually like a megaphone – where content is ‘broadcast’ from a central point. Social media look very different. Social media are ‘horizontal media’ where information is shared person-to-person in a model that appears ‘flat’ and ‘networked’. Journalists and media brands are no longer the centre of attention. With this networked model, journalism content mixes freely with gossip and personal updates. Once the main producer of content to a loyal audience, journalists have been side-lined on social media.

The internet was never just a technology. It always had a social dimension. People sent email (electronic mail) before the invention of the World Wide Web. Ray Tomlinson is commonly thought to have sent the first email in 1971. The World Wide Web, invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, arrived much later in the 1990s.

The post-millennium saw the rapid rise and fall of a series of social media sites. Those with long memories may recall social platforms such as Friendster (launched in 2002), MySpace (2003) and Bebo (2005). One platform that rose to fame and has yet to fall is ‘TheFacebook’, as it was known at launch. Created by Mark Zuckerberg from a dorm room at Harvard in 2004, it incorporated social technology such as email, message boards, direct messaging and group chat into one single platform. What separates Facebook from the social media failures is its focus on the user experience and keeping things simple. This is something we will return to throughout this book.

While traditional media companies like the Telegraph have relationships with their audiences of sorts, it is nothing compared to the vast amounts of user data the social media players collect. This means they can target adverts at specific demographics, based on things like age, gender, location in the world, etc.

As we mentioned at the start of this section, Facebook insists it is not a content publisher. It is a platform that hosts other people’s content and it produces none, or very little, itself.

Journalism is expensive to produce and various external bodies regulate media publishers. In contrast, technology companies work within a lighter regulatory environment. Producing quality journalism can be a lot of hassle and so the tech giants often don’t wish to be involved.

However, traditional media publishers can learn much from tech companies, such as how they can embrace the interactive and the horizontal nature of social media. Some publishers still talk of having ‘readers’ and ‘audiences’ rather than appealing to commu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Mobile and social media journalism – past, present and future
• 1 Understanding the user
• 2 The MoJo skillset
• 3 Fake news and trolling
• 4 Finding the story: Verifying the news
• 5 The art of storytelling
• 6 Visual journalism, video and audio
• 7 Publishing directly to social media
• 8 Publishing news to the Web
• 9 Building news apps
• Index