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This chapter will cover:
ā¢The relationship business
ā¢What is social media?
ā¢Status in the community
ā¢Isnāt all news social?
ā¢Smartphone addiction
ā¢Mobile and social media ā two sides of the same coin
ā¢Personalised, portable, social and always on
ā¢Mapping the mobile and social media landscape
ā¢Mobile wars
ā¢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 āreadersā, then mobile websites and apps have āusersā. Analytics software is used to collect data on a websiteās 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 āreachā on social media) is one thing, but a user interaction with content is better. āEngagementā is used to measure the number of shares, comments or other interactions with our journalism content on social media. We can also measure ādwell timeā ā 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 isnāt 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 PokĆ©mon Go.
We use the term āuserā rather than āaudienceā 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 āchildā and we, the journalist, as a āparentā who is āteachingā the children what they need to know about the world. In fact the classic advice for feature writers is often āshow, donāt tellā ā 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 producerāuser relationship. Academic Jay Rosen (2006) coined the phrase āthe people formerly known as the audienceā over ten years ago. Henry Jenkins (2008) described user participation as being an integral part of what he referred to as āthe new economyā. The ideal media consumer was āactive, emotionally engaged, and social networkedā, according to Jenkins.
Clay Shirky (2008) said mass media is shaped like a megaphone ā content is ābroadcastā 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.
ā¢Mass media content ā viewed by āaudiencesā
ā¢Digital content ā engagement and interaction by āusersā
A shift has taken place from a āfocus 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 networkedā (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 āsense-makersā ā 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 doesnāt 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 peopleās 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 ācontentā. Most journalists pride themselves on the fact they will try to ābreakā stories and influence the public debate. The word ācontentā suggests they are creating stories solely to fill a space online or to generate advertising revenue, hence the quality of the content really doesnāt matter.
In 1994 the Daily Telegraph was the first UK national newspaper to launch a website ā the Electronic Telegraph. Like many newspaper sites back then, it was little more than text and images from one platform ā the printed paper ā shoved onto to another platform ā the web.
The Telegraph is in the journalism business ā it invests in news production, employs professional journalists and seeks to ābreakā exclusive stories. It embodies public sphere journalism much like the BBC, Guardian and The Times. But traditional media ā print and broadcast ā 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 ā 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 ā 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 ā where content is ābroadcastā from a central point. Social media look very different. Social media are āhorizontal mediaā where information is shared person-to-person in a model that appears āflatā and ānetworkedā. 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 āTheFacebookā, 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 peopleās 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 donāt 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 āreadersā and āaudiencesā rather than appealing to commu...
