How will people consume their news and media?
The way people consume their news is changing, the move from reading news through print media to having the news on the go is visibly apparent. Thus traditional media platforms such as, The Times, are moving to online business models without losing the quality and credibility of daily newspaper edition.
The print media industry has already seen a decrease in circulation and readership figures when compared to four years ago, when new media was at its infancy. A recent study by Forbes Insights and Google determined that the “internet has become the chief source of business information” for key decision makers. The survey of 354 top executives found that during work hours 70 per cent of executives prefer to read “traditional” media online rather than in print (30 per cent), and 69 per cent prefer to access “traditional broadcast media” online rather than over the air. This again illustrates the prowess of new media against traditional platforms. Nonetheless the importance of print media has not declined with the circulation and readership figures. Research still outlines the influences that print media have on decisions (Brunswick Review, 2009).
Research into how people consume their media concluded that many people felt addicted to online media and without it felt alone and disconnected. It also uncovered that respondents from their study did not receive their news from branded traditional print media, but from email, texting, Facebook and Twitter (Cass, 2010).
Many admirers of new media praise the impact of social media. Initially the likes of Facebook and Twitter were seen as a platform for mundane individuals who find the need to share details about their lives; the view has now totally changed and many regard social media as the go-to source for breaking news, which allows readers to tap straight into the minds of news makers, writers, gatherers and thought leaders (De Rosa, 2010)
To the question of how people will consume their news and media; many researchers, bloggers and journalists have come to realise the importance of the new media landscape. News and media organisations will look to approach monetisation and content experimentation that is focused on looking at the web in a new way. News in the coming years will blur the lines between audience and creator more than ever in an era of social media. Below is a look at several trends in content distribution and presentation that is likely to occur.
1. Personalised news
News organisations will design stories that are more suited to the way readers consume online content. One early sign of this is the recent collaboration between Google, The New York Times, and The Washington Post on the Living Stories project, an experiment that presents coverage of a specific story or topic in one place, making it easy to navigate the topic and see the timeline of coverage on the story. It also allows one to get a summary of the story and track the conversations taking place. This format contextualises and personalises the news.
2. Real-time news streams
Real-time news is increasingly important and will become an integral part of traditional news sources. Jeff Jarvis, buzzmachine.com media critic predicts these streams will replace web sites. It is already visible with Twitter streams and other visualisations incorporated into news home pages with updated financial and market information from new sources like Google Finance.
3. Blogozines
Blogozines are another format of blogging but with a bit of design, in essence an online magazine, that is an engaging alternative to the traditional blog post. This format is great in keeping readers engaged in long-form stories. Though blogozines will not mark the end of simple blogging but act as an adaptation to the original form.
4. Social news
Last year the social news trend gained momentum with the explosion of Twitter. Organisations will further distribute their content across social platforms that allow its users to create a personalised and socialised news stream. Personalised search has emerged in 2009 which will see more sites integrating applications that allow users to create personalised news streams. News organisations are beginning to establish a presence across multiple platforms and social sites. It is not just the popular sites like Twitter and Facebook anymore, but with platforms like Tumblog, a platform that is good for magazine journalism.
Robert Quigley, social media editor at the Austin American-Statesman, believes news sites will continue to exist for a while, but “smart news sites will extend their tentacles into the spaces where people are communicating, and talking about news.”
5. Mobile news
Already popular amongst smart phone users, mobile news will see a distinct transformation in the way people consume news as smart phones become ubiquitous. More and more news organisations will innovate by making mobile phone apps that will give the users the news they need as well as creating a revenue stream for news organisations. Bill Thompson, a commentator relays, ‘Innovation, not pay walls, the future for media companies, like thousands of people around the world I have just purchased The Guardian app for the iPhone.’
Mobile news also has great potential to increase the number of content consumers, if done in a way where consumers are able to subscribe to sections from different news organisations. Newspapers and publishers need to create a platform where consumers can purchase and manage their own digital subscriptions.
(By Nahidur - August 2010)
Too Big to Fail - Book Review
Reviewed by Nahidur Rahman
Too Big to Fail - Inside the battle to save Wall Street, by Andrew Ross Sorkin, a New York Times chief mergers and acquisitions journalist, is a fascinating story about the collapse of the American and then the global financial markets in 2008. It is a reminder of just how close the worlds banking system came to a total meltdown, when Lehman Brothers crumbled and AIG crashed. The narrative is based on interviews the author conducted during and immediately after the financial crisis. These interviews took near enough 500 hours to conduct amongst 200 major players from the financial world. Along with the interviews, Sorkin managed to obtain documented tapes, notes, presentations, calendars, call logs, and more. The level of detail is nothing short of amazing with a moment-by-moment account of the calamity, which made the story prolonged; yet the author managed to keep things interesting.
Sorkin builds the story of how the financial collapse actually started. He initiates although most people are aware of the meltdown starting in and around September 2008; it actually started much earlier - in the March 2008 when the U.S. government helped Morgan Stanley with the acquisition of Bear Stearns. He manages to discuss the events leading from that time to the eventual collapse. Sorkin describes how Wall Street and Washington were intricately tied together in the collapse and details the level and depth of these ties. Before the story pans out, he enlists his cast of characters which include the likes from the management of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as overseas organisations from countries like Korea and China. The characters also include a whole array of U.S. attorneys, financial and political figures from the U.K., as well as the American Congress, the Federal Reserve, the Department of the Treasury, and the White House to name a few.
A character that pops up quite a few times throughout the read is energetic Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury, who ultimately becomes exhausted as he leaps from crisis to crisis, first trying to influence Dick Fuld to sell the doomed firm - Lehman, then plotting himself into a war with the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and finally, reeling from plan-to-plan to hold everything together but eventually underestimating the whole situation and letting Lehman relinquish itself from the face of the earth. Such is the detailed outlining of Hank Paulson; Sorkin manages to go into pretty much every detail of the key characters in the book. Interestingly, Sorkin even manages to reveal what the people at the top of the international financial institutions think of each other. Hank Paulson describes John Varley, CEO of Barclays, ‘a waffler’ and ‘a weak man’.
The book depicts the greed, the hunger for power, the money, and the lack of financial regulation that led to the financial collapse. Too big to fail clearly manages to convey the egos and decision-making styles of the key figures during the period of the meltdown. Such is an example of the way one of the top bankers use to lead his lifestyle, “Lehmann CEO Dick Fuld's long-time No. 2, Joe Gregory, would helicopter to work each day”.
Sorkins’ writing style is of a novel, which makes the whole financial catastrophe a thriller with page-turning cliff hangers. As a result, readers feel as though they are in the midst of the action. Sorkin recreates intimate conversations and high-level discussions. He manages to get into so much detail and describe pretty much everything in most scenes, much like a Hollywood movie - From what coffee individuals were drinking due a particular meeting to describing a character with the attributes of a ‘Sex and the City’ character.
From a communications perspective, Sorkin does not manage to outlay what PR people did during the whole meltdown. It would have been interesting to know what role communication agencies played during the biggest crisis of the 21st century. On the other hand, as city PR sits in the shadows of what businesses do, it is plausible to think Sorkin did this deliberately.
Despite its’ 600 pages, Too Big To Fail moves along at such a fast pace that even as the reader you feel hard-pressed to stop and think what if this happened or what if that did not happen. While no one can be happy with the way the financial markets tumbled with taxpayers paying hundreds of billions to prop up failed banks and bonus-driven bankers, the narrative at times makes one feel sorry for some the bankers involved and/or those that lost jobs due to the crisis.
Moreover, as a reader with a fair understanding of the financial industry, I do feel that the editing rushed and poorly done, as what was written in 600 pages could have been written in half as much. Another editorial issue with book was the way it was written, a person with no financial knowledge could not understand the story without referring to a financial jargon-buster. I also feel that Sorkin writes with a liberal bias as there were no villains, but a few heroes; even though the story illustrates how interconnected the financial institutions, governments and top banking officials are, despite being rivals. Nonetheless the book is a truly remarkable non-fictional achievement, concerned as it is with politics and international finance. At the end, the reader will be left feeling astonished, amazed and fairly well informed.
Too Big to Fail - Inside the battle to save Wall Street, by Andrew Ross Sorkin, a New York Times chief mergers and acquisitions journalist, is a fascinating story about the collapse of the American and then the global financial markets in 2008. It is a reminder of just how close the worlds banking system came to a total meltdown, when Lehman Brothers crumbled and AIG crashed. The narrative is based on interviews the author conducted during and immediately after the financial crisis. These interviews took near enough 500 hours to conduct amongst 200 major players from the financial world. Along with the interviews, Sorkin managed to obtain documented tapes, notes, presentations, calendars, call logs, and more. The level of detail is nothing short of amazing with a moment-by-moment account of the calamity, which made the story prolonged; yet the author managed to keep things interesting.
Sorkin builds the story of how the financial collapse actually started. He initiates although most people are aware of the meltdown starting in and around September 2008; it actually started much earlier - in the March 2008 when the U.S. government helped Morgan Stanley with the acquisition of Bear Stearns. He manages to discuss the events leading from that time to the eventual collapse. Sorkin describes how Wall Street and Washington were intricately tied together in the collapse and details the level and depth of these ties. Before the story pans out, he enlists his cast of characters which include the likes from the management of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as overseas organisations from countries like Korea and China. The characters also include a whole array of U.S. attorneys, financial and political figures from the U.K., as well as the American Congress, the Federal Reserve, the Department of the Treasury, and the White House to name a few.
A character that pops up quite a few times throughout the read is energetic Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury, who ultimately becomes exhausted as he leaps from crisis to crisis, first trying to influence Dick Fuld to sell the doomed firm - Lehman, then plotting himself into a war with the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and finally, reeling from plan-to-plan to hold everything together but eventually underestimating the whole situation and letting Lehman relinquish itself from the face of the earth. Such is the detailed outlining of Hank Paulson; Sorkin manages to go into pretty much every detail of the key characters in the book. Interestingly, Sorkin even manages to reveal what the people at the top of the international financial institutions think of each other. Hank Paulson describes John Varley, CEO of Barclays, ‘a waffler’ and ‘a weak man’.
The book depicts the greed, the hunger for power, the money, and the lack of financial regulation that led to the financial collapse. Too big to fail clearly manages to convey the egos and decision-making styles of the key figures during the period of the meltdown. Such is an example of the way one of the top bankers use to lead his lifestyle, “Lehmann CEO Dick Fuld's long-time No. 2, Joe Gregory, would helicopter to work each day”.
Sorkins’ writing style is of a novel, which makes the whole financial catastrophe a thriller with page-turning cliff hangers. As a result, readers feel as though they are in the midst of the action. Sorkin recreates intimate conversations and high-level discussions. He manages to get into so much detail and describe pretty much everything in most scenes, much like a Hollywood movie - From what coffee individuals were drinking due a particular meeting to describing a character with the attributes of a ‘Sex and the City’ character.
From a communications perspective, Sorkin does not manage to outlay what PR people did during the whole meltdown. It would have been interesting to know what role communication agencies played during the biggest crisis of the 21st century. On the other hand, as city PR sits in the shadows of what businesses do, it is plausible to think Sorkin did this deliberately.
Despite its’ 600 pages, Too Big To Fail moves along at such a fast pace that even as the reader you feel hard-pressed to stop and think what if this happened or what if that did not happen. While no one can be happy with the way the financial markets tumbled with taxpayers paying hundreds of billions to prop up failed banks and bonus-driven bankers, the narrative at times makes one feel sorry for some the bankers involved and/or those that lost jobs due to the crisis.
Moreover, as a reader with a fair understanding of the financial industry, I do feel that the editing rushed and poorly done, as what was written in 600 pages could have been written in half as much. Another editorial issue with book was the way it was written, a person with no financial knowledge could not understand the story without referring to a financial jargon-buster. I also feel that Sorkin writes with a liberal bias as there were no villains, but a few heroes; even though the story illustrates how interconnected the financial institutions, governments and top banking officials are, despite being rivals. Nonetheless the book is a truly remarkable non-fictional achievement, concerned as it is with politics and international finance. At the end, the reader will be left feeling astonished, amazed and fairly well informed.
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