Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The last year has turned the United States into a country of information addicts who compulsively check the television, the smartphone and the good old-fashioned newspaper with a burning question: What fresh twist could our national election drama and its executive producer, Donald J. Trump, possibly have in store for us now?

No doubt about it: Campaign 2016 has been a smash hit.

And to the news media have gone the spoils. With Mr. Trump providing must-see TV theatrics, cable news has drawn record audiences. Newspapers have reached online readership highs that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

On Wednesday comes the reckoning.

The election news bubble that’s about to pop has blocked from plain view the expanding financial sinkhole at the center of the paper-and-ink branch of the news industry, which has recently seen a print advertising plunge that was “much more precipitous, to be honest with you, than anybody expected a year or so ago,” as The Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerard Baker told me on Friday....

Try to imagine getting the latest news by chatbot?

If you can think it, you can ask for breaking news from CNN using Amazon Echo.

That’s right. It’s the latest news brought to you by CNN chatbot.

CNN launches chatbot news

CNN has done a great job of delivering the news on TV and new social media channels. In fact, it has a 40-person dedicated digital team ready to deliver chatbot news according to a Lost Remote post by Max Willens:...

In August, Washington Post Managing Editor Cameron Barr and his fellow senior editors decided to do something about a problem that had been niggling at them for some time:

Articles were becoming too long, often for no good reason.

"We were seeing too many pieces that were in the mid-range of their ambition and their success — coming in at 60, 70 inches of copy," Barr said. "We were seeing the same thing in a number of blogs, where pieces were just too long, and we felt as though editors were not applying the necessary discipline and rigor in how these pieces were being handled on the desk."

The solution? A newsroom-wide initiative to cut down on editorial flab, Barr said. Since the middle of August, he's asked Post's department heads to take responsibility for articles longer than 1,500 words online or 50 inches in print. Bylines, captions, headlines and subheadings don't count....

WBetween 1999 and May 2015, newspapers eliminated their paywalls 69 times, according to a study out this week by University of Southern California professor Mike Ananny and USC Ph.D. candidate Leila Bighash. (The authors say they came to this figure by finding public mentions of the decisions to drop paywalls, so they admit that their analysis could miss some of the times newspapers changed how they charge for online access.)

The decision to drop a paywall can provide insight into how a news organization’s “values intersect with its commodification strategy, its technology design, and its brand identity” as outlets of all stripes are still deciding how much their reporting should cost:

Whatever the motivations and mechanisms, when news organizations drop, suspend, or otherwise open up their paywalls, they change the commodification of online news. Content that was previously considered valuable enough to charge for becomes free because, for the different reasons described here, news organizations think it should circulate freely. The commercial press sometimes, briefly, looks similar to a public service broadcaster, providing access to all (albeit still with advertising).

Of the 69 instances paywalls were dropped or eliminated, there were 41 times that news outlets dropped them only temporarily; the other 28 times, papers made the decision to permanently reduce or eliminate them. Ananny and Bighash were able to categorize these changes in paywall strategy into six different scenarios.Here are the reasons why publishers drop their paywalls, according to the study....

A new Pew Research Center survey finds that, for the most part, the large majority of Americans do not feel that information overload is a problem for them. Some 20% say they feel overloaded by information, a decline from the 27% figure from a decade ago, while 77% say they like having so much information at their fingertips.

Two-thirds (67%) say that having more information at their disposals actually helps to simplify their lives.

The survey shows that most Americans are comfortable with their abilities to cope with information flows in their day-to-day lives. Moreover, those who own more devices are also the ones who feel more on top of the data and media flows in their lives.

Those who are more likely to feel information overload have less technology and are poorer, less well-educated and older....

Since Election Day, President-elect Donald J. Trump has proposed a U-turn in American diplomatic relations with Cuba, boasted about negotiations with a major manufacturer, trumpeted false claims about millions of illegal votes and hinted that he might upend current free speech laws by banning flag burning.

All in 140 characters or less.

As news organizations grapple with covering a commander in chief unlike any other, Mr. Trump’s Twitter account — a bully pulpit, propaganda weapon and attention magnet all rolled into one — has quickly emerged as a fresh journalistic challenge and a source of lively debate.

How to cover a president’s pronouncements when they are both provocative and maddeningly vague? Does an early-morning tweet amount to a planned shift in American policy? Should news outlets, as some readers argue, ignore clearly untrue tweets, rather than amplify falsehoods further?...

Since Tuesday’s election, there’s been a lot of finger pointing, and many of those fingers are pointing at Facebook, arguing that their newsfeed algorithms played a major role in spreading misinformation and magnifying polarization.

Some of the articles are thoughtful in their criticism, others thoughtful in their defense of Facebook, while others are full of the very misinformation and polarization that they hope will get them to the top of everyone’s newsfeed. But all of them seem to me to make a fundamental error in how they are thinking about media in the age of algorithms.

Consider Jessica Lessin’s argument in The Information:

"I am deeply, deeply worried about the calls I am hearing, from journalists and friends, for Facebook to intervene and accept responsibility for ensuring citizens are well-informed and getting a balanced perspective….

Facebook promoting trustworthiness sounds great. Who isn’t in favor of accepting responsibility and ferreting out misinformation? But major moves on Facebook’s part to mediate good information from bad information would put the company in the impossible position of having to determine “truth,” which seems far more objective than it really is. Moreover, it would be bad for society.”

My response: Facebook crossed this river long ago. Once they got into the business of curating the newsfeed rather than simply treating it as a timeline, they put themselves in the position of mediating what people are going to see. They became a gatekeeper and a guide. This is not an impossible position. It’s their job. So they’d better make a priority of being good at it....

At the recent Dell-EMC World event, Dell’s global communications director said that a growing number of people who used to identify themselves as journalists or analysts are identifying themselves as “social influencers.” She said that this digital transformation was happening before our eyes, right in the press room. Of the 300 press representatives attending the event, nearly 60 also identified themselves as social influencers.

I wondered about this. There has been a steep decline in journalism jobs, and presumably a rise in “social influence” jobs (although I have not seen any real statistics on this). Are social influencers taking on the role of journalists, or replacing this function in some way? And on the flip side, why would journalists need to become “influencers?”...

Pew Research tracks all kinds of media data but two recent facts stand out:

Only 18% of the public have “A lot” of trust in the information provided by “national news organizations.”

Understandably, only 4% of the public have “A lot” of trust in the information provided by social media.

Media credibility will continue to drop like a hot potato from the top of Trump Tower....

Election night is the time when everyone has CNN on. We’re the place to go for TV and digital, and we also want to be the place to go on social. We’re working on that, and we have a lot of fun things planned for election night.

We’re going to be very conscious of reaching our audiences across Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter. But we’re also going to live up to the CNN standard. We will work together as a multi-platform media company to make the calls at the right time.

We saw this play out in the primaries, where we made the calls across TV, digital and social at the exact same time. So we work together as a unit to make sure as a network, we make that call in unison. The same will happen on election night. All of social and digital and TV will be working to make sure there’s a crescendo of results as they happen....