(Rich Gordon)

In the age of mass media (say, the 1980s or early 1990s), a few organizations set the news agenda. A story in The New York Times might be picked up by CBS News or followed by the Washington Post. A story broken on NBC might also get covered in the Wall Street Journal. In a local market, big news would be spread through the community via coverage in the daily paper or on one of the network TV affiliates, or both. Stories deemed less significant by journalists at these news organizations, though, might get little attention or not be covered at all.

A few years later, it's clear that the mass media (newspapers and TV) are no longer as influential as they once were. Their audiences have shrunk and so have their reporting staffs. More importantly, news consumers now have many more choices for finding news -- in addition to traditional sources, they can now read newspapers from all over the world, check what's happening at sites such as Yahoo! News and Google News, subscribe to RSS feeds or news alerts, and receive emailed recommendations from friends. The new digital tools, potentially, help consumers discover news they might otherwise have missed.

For news producers as well as society, these changes in the media landscape raise some important questions:

• Do big, important stories still get the attention they should?
• Can less significant stories find audiences now when they might have been missed before?
• How important are the traditional, mainstream media to getting the news out today?
• If you are a content producer or publisher, what's the best approach to maximizing the audience for your content?

I don't have definitive answers to any of these questions, but two news stories reported by Medill graduate students last year offer some insights that I think are interesting. One story earned public attention largely through distribution by mainstream media. The other attracted an audience largely through blog links -- an increasingly significant vehicle for aggregating audiences. Looking at how the news spread provides a glimpse of the new realities of news distribution and audience attention. (Many thanks to Medill master's student Matt Bigelow, who helped compile the information below.)


About the stories

Last year was the first year of the News21 reporting project, an initiative led by four graduate journalism schools (Medill, Columbia, USC and Berkeley) and funded by the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation. Forty master's students from these schools, plus four from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, were assigned to report in depth on different aspects of the war on terrorism, five years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C

The students produced dozens of interesting stories in a variety of formats -- text, audio, video, slideshows, and interactive presentations. All of the students' journalism was published on the News21 Web site, newsinitiative.org. In addition, the project's coordinators (faculty from the four schools) and Merrill Brown, national editorial director of News 21, worked hard to find traditional media outlets interested in publishing or broadcasting the students' work.

Medill's team focused on privacy and civil liberties. I'm going to look at two of their stories:

1. Studying students: Education Department and FBI scoured millions of student records (Laura McGann): For the past five years an office in the Education Department has scanned through its databases of millions of students' federal financial aid and college enrollment records in search of terrorist names supplied by the FBI. The effort, dubbed "Project Strike Back," was created by the Education Department's Office of Inspector General after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to expand the office's mission to include counterterrorism.
   
   
2. Walt Disney World: The government's Tomorrowland? (Karen Harmel, Laura Spadanuta): Walt Disney World, which bills itself as one of the happiest and most magical places anywhere, also may be one of the most closely watched and secure. And control over park entrances is getting even tighter: the nation's most popular tourist attraction now is beginning to scan visitor fingerprint information.

(You can read the full articles on the News21 Web site, but you may find some odd formatting because the site is in the middle of being redesigned for this year's News21 project.)


How the news spread

Both of these articles are about privacy in the digital age. Both were distributed through the Associated Press and were therefore available to any news organization -- traditional media or Web sites -- that subscribed to the AP. And both were also available on the News21 Web site. But the stories earned public attention through very different means.

"Studying students" spread mostly through the mainstream, traditional media. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and USA Today all assigned staff reporters to do their own versions of these stories. So did the Houston Chronicle, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Seattle Times, Grand Rapids Press, Salt Lake Tribune, and Albany Times-Union. Meanwhile, the wire story was picked up by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, many college papers, and international outlets including Dow Jones International News, the Financial Times, the Irish Times, the Guardian, and the International Herald Tribune.

"Walt Disney World" was largely ignored by the mainstream media. Matt was able to search databases containing archives from 89 of the 100 biggest U.S. papers by circulation. He found only three papers (the Austin American-Statesman, Detroit News, and Fort Worth Star-Telegram) that published the AP-distributed Disney story. No papers assigned their own reporters to the story.

Once published on the Web, both stories got attention -- in the form of links -- from other Web sites, especially blogs. Most of the links to "Studying students" went to the New York Times' version of the story. Relatively few linked to the version on the News21 Web site. By contrast, since the Disney World story was not widely available on traditional news sites, just about all the Web links went to the News21 version.

Which story got the most attention? While there is no way to count all the people who saw these stories in print, online or both, it's clear that "Studying students" earned a much bigger audience. The New York Times graciously provided me with page view data for their version of the "Studying students" story for the day it was published and the next day. In just these two days, the story got almost 70,000 page views. I don't have data from other newspaper Web sites, and no one knows how many readers of these papers' print editions -- or other outlets that published the AP version -- saw the story. But clearly, including print and online readers, "Studying students" drew an audience numbering at least in the hundreds of thousands, if not in the millions.

"Walt Disney World" attracted a much smaller audience, but still a significant one, considering that it was not promoted through mainstream media and the News21 site had a tiny audience before the story was published. Since the article was posted, it has earned more than 15,000 page views on the News21 site. By a wide margin, "Walt Disney World" is the most visited article on the News21 Web site -- with 14 times as many page views as the "Studying students" story has received there.


Why the differences?

Let's try to analyze why these stories had such different patterns of distribution.

The first issue is why "Studying students" was so much more popular among mainstream media. This isn't too hard to see. While both stories broke new ground, by traditional news standards, "Studying students" is a better story:

• It's a matter of civic importance, since it involves actions by the government.
• It's about a program that the government failed to disclose or tried to keep secret.
• The story had an irresistible angle: student journalist uncovers secret government program.

The new fingerprint scanners at Disney World couldn't compare to "Studying students" based on journalistic news values. Disney World had scanned visitors' fingers before, so the new technology (which captures data about fingerprints for the first time) was not entirely new. And while privacy advocates raised questions, Disney was able to present the new scanners as a "technology upgrade" that didn't threaten visitors' privacy. In general, it was a challenge for the Disney reporters to explain why people should care about the new fingerprint scanners.

Still, I would argue that the Disney World story deserved more media attention than it got. Millions of people, after all, pass through the gates of Disney World every year. Even if the Disney story lacked some of the elements present in the "Studying students" story, you would think that fingeprint scanning at Disney World would be a topic of some interest.

And in fact, among the Internet audience, the story did get considerable attention. It's instructive to see where the attention came from. This can be measured by Web site "referrer" logs, which record the external sites where people clicked to arrive at a particular page.

Over the 10 months since the article was published, the top traffic driver is Google, which is typical. Usually Google-driven traffic is the result of a search, for instance, for "Disney fingerprint," which turns up the News21 article as one of the top links. But in the days after the article was first published, the most significant traffic drivers were:

• BoingBoing.net and Engadget.com, two of the most popular technology blogs;
• Netscape.com, where a user saw the BoingBoing post and submitted it in the travel section for other Netscape users to rate and comment on;
• Wikipedia, where a contributor added a link to the page on biometrics;
• Iranian.com, which describes itself as "the largest online community for Iranians residing in North America";
• Themeparkinsider.com, a site for devotees of theme parks, which is run by Robert Niles, editor of OJR.org and an adviser to the News21 students at USC.

So the Disney story generated interest among editors or content contributors at sites devoted to (1) technology; (2) travel; (3) biometrics; (4) Iranian residents in the United States; and (5) fans of theme parks. I think this is a good illustration of the way the Internet enables niche audiences to aggregate based on topical relevance -- and of the importance of niche audiences in generating online traffic.


'Long Tail' connections

These two articles also illustrate the "Long Tail" phenomenon that Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson wrote a book about and continues to cover on his blog. From his site, here's Anderson's premise:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

The Disney story, under this framework, is classic "Long Tail" content. In his blog, Anderson points out that content in the tail can't be found without good recommendation tools -- people or software that invidual users trust to connect them to relevant content among "what would otherwise be a bewildering array of choices." Sites like BoingBoing and Iranian.com fit that description nicely.

So here's a stab at some lessons from the two News21 stories:

• Journalists still play a critical function in identifying stories important for citizens to be aware of.
• To maximize the audience for any particular news story, both traditional media and new media are important.
• Because mass media journalists must make news judgment decisions based on limited space or air time, they inevitably (and sometimes mistakenly) bypass stories that appeal primarily to niche audiences.
• Attention is aggregated differently on the Internet than in traditional media -- blogs and other Web sites with niche audiences are critical to driving traffic to Internet content.

By Rich Gordon (richgor@northwestern.edu)
Rich Gordon is Associate Professor and Director of Digital Technology in Education at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University.

Thanks, Alice. That's a really good point, and one I hadn't considered.

It does mean, unfortunately, that unless you pick up print editions (or microfilm), it's impossible to track the pickup of wire stories through newspapers ... unless someone has another idea?

Rich Gordon

Posted by  richgor at July 5, 2007 9:21 PM

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