You’re driving down the highway when a tractor trailer flips. You’re nowhere near the office and your editor is finished for the day. How do you get coverage of this event out to your readers before your competitors? If you have an Android phone, you use the new ScribbleLive app.
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Introducing new Android app
Friday, March 8th, 2013The future of digital and social media in newsrooms
Saturday, October 6th, 2012PEW Research Center has recently published their biennial news consumption survey, looking at trends in news consumption over the last 20 years. One of the most promising trends for digital newsrooms is that their format of news is the only one that has seen growth in the last two decades, with 46% of Americans getting news online at least three times a week. Currently, a third (32%) of US Americans get their news online on a daily basis.
Mobile
A good part of the increase in online news consumption can be attributed to readers accessing online news through mobile and tablet devices. One in five Americans have got their news on a mobile device, 78% of these people did so using a smartphone. News consumption is one of the most popular activities on tablets and mobile.
Social
Consumption of news via social media has also undergone interesting growth. Nearly 1-in-5 Americans saw news headlines on social media, the proportion of people getting news headlines or news regularly from these sources has nearly tripled from 7% to 20%. And it’s not only the very young who use social media to get their news: the number of people in their 40′s getting news from social nearly tripled from 8% to 23%, the number of 50-64 year-old’s doubled from 5% to 10%.
Although those of us who participate in journalism use Twitter frequently, the rest of US adults do not. Only 13% of Americans use Twitter and only 11% of those have ever seen news on Twitter and only 3% saw it yesterday. If we look at the entire population of the US, around 311 million, only 30 million are on Twitter, so only around 3 million US adults have ever seen news on Twitter. This pales in comparison to Facebook, who have a 53% penetration rate of the American public and around 166 million users - according to PEW data 47% of adults get news on Facebook and other social sites – that’s around 78 million people.
Although traditional news sources still dominate how people get their news, digital has seen dramatic growth in the last two decades. There’s been increased growth in the portion of people getting news from social networks. Twitter, however, although very useful for journalists, has a relatively small audience – reaching only 1% of adults from 50-64 year-old’s–compared to digital/online’s reach of 35% of 50-64 year-old’s. This makes twitter a great way to share news among various communities that use the site diligently (including journalists), but not to the general public. Meanwhile a third of Facebook users share news, however 70% of these users report getting those news links from family and friends, only 13% report getting them from news organizations or journalists.
We recommend digital newsrooms focus on gaining traffic and views on their content. Social is a great way to bring those readers in but your website should be the place where readers consume your content. It’s where your organization can monetize through ads and editors can see the levels of engagement through web analytics. An interesting point was made by Dennis Mortensen, co-founder of analytics provider Visual Revenue, in a recent Editor and Published article
“Don’t surrender your wonderful brand to the Facebooks of the world. Extract as much value as you can from those channels, but only with the primary purpose of actually gaining a reader for later. Turn a Tweet into a reader who knows you for who you are, will bypass those channels, and go directly to your front page or tablet/mobile offerings.”
As the sources of news consumption change, newsrooms will have to adjust accordingly and bring news to where their audiences are: online, on social, and on mobile.
Why the world’s media companies use ScribbleLive
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012Note: This is an updated version of a previous blog post, new features and API projects have been added.
Did you know that 90% of ScribbleLive’s direct customers have switched from another live blogging platform? Most of these moved over from Cover it Live. Many people ask us: what sets ScribbleLive apart?
A key part of our differentiation is how our platform has evolved, expanded and improved based on the needs of our customers and our strategic vision of how the real-time content and live-blogging landscape is changing.
Some of the things we’re excited about include:
Custom All Events Pages: If our generic archive page is not cutting it for you, then this new project should get you excited. You can now create a custom list of all your ScribbleLive events. Since the ‘all events’ page is not in real time, we didn’t use Javascript, we used PHP instead. Here is our ScribbleLive API ‘All Events’ project on Google Code.
Event Start Notifier Widget: This is another open source Javascript API widget – the Event Start Notifier. It will notify your readers when an event is about to start. The notifier will slide on to your website (any page or all pages, the choice is up to you), it will link your readers to the event on your white label site. You can style the notifier to match your branding, control the notifier’s location, and allow users to close the notifier if they aren’t interested in the event.
Recent posts API: Our new Recent posts Javascript widget will allow you to minimize bandwidth costs while supplying your readers with the latest news. You can display it on your homepage and include a link to the full event in your white label. Use this widget as a ‘breaking news’ section on your homepage, add it to your mobile app, or create a multi-column view of your event with different types of content in each column.
Multiple Language Support: As we continue to grow, we want to ensure that our language offerings cater to our diverse clientelle. In addition to publishing liveblogs that appear in multiple languages, reporters will be able to choose which language they’d like the backend interface to display in. Languages we currently support: English, Finnish, French, German, Arabic, Japanese, Danish, Spanish, Croatian, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish.
Moderated Writers: The moderated writer is new level of permission is available that’s ideal for cub reporters or anyone with a penchant for typos. The moderated writer will allow full access to log in, type updates, upload photos, video and audio files but the content they produce will not be published until is it approved by a moderator, editor, developer or administrator.
HTML Pages for SEO and monetization: A key advantage ScribbleLive has over competitors is our white label technology, which generates fully indexable web pages in real time, making it easier for search engines to discover your content. Embedded and widget-based platforms such as Cover it Live hide your content, making it difficult for search engines to index it or, even worse, they index it as part of another company’s brand.
Permalinks: Every ScribbleLive post has its own URL. This makes it easy for people to share that content on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites to drive traffic and advertising revenue. Many commenting systems can also be integrated into these pages to provide a threaded discussion of an individual post to complement your content.
Mobile: According to Pew Research, 47% of survey participants get their news from mobile devices. This includes live coverage. ScribbleLive optimizes its liveblogs so no matter the device, your readers can seamlessly interact with your multimedia coverage. ScribbleLive supports all mobile devices through cost-effective mobile skins, as well as API-based integration for mobile devices.
Flexibility: With ScribbleLive, your team can create multimedia content in a variety of ways — via the web, mobile, email, SMS and voicemail. We offer iPhone, Android and BlackBerry apps to support journalists in the field. ScribbleLive’s API also lets clients build custom apps that push out news and updates to readers in real time.
Workflow: ScribbleLive’s industry-leading LiveArticle feature lets multiple reporters create complete articles that update in real time, making it an ideal tool to summarize the events to date in a breaking story. LiveArticle is just one example of how we’re constantly coming up with new ideas to meet and support the needs of newsrooms and digital reporters.
Syndication: ScribbleLive is the standard for major news agencies such as AP, Reuters, EFE, PA and RIA Novosti. No other content platform offers the ability to syndicate news in real time. ScribbleLive’s syndication capabilities let newsrooms lower the cost of producing content by sharing resources and coverage in real time.
For some companies, real-time is an afterthought or a nice-to-have. ScribbleLive is built for journalists and news organizations that recognize real-time coverage is a core part of the future of journalism. If you share our vision, we’d love to share our capabilities with you. Sign up for a free trial or contact us for more information.
Apps help newsrooms embrace mobile journalism
Monday, March 26th, 2012
The iPhone was born in 2007, and immediately became a useful reporting tool. But it wasn’t until Apple released a high-definition video camera in 2010 that it made a real impact on day-to-day newsgathering. Since then, a slew of apps and products have made it a go-to production tool.
ScribbleLive’s iPhone app allows reporters to create live events, publish them on a site, add text, photos, video and audio files, and moderate questions coming in from readers. (We also have BlackBerry and Android apps).
An article on TVNewsCheck.com looks at how media giant Gannett — owner of USA Today, The Arizona Republic and other newspapers and TV stations– has embraced mobile journalism. The company has bought over 1,000 iPhone 4s smartphones for its employees, and have incorporated them in a large way into content production and publishing. Arthur Greenwald writes:
“…Gannett journalists are equipped with two video editing apps, Apple’s iMovie ($4.99) and the more feature-laden Splice, ($3.99.) For transmitting raw or edited footage, Gannett chose the Brightcove Mobile Upload app becauseBrightcove is already Gannett’s platform of choice for its websites. ‘Video goes straight into the playlist to be approved or edited by an editor or straight to consumer,’ says [Gannett’s Director of Digital Content MacKenzie Warren]. For live streaming video, Gannett reporters rely on the free QIK app.”
Check out the rest of the article for a full roundup of apps, add-ons and tools for improving your iPhone reportage.
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