AG on New Media

The Pew Research Center for People and The Press’ study of the effects of the Internet on newspaper readership had two particularly interesting parts. First, users do not cite the medium’s multimedia capabilities as a reason for getting news online. Second is the importance of search for online news consumers.

Though the Web has tremendous multimedia capabilities, users don’t list it as “what sets internet news apart.” (26) In fact, only 2 percent listed it as a unique feature of the medium, though the answers were coded from open-ended, not prompted, responses. This is particularly interesting to the New Media journalist. Though there has recently been a major push to make multimedia journalism online better, perhaps some of that effort has been put in the wrong place. Readers instead reference other features of the web as more important, such as the ability to “‘read several opinions,’ compare different sources,’ and get a variety of perspectives’ online.” (26) Perhaps this indicates that some effort should be put into new projects like the New York Times’ MyTimes initiative, which helps collect the best information from around the Web, regardless of its source.

Another thing that readers do cite as key for the medium is search. “Nearly three quarters of all internet users (74%) say they have used a search engine,” (17) to find news that is of personal interest to them. Moreover, about the same number (76%) say they “bump into” news stories online when doing searches for information, even if not explicitly looking for news. The centrality of search also presents serious questions for multimedia journalists. Current search technology is wholly text based. If people are coming to news content increasingly via search, they are missing out on many excellent multimedia packages. Optimizing multimedia content for search is not an easy task, but must be done. Perhaps one methodology would be to include a full transcript of a voiceover in the metadata of any page with a flash movie in it.

Essentially, the tendency of users to rely on search to bring them the specific content they’re interested in presents fundamental questions about the value of multimedia journalism. Obviously, people do care about rich Web sites – if offered a plain text one and one filled with color and flash video, I’d guess many would choose the latter – but they use Internet news for something more than multimedia. Publishers ought consider the current value they are generated from multimedia journalism and should consider methodologies to optimize multimedia content for search.