State of the Media: In which category is your site?
Steve Safran March 12th, 2007
I’ve been going through the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the Media 2007 report. It takes some time and it’s well worth the commitment. Of interest is how they break down the 38 media outlets whose websites they studied. The PEJ came up with five groupings, The PEJ came up with five groupings, and it’s worth asking yourself into which category your own site may fall.
The High Achievers: “Only a few of the sites studied excelled across more than two of the content areas we studied. They might be called High Achievers, sites that scored in the highest possible tier for at least three of the five content areas.” CBS, Washington Post, BBC and Global Voices took this. Why? Original content for one. All the customization features, video bells and social network 2.0 whistles don’t mean much without original content.
The Original Brand Crowd: Sites that promote their own original content above all. (Note that this doesn’t always mean original online-only content.) The emphasis is on the branded content. Here, 16 of the 38 sites are grouped.
“Us and You”: another grouping, this combines branded content with the ability for users to interact. What places them here is their willingness to give up agenda-setting and let users decide what they consider important. These include Time magazine and National Public Radio, the online-only site Slate, a local TV station (King5 TV in Seattle) and Daily Kos, a liberal political blog.
BTW - Let’s hear it for Cory and KING5. Show some LR Love.
Jacks of All Trades: Pew put six of the 38 sites into this category. They form “…a group that does not excel at one thing but tried to manage most or all of the categories. They may produce some original content, but don’t stand out for doing so.” In this group you’ll find: Yahoo, USA Today, CBS 11 TV, in Dallas, MSNBC, CNN, and Crooks and Liars.
User-Centric: Self-explanatory. Six sites where the emphasis is on “letting the user control the material.” Digg, Topix, AOL News, Fox News, WTOP and “Benicia, a local news site in Benicia Calif., which relies heavily on bloggers.”
2 Comments Add your own
1. Jason | March 13th, 2007 at 7:48 am
I find the whole original content issue to be tricky. The time I spend rewriting my news stories for the web tells me that I’m producing “original” content. Often that content posts before the TV story, sometimes after the story airs. Fewer people are watching our TV products. Doesn’t it make sense to put that product on-line?
Of course, in the “jack of all trade” type of website (mine is one of those), it’s hard to find the original content being created (blogs, videoblogs, slideshows, etc.).
If “original” content means crappy stories that don’t even come close to making the cut to go on TV, what’s the point?
2. Jason Salas | March 15th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
…but getting back to the point of the post, I’d hope that our work at KUAM would be in the High Achievers category. We make a ton of content available through a plethora of channels.
(A guy can dream in lieu of hard data, right?)
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