Media seek 'emotional engagement' of audiences

Sylvia Chan-Olmsted is one of the leading scholars of media economics, and she stopped by the University of Navarra Dec. 13 to chat about some of the trends she is seeing in the industry.

"Media companies need to translate data into intelligence."

Chan-Olmsted, a professor at the University of Florida, singled out three trends:

1. There is a new value chain in media. Content is becoming "unbundled", meaning users can buy individual movies, TV shows, or songs without having to pay for products they don't want. 

Content is becoming crowd-sourced, meaning that consumers are recommending things to each other through social media.

And the major media companies are harnessing their data about users to recommend media products and even create content based on their customers' tastes.

Media platforms like YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Hulu, and Facebook are all starting to invest billions of dollars in original content to challenge Netflix, whose business model has disrupted the movie studios, TV networks, and cable services.

Police blotter brings in $100k for Montana newspaper

Versión en español aquí.

Who would have thought that a small-town newspaper could discover a new revenue source worth $100,000 by repackaging some of its content?

As the Wall Street Journal reports, a local best-selling book in a Montana town is "We Don't Make This Stuff Up: The Very Best of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle Police Reports."

Editors have always known of the public's interest in police news and the human dramas and comedies that law enforcement officers witness on a daily basis. But the Daily Chronicle decided to go a step beyond publishing the daily news and compile the most interesting items into a book.

Good data is worth more than a thousand words

Versión en español aquí.

An in-depth analysis of the most popular contents on your website can produce some  surprises and yield some financial benefits.

I was recently advising the editor of a small newspaper whose website was not generating the desired traffic. We dug into the content section of Google Analytics to see what was popular with users. The consistent favorite was the town’s bus schedules.