Research Summary

Read a sample from "Paid content: coming of age"

Just two years after being dismissed as a failed strategy, paid online content modules have become a full blown movement.

While pundits and the public watched to see how the New York Times’ model would be received, the rest of the industry wasn’t waiting.

Three-fourth of residents (74%) in small cities and towns in the United States read a local newspaper ranging from 1 day to 7 days a week; majority of the readers (81%) relied on the newspapers for local news and information, according to the 2011 Community Newspaper Readership Study conducted by The Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) on behalf of National Newspaper Association (NNA) in August and October 2011.

Historically, when a newspaper ceased publication, the photographs, clippings and bound volumes were handed off to the local historical society or public library. They sat there, and many continue to sit there, until the organization decided what to do with them.

Download David Cohn's latest research about community-funded reporting.

We practice journalism in changing times. In 2008, David Cohn received a grant from the Knight News Challenge to build Spot.Us, a site to pioneer “communityfunded reporting,” or the crowdfunding of journalism. We define crowdfunding as “the collective cooperation, attention and trust of people who network and pool their money and resources, usually via the Internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations.” Then we define crowdsourcing as “the act of delegating tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people (the crowd), through an open call.” Basically, crowdfunding is a type of crowdsourcing.

Full report available for download

Reporters at U.S. daily newspapers routinely turn to local, state and federal government websites to hunt for data that they can use in their stories, a recent survey by the Reynolds Journalism Institute found.

Overall, the reporters contacted said that they looked for data on the government sites three to four days a week and were generally successful in finding what they needed. However, many of the 600 reporters surveyed by the Center for Advanced Social Research (CASR) at the Missouri School of Journalism said they found information that was outdated, poorly documented or incomplete.

By Ambarish Chandra, Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia, Sauder School of Business, Strategy and Business Economics Divison

By Shrihari Sridhar, Assitant Professor Marketing Department, Broad School of Business Michigan State University

By Steve Wildman, James H. Quello Professor of Telecommunications Studies

Director, Quello Center for Telecommunication Management and Law Michigan State Univeristy

Editors see engagement as part of good business. Over and over in the open-ended responses, they said connecting with and listening to their communities is vital to their newspapers’ survival. That said, they don’t know how to fit it in.

Communication Markets Lecture Series
Spring Semester, 2011
Sponsored by Mizzou Advantage and the Reynolds Journalism Institute

Consistent with the findings in the past, the 2010 annual readership survey revealed that 73 percent of small-town readers read local papers. Most of the readers (94%) pay for their papers and more than two-thirds (78%) of respondents read most to all contents of their papers.

The 2010 Community Newspaper Readership Study on behalf of the National Newspaper Association showed that residents in small towns across America read ads on local newspapers more than those on television, radio and the Internet. Similar to the findings about editorial contents, local newspapers were also the primary source of information for small-town residents to makepurchasing decisions.

The results show that suburban/community newspapers are important, valuable, and informative to residents of suburbs. Click for more detailed findings.

The Media Choice Model is a research project that analyzes the ways the public consumes news. Who is getting their news on television verses reading a newspaper versus going online? The model was designed to look at different groupings of people and their different news use patterns. If you want to cater to a specific group, a news organization can look at different patterns of news use and find out how that group consumes news.

The research looks at how the impact of increased attention from the media interacts with school curriculum to get kids engaged and interested in politics. The media will produce actual news stories on what the teens are doing to get involved and the stories will air on television, online, and in the newspaper. The researchers hope that will draw attention from the students and parents (who will be seeing themselves on TV and in the newspaper) to want to participate in the study, and eventually become more engaged citizens long-term.

Would contextual advertising damage the credibility of online news sites? Would it harm the credibility of advertisers? Would readers even notice it? And if they do, what would they think of it?

RJI has sponsored KOMU-TV’s first of two viewer surveys (400 samples in the Columbia-Jefferson City television market; half a million homes). This survey established a baseline on the issues of viewer recognition of Your View and on the viewers’ sense of credibility of the news. We will conduct a second survey in late 2009 to measure change -- hopefully an increase in recognition and credibility relating to Your View. The Your View viewer ombudsperson project was presented at the 2009 Radio-Television News Directors Association conference at the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention in April.

With more people and newspapers moving online, is journalism getting better in today’s multimedia news environment? How do journalists feel about the impact of the growing prevalence of the Internet and continuous news desk on their editorial products? How are various newsrooms handling the pressure associated with 24/7 news cycle?

Researchers presented a resource optimization model that publishers can use to measure whether they are investing too much, too little, or the right amount among news, advertising, and distribution departments for maximum revenue and profits.