Will news consumption preferences change media crisis coverage?

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Bob Rehak

In 2004, Stuart Fischoff, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychology, California State University, Los Angeles, published a poignant essay entitled Media Crisis Coverage: To Serve and to Scare. It was published in the Journal of Media Psychology.

Professor Fishoff examines what he calls the “dysfunctional partnership between the media and the public in our increasingly media-centric lives.” He describes the intimate, adrenaline-fueled dance between viewers and producers of television crisis coverage and observes:

“The thin line between gut-wrenching, vital information and a news-sponsored horror show begins its fade to oblivion.”

In 2001, days after 9/11, a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project titled How Americans Used the Internet After the Terror Attack found that 81% of all Americans said they got most of their information from TV; only 3% of Internet users got most of their information about the attacks from the Internet.”

In his essay Media Crisis Coverage, Fischoff observed:

“During a crisis, many viewers, particularly those with 24-hour cable news shows, seek out the constant drumbeat of news coverage to stay informed and reduce the stress that accompanies uncertainty. But watching hours of crisis coverage footage can often have the opposite effect. Visual images go directly to the most primitive parts of our psyche, pushing all the fear buttons. Anxiety is elevated. People watch in order to calm themselves. The more they watch, the more they want to watch because the more anxious they feel. And the cycle continues.”

To reduce the psychological trauma and anxiety of being drawn into news/horror shows, Fischoff made a number of recommendations. One had to do with the size of the screen that viewers used to watch crisis coverage.

“Shrink the size of the image,” said Fischoff. “Here is another example of when size matters: According to Detenber (1996), size is important to emotional response. It is important to babies in perceiving others, and to adults when watching a movie in a theater. Image size positively affects the arousal and dominance dimensions of emotional responses. Size is a primitive heuristic (in animals, for example, who is prey and who is predator, or who is too powerful to safely take on) that influences a range of judgments. Films seen as large images on a screen elicit stronger feelings of arousal than the same films when viewed on small screens disbursing small images.”

After reading this essay, I began to wonder about two things:

Will the trend toward getting news from the Internet, especially via smartphones and tablets, reduce the traumatic stress that people feel when viewing crisis coverage? Their screens are much smaller than televisions’ (70″ LED screens seem to be the current norm for new TVs).
In times of real crises, such as 9/11, will people revert back to getting news from TV because of the “quality” of coverage it presents?

Fast forward ten years. By 2011, Pew found that “The internet now trails only television among American adults as a destination for news, and the trend line shows the gap closing.” The report also found that in December 2010, 41% of Americans cited the internet as the place where they got “most of their news about national and international issues,” up 17% from a year earlier.

Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project

My Take

Current Internet news coverage fundamentally differs from television news coverage. It tends to be more text than video focused, although this is beginning to change with increases in bandwidth. The comparative lack of video and sound remove much of the visceral “you-are-there” impact of crisis coverage. And if digital coverage becomes too repetitive, i.e., with endless reruns of the Twin Towers falling, viewers can easily switch “channels” or topics. The Internet offers millions of URL’s to choose from.

I suspect that the shift to digital news consumption will have a psychologically mitigating effect on consumers. I also suspect, for television producers, the real horror show will be their bottom line.

Interactive Media Creating a “Pull” Economy

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Bob Rehak

Compared to printed media, online publications offer several powerful draws.

Lower costs of publication
Lower cost of consumption
Interactivity
Choice/variety (an infinite number of channels)

These appeals are causing a far-reaching shift from a “push” to a “pull” information economy. The decline in ad revenues for printed newspapers and magazines is a barometer of this change. People report spending less time with traditional mass media while spending more on interactive media which enables them to find exactly what they want, not only in terms of information, but also in terms of products and services.

People can now find what they want
instead of what someone else wants them to want

As a consequence everything we consume is increasingly customized. A shift to computer-aided manufacturing is creating the ability to mass-customize goods and services. The technology of manufacturing and the technology of communication are converging in a way that allows manufacturers with unique capabilities and consumers with unique desires to find and collaborate with each other.

Push vs. Pull in the Marketplace:
The Changing Balance of Power

As a result, we’re seeing a steady shift in information/goods/services being pulled through the economy by consumers rather than pushed by publishers and manufacturers.

The “push economy” characterized by mass production in the last century anticipated consumer demand. The “pull economy” reacts to it. Small niches of consumers once dismissed by sellers are a growing market force.

You can see this trend in everything from micro-breweries to built-to-order cars and computers, personal publishing, user configurable software, customized clothing and more.

You can hear this trend in everyday language – “me” is replacing “we.” Intellectual freedom is replacing group-think. People still want to identify with groups; they just don’t want to lose their individuality in the process. Interactivity empowers them. It’s no longer about being part of the machine. It’s about controlling the machine.

Anticipating Demand vs. Collaborating with Customers

Marketing today is still about creating products and services that fit into people lives. The shift is from anticipation to collaboration. Instead of trying to guess what the largest number of people want, marketers need to be agile enough to collaborate with customers to create what each wants on demand.

Media Proliferation, Creativity and Change

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Bob Rehak

Today, I’d like to talk about how media proliferation affects creativity – specifically, how media proliferation has increased the availability of information which fuels creativity. This creativity can, in turn, foster change which fosters more media proliferation – forming a continuous feedback loop that leads to exponential growth in the rate of change.

Model for the Creative Process

Perhaps the best book ever written on creativity, The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler, describes a model for how new ideas come into being. Koestler called this process bisociation. Bisociation occurs when two previously unrelated planes of thought suddenly intersect. In his book, Koestler gives us hundreds of examples of how this process worked for the most creative people in history.

The geometric plane below represents the beginning of a creative person’s search for solutions. He/she explores what they already know looking for answers. However, the answers they find will, by definition, be expected and not creative.

However, this exercise serves a purpose. It eliminates expected solutions and prepares the subconscious for the moment of inspiration. Koestler visualizes what some people call the “Aha” or “Eureka” moment as the sudden bisociation of a new plane of thought.

Sudden Bisociation of Previously Unrelated Thoughts

Bisociation usually happens at times when we allow our thoughts to stray after a frustrating search of known solutions – as when browsing through a library, walking past a shop window, flipping channels, or singing in a shower. A chance encounter, a fleeting thought, a random comment, or an unexpected experience suddenly connects two previously unrelated planes of thought.

Without first having wandered through the wilderness of known solutions, the mind would never recognize the solution as the solution. The mind would see it as just another in a long stream of random, unrelated ideas.

This model works in a wide variety of creative endeavors – from the arts to comedy and even science. My experience agrees with Koestler’s. Several things increase the chances of creative success:

Tightly defining the problem/issue
Thoroughly embedding it in the subconscious mind by exhaustively searching for solutions
Stepping away from problem
Voraciously consuming information on other topics

The more we know and the more we experience, the greater the chances for bisociation. Said another way, “Chance favors the prepared and well-stocked mind.”

Media Proliferation Fuels Creativity

This brings us back to media proliferation. Today, more information surrounds more people than at any other time in history. Newspapers, bookstores, radio, TV, libraries, and the Internet bring the world to us through computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and more. We swim in information every day.

Media proliferation fuels creativity by increasing the chances for bisociation of ideas. It’s no accident that an exponential increase in information availability has coincided with a geometric increase in change. Each fertilizes the other in a continuous loop.

Now pardon me while I focus on some business issues and then let my mind wander.

Communities Now Defined by Interests as Much as Geography

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Bob Rehak

We live in a transitional age. Perhaps for the first time in human history, communities are now defined as much by interests as they are by geography.

Of course, interest groups existed before digital media. Scientists, clergy, physicians, industrialists, government leaders and other elites formed interest groups that transcended local communities. But for the average person, communities were defined by geography, or at least had roots in geography. Cultures, customs, dress, sports, taxes, voting, language, transportation, markets and more all depended on “where.”

We identified ourselves by city, state and (more recently) country. Survival and civilization depended on binding ourselves together with those physically close to us. Usually, the first questions asked after meeting someone were:

Where are you from?
Where do you live?
Where do you work?

But the advent of the Internet began to change that. Now the first question asked is likely to be: What are you interested in?

The rapid rise of electronic forums, special interest groups, chat-rooms, social networks, dating sites, and more enabled people to reach out to others around the world who shared unique interests – regardless of geography.

Shared interests form a more powerful bond than mere proximity.

I have a reclusive neighbor that I’ve seen twice in twenty years. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I would recognize him if I met him on the street. However, I correspond daily with people all over the world who share my interests. I have more fun with them than most of my neighbors. I have deeper discussions. I feel for them. I share their pain in the same way that members of a church support each other in times of need.

Rather rapidly, humans are beginning to re-align themselves. Interests can now easily transcend geographic boundaries. We can easily reach out to like minded people on almost any topic, regardless of where they live in the world. The implications for government are profound.

Individuals who share narrow or unique interests can quickly find each other, form groups and gain recognition. This could have a splintering effect on political systems.
Those dissatisfied with unjust regimes can coordinate large protests and even bring down governments, as we have recently seen in Africa and the Middle East.
More people are becoming world citizens with global awareness. Nation states could be replaced by something larger, just as city states were replaced hundreds of years ago by nation states.
An electoral process based on geographic representation could become obsolete.

Should we apportion congressional seats on a non-geographic basis to ensure representation for gays, pacifists, and a woman’s right to choose?

This idea seems far-fetched, but 50 years ago, so did the idea of gerrymandering congressional and city council districts to ensure representation for Blacks and Latinos. Thanks to the awareness brought about by mass media, we’re already apportioning representatives according to interests, not just geography, on a limited basis. How much further will this trend go with digital media?

Ramifications of Decline of Trust in Media

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Bob Rehak

Journalists have historically performed a watchdog function over the three main branches of government. The executive, judicial and legislative branches check the power of each other. Journalists watch over them all on behalf of the public and provide an additional check … or so the theory goes.

A 2012 poll by Gallup, Media Use and Evaluation, showed that trust and confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, fairly and accurately has reached an all time low. It peaked in 1976, the year after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency following the Washington Post investigation into the Watergate Scandal, but as the Gallup chart below shows, trust has been declining since then.

Gallup concluded:

“This is particularly consequential at a time when Americans need to rely on the media to learn about the platforms and perspectives of the two candidates vying to lead the country for the next four years.”

“Americans’ high level of distrust in the media poses a challenge to democracy and to creating a fully engaged citizenry. Media sources must clearly do more to earn the trust of Americans, the majority of whom see the media as biased one way or the other.”

In this second, separate survey that you can see by following the link above, Gallup also found that 60 percent of Americans see the media as biased, with 47% saying the media are too liberal and 13% saying they are too conservative. Republicans trust news media least, but curiously, Gallup found that they pay the most attention to national news.

My Take

For the moment, the lack of trust in news media seems to have caused people to become more vigilant rather than less engaged. However, one wonders when the switch will flip.

When people start to tune out, we are on the most slippery of slopes. We will lose the ultimate check-and-balance in society – an informed electorate.

When Smartphones Undermine Essential Business Skills

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Bob Rehak

Adults have been complaining about the decline of arithmetic skills since students began relying on pocket calculators in the 1970s. When personal computers became widely adopted in the 1980s, they complained that keyboards contributed to the loss of handwriting skills. Then in the 1990s, when spell- and grammar-checkers become popular, people complained about the demise of spelling and proofreading skills.

Smartphones contain all of the tools above plus many others. Since 2000, smartphones have become so ubiquitous, even among young children, that they are affecting the way we conduct business.

The Big Questions

Despite their undeniable benefits, do smartphones sometimes undermine essential business skills? If so, how?

The Dumb Side of Smartphones

I recently asked a group of business owners and academics this question and got an earful. Below is a small sample of their answers.

A librarian told me students are so addicted to Internet browsers and search engines that they are not learning how to use libraries. She worries that this blocks them from using knowledge accumulated before the digital age and from using current information that may not be online.
A restaurant owner complained that her cooks were having trouble reading orders placed by young waiters and waitresses who had better texting than writing skills.
A retailer complained that his clerks were so dependent on the calculators on smartphones that they could not make accurate change unless the cash register told them what to give back.
A pharmacist complained that his younger employees could no longer visualize quantities associated with prescriptions because they could no longer do simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in their heads.
A store manager complained that over-reliance on calculators (which express quantities solely in terms of numbers) blinded young people to other ways of expressing numeric values. He overheard a customer ask one of his employees for a dozen eggs. The employee said, “We don’t have a dozen. We only sell cartons of 6 or 12.”
A delivery-service owner told me about an employee who relied on his cell phone’s turn-by-turn navigation. When the phone’s battery went dead, the employee wound up on the wrong side of town even though he had a key map.
A physician was late filing urgent pathology reports because her transcriptionist couldn’t access her medical spell-checker during a system changeover.
An owner of a service company complained that clients rarely answered phone calls anymore. They replied to questions with texts while they were in meetings. Problem? They rarely read past the first line of an email to get the full gist.
Many owners complained about multitasking-induced errors, i.e., that employees were distracted by texts and emails when they should have been attending to business.
Many owners worried about the loss of productivity because people were spending too much time on social networks during work hours.
An owner of a company that relied on research felt the convenience of search engines caused many people to confuse thorough, valid analysis with quick, easy answers.
Another retailer worried that many young cashiers don’t even look at customers anymore. “They simply stare at their screens and push a button that dispenses change.” He worried that the “personal touch” was being replaced with emotionless transactions that left customers cold, inviting them to go somewhere else.

Despite these problems, we need to recognize and applaud the wonderful things that smartphones enable us to do. Imagine how dull life would be if it weren’t for texting while accounting.

Generational Preferences Affecting News Consumption

Posted on January 28, 2013 by Bob Rehak

The decline of printed newspapers during the last decade has been well chronicled. An earlier post called The Future of Digital Media referred readers to a slide deck compiled by Business Intelligence. BI indicates that print-newspaper advertising revenue has declined more than 60 percent in the last decade as people got more and more of their news over the Internet and from mobile devices.

A 2012 survey by the Pew Foundation called Trends in News Consumption confirms this trend. It also indicates that television news may be vulnerable now, too. The reason: a growing tendency among young people to consume news online.

Pew found that “Perhaps the most dramatic change in the news environment has been the rise of social networking sites. The percentage of Americans saying they saw news or news headlines on a social networking site yesterday has doubled – from 9% to 19% – since 2010. Among adults younger than age 30, as many saw news on a social networking site the previous day (33%) as saw any television news (34%), with just 13% having read a newspaper either in print or digital form.”

As younger people move online, they leave television news with an increasingly older audience.

My take: In a personal essay elsewhere on this site, I discuss generational conflicts in media preferences. Changing demographics of the evening network news shows have changed their advertiser base. Long gone are the BMW commercials. Viagra, Cialis and other drug commercials aimed at seniors have replaced them.

Prescription drug advertising has become so prevalent, one wonders whether it is a reflection or a cause of the shows’ aging demographics. Personally speaking, I feel a little self-conscious when – with my family – Cialis commercials come on. It makes me wonder whether the younger people in the room are thinking, “Does he or doesn’t he?” Hey, when they start advertising adult diapers on the evening news, I’m out of there. You’ll find me getting all my news online, too!

The Future of Digital Media: Implications for Responsive Design

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Bob Rehak

BI Intelligence is a new research and analysis service focused on mobile computing and the Internet.

This massive, data-driven slide deck shows trends in device usage, advertising revenue, internet searching and more by market.

Some key findings, as I see them, for the business-to-business sector:

As PC sales stalled in 2012, sales of mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones, soared.
Americans now spend more time on social networks than portals.
But social site referrals to commerce sites are tiny, about 1% for Facebook.
Google drives 80% of traffic to e-commerce sites.
As mobile usage increases, time spent with all other media is decreasing.
Google owns mobile search with approximately 95% market share.
Digital is turning into a four screen world: desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone.

I concluded after reviewing this entire deck that most businesses can no longer rely on web sites optimized only for desktop computers. Sites that do will simply not be useable on tablets and smartphones. Companies must either refer prospects to sites optimized for mobile devices or develop sites that dynamically reformat themselves depending on the access device.

The second option is known as responsive design. While responsive design programming is far more complicated (i.e., about a third more expensive than conventional), it pays off in the long run. Major benefits include improved site usability on a wider variety of devices and reduced maintenance costs. Instead of supporting/updating three or four sites, you update one.

Google now estimates that 50% of all Internet searches will take place from mobile devices by 2015. That will make responsive web design the wave of the future. I’ll discuss that in greater detail in future posts.

Read the entire Business Intelligence report.