Peeking into Web surfers' brains

An interesting new study reported on in Sunday's USA Today purports to be "a sneak peek into people's brains,” according to the research firm's research director. The Nielsen Norman Group claims to offer companies an insight into what works and what doesn't with web site design. Their study underlines a key problem facing all web sites: the difficulty of finding a balance between good design and effective information provision. It points to web sites such as Jet Blue's, which they say get it right. On the other hand, one of Sony's websites (the report isn't clear which one) is apparently an example of ineffective web design.

The study's findings include the following:

1.) "Individuals read Web pages in an 'F' pattern. They're more inclined to read longer sentences at the top of a page and less and less as they scroll down. That makes the first two words of a sentence very important. 'People are extremely good at screening out things and focusing in on a small number of salient page elements, says Jakob Nielsen, a principal at the firm.

2.) "Surfers connect well with images of people looking directly at them. It helps if the person in the photo is attractive, but not too good looking. Photos of people who are clearly professional models are a turnoff. 'The person has to be approachable,' Pernice Coyne [the firm's director] says.

3.) "Images in the middle of a page can present an obstacle course.

4.) "People respond to pictures that provide useful information, not just decoration.

5.) "Consumers will peek at ads in search engines as a 'secondary thing,' Nielsen says, since they usually have specific product targets in mind."

Knight Ridder's woes and Excellence(?) in journalism

One of America's highest quality news groups, the Knight Ridder newspaper chain--owner of the owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Miami Herald, is going away. Like many traditional newspaper companies, it's been underperforming for some time (see my Jan 17 entry, Can we save newspapers?), and it's finally going under--to be bought up by rival publisher McClatchy Co. for $6.5 billion.

Knight Ridder will be sorely missed. As American Journalism Review notes, Knight Ridder "was an amazing newspaper company. It was a newspaper company that stressed the newspaper more than the company. It really cared about the journalism. It made a lot of money, sure, but it invested enough in the product to do great work." Eventually, though, it stopped making enough money, and because it failed to squeeze out consistent 20 percent profit margins, it was ripe for cutbacks and then takeover.

Many see this as another body blow to solid high-quality American journalism--and a worrying development that is happening just as The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s third annual “State of the News Media 2006” report has been released. This is in effect America's annual report card for its media. And once again, the report is worrying.

According to Eric Alterman at the Center for American Progress, the report is very timely. With the McClatchy Co.-Knight Ridder news, "a new round of speculation about the health of the newspaper industry is well underway." Unfortunately, such bouts of anxiety about journalism's future are rarely misplaced. This time is no different, as "McClatchy immediately announced that it was selling off 12 of the 32 papers it inherited from Knight Ridder and the little-known fact reported by the San Jose Mercury News (one of the papers to be dumped by McClatchy), that eight of the 12 papers to be sold are union shops." While, as Alterman notes, this has all taken place since PEIJ study was completed, "the congruence of the two events simply added to an increasing sense of foreboding about the industry for nearly everyone who cares about its future."

Alterman notes that the PEIJ study confirms once again "something that many close observers certainly suspected: More and more news outlets are crowding themselves around fewer and fewer stories, hitting the public over the head with them until the blood flows from the cranium." This has little to do with the press acting as a viable Fourth Estate and everything to do with the pursuit of corporate profits.

The trouble, as I've written before in this blog, is that levels of public confidence in the U.S. mainstream media are rapidly declining, and this can be laid squarely at the door of corporate America's relentless desire to squeeze high profits from a medium that relies above all on its ability to function as a credible source of impartial news and information--and that requires investment. Last year at about this time I noted research by the Pew Research Center's Trends 2005 report, the National Opinion Research Center, and USA Today. (See here for a U.S. News take on the Pew report, by Jay Tolsen; and Nicholas Kristoff covered the issue for the New York Times - see my blog entry for a review on that piece.

It's worth reviewing again some pertinent statistics and points:

• 1. 45 percent of Americans believe little or nothing in their daily newspapers, up from 16 percent two decades ago.
  Pew Research Center's "Trends 2005" report (available online).
  
• 2.Between 1973 and 2002, confidence in the press has fallen sharply, from 85% to under 60% - and the press is now almost at the bottom amongst public institutions (only beaten by the legal system).
  National Opinion Research Center survey, 2004
  
• 3. A 2004 survey of 112,000 American high school students showed:
  - 32% of them believe that there is too much freedom of the press
  - Only 10% believe that there is not enough.
  - 36% would prefer that the media be subject to government control
  USA Today survey
  

Some comments and insights:

• "The public sees the [mass] media as self-centered and self-promoting."
  Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
  
• "I think commercial factors are the overriding factor shaping the collapse of professional journalism.”
  Robert McChesney, professor of communication, University of Illinois
  
• "Media companies are more concentrated than at any time over the past 40 years, thanks to a continual loosening of ownership rules by Washington."
  Ted Turner, CNN founder
  
• "As people move online, the notion of news consumers is giving way to something called 'prosumers,' in which citizens simultaneously function as consumers, editors, and producers of a new kind of news in which journalistic accounts are but one element."
  Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, writing in The State of the News Media 2004
  (Above comments all from U.S. News)

Ebert goes to the movies ... in Rochester!

One of the best things about Rochester is the George Eastman House and the Dryden Theatre. These institutions are devoted to film preservation and film presentation on the big screen, and the Eastman House's Motion Picture Collection is "one of the country’s five major film archives, alongside [the] Library of Congress, UCLA Film and Television Archive, Museum of Modern Art, and the Academy Film Archive."

I've been volunteering at both places for more than four years now, and every now and again I introduce one of the films in their excellent ongoing film calendar that includes classic and hard-to-find films (here's a list of the films I've introduced). But I try to get along to see films there whenever I can. Last week, for example, we went to see Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man, a fascinating 1957 sci-fi film I remember quite vividly watching on TV as a kid; it was great seeing it again--and this time on the big screen, as it was meant to be seen.

One of the best things about having the Dryden on our doorstep is that it attracts some pretty big names in the film world to this little corner of Western New York. Some of the Big Names I've got to see at the Dryden include John Landis, Jeff Bridges, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Last weekend it was the turn of film critic Roger Ebert to visit the Dryden. Ebert is one of America's foremost film critics, and he's seen just about everything there is to see--and he has a great perspective on the state of American film today (here, fyi, is his wikipedia bio). He was here last weekend to pick up an honorary George Eastman Scholar award and present and talk about some of his favorite movies. My better half and I were fortunate to be invited to a private matinee screening of the 1975 film Night Moves, with Gene Hackman--which Ebert is considering adding to his "Great Movies" series of essays (and which I would call a fine movie--not sure if it's a great one, though). Later that evening we went along to a public screening of Robert Altman's 1977 film 3 Women--which wasn't really my cup of tea, but was worth seeing just for the fascinating discussion with Ebert it sparked. I'll quote my wife's take on Ebert that night, as she got it just about right:

Before each screening, Ebert held forth on the problems facing the movie industry today. He made what I thought were a couple of really good points about why movies are important and why they're sadly losing ground in terms of their cultural importance.

"We are born into a box of space and time," Ebert began. "And that's all we have." Books, plays, paintings, operas, movies: they all allow us to temporarily break out of that box and experience the lives of people from different countries, different race or class backgrounds, different periods in history. But nowadays, complains Ebert, it's next to impossible to get a 20-year-old male to go to a movie that does not star other 20-year-old males. The movies are trapped in a self-confirming feedback loop, where all the audience gets to do is congratulate itself on how funny and cool we are for liking these funny, cool movie stars who are really "just like us." "When I was a kid, teenagers went to movies to see adults have sex," said Ebert. "Now adults go to movies to see teenagers have sex."

He saved special vitriol for the film ouevre of Rob Schneider, whose Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo caused him to use the word "sucks" for the first time in a review. This brought Ebert to the second point about the flagging future of the movies: Columbia Pictures couldn't wait to finance Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo in 2005, but the studio ran a mile from Ray, The Aviator, Million Dollar Baby, Sideways, and Finding Neverland, the five films that the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences went on to congratulate itself for producing by honoring them as Best Picture nominees. "Ray took nine years to make," said Ebert. "And even after that success, it still took nine years to make Walk the Line. These movies cannot get backing unless they're tentpoles, franchises, star vehicles, and the like. Altman's 3 Women was made by a major Hollywood studio, with a major star attached [Cissy Spacek]. That would never happen today."

March Media Madness

March madness has begun, and while I'm spending my spring break frantically working on two chapters of a book I'm writing (well, co-writing), my wife is dragging me into the strange realm of NCAA "March Madness." My wife, like so many people who live and work in an office environment in the United States, has gone and joined a March Madness office pool. And now someone who typically pays little attention to basketball--baseball and football are more her things--is sitting glued to CBS hoping that her first and second round picks make it to the next stage. (Too bad, Syracuse!) As she says: "I know exactly nothing about college basketball. As I was doing my picks, I found myself favoring colleges that I had attended conferences at, or that had offered me graduate assistantships in the past. That's how I ended up with an all Washington state championship game, which has as much chance of happening as I have of being named Queen of Spokane." And because she's getting sucked in through the power of the office pool, I'm getting sucked in too! Maybe the final will be between The Huskies and Gonzaga! :-)

This state of affairs isn't all that uncommon. At this time of year millions of people get sucked into the National Collegiate Athletic Association Men's Division I Basketball Tournament--an event and a sport they often know little of, but which manages to build up the sort of buzz of excitement that any Hollywood movie studio exec would kill to have for their big summer tentpole release. Sixty-four (well, actually 65) college teams are playing (many are already out), and even though four games are on at roughly the same time for the first few days, viewers get to see most of them for at least a few minutes as CBS frantically switches from game to game. But now, for the first time, the games will be available free over the internet on CBS Sportsline. The media have run some stories about employer anxiety over lost productivity (here's NPR's take on a story that's essentially a media creation.) In fact, March Madness facilitates a powerful centripetal media effect on society. That's a fancy way of saying it's one of these great sports events that can bring people together--in offices, in clubs, in families, and across the whole country--through the power of a media spectacle. People, even those who normally care not a whit about basketball, get caught up in, bet a few bucks on (and for most people, it is only a few bucks), and feel they're part of something special that's bigger than they are. It gives people something to talk about, something to riff on, something to get excited about. It's like the Super Bowl but it lasts for 20 days. It gets lots of people through the dreary month of March, and by the time it's all over the weather will be getting warmer--and baseball season will be upon us!

Now, ahem, back to writing that book!

On "youths" and getting a bad press

Recently I heard from an old student of mine who passed on a newspaper article that reminded her of a "framing the news" assignment she'd completed in my Mass Media & Society class. The article, which apppeared in the San Bernardino (Calif.) Sun earlier this month, concerned a "youth riot" that supposedly broke out after a punk rock concert in that city (Article is available online here). My old student had been at the Woodstock '99 festival (which had also been slammed by the news media for turning to violence, sexual assault, and looting--stories that were almost certainly overhyped). So this event had caught her eye. She told me that, after dissecting the piece, she was "really appalled at how blatantly biased this piece actually is." She was concerned at how the article, in her eyes, failed "to answer or at least address all the readers' questions," and she was still left wondering, for example, why cops tear-gassed a crowded hall with 4,000 kids in response to a stabbing? And why weren't venue security staff able to handle the incident? She signed off: "This article has really come to embody all that I loathe about the media. I just thought I'd pass it along! :)"

Well, looking over the article and the way it presents the events, I think she probably has a point (of course I wasn't there to see the event first-hand, so I'm going on past experience with these sorts of things). The story is certainly framed in such a way as to downplay the opinions and concerns of concertgoers, and to play up the police's and local business community's version of reality. One thing to always note in articles such as these is who's being quoted in the piece--and who gets quoted first. Police spokesmen are always readily available to the press to "spin" the local PD's preferred reading of events. And local business owners (usually conservative by nature) are often able and willing to come forward and support that version--since the police have framed themselves (and the media accept and legitimate the frame) as protectors of law and order (and property) against the perceived anarchic hordes. This is a frame built up over generations of media coverage of "rowdy" youth culture, and an easy pigeonhole to place young people into.

What you don't see anywhere is a spokeperson for the concertgoers, the "youth." This group's members aren't organized, have no spokesperson available to take press calls and speak on their behalf (and even if they did there's a good chance that the media would ignore them or downplay their opinion are less legitimate). This group (if you can even call it a "group") is therefore safely marginalized as a source of opinion, and can safely be placed in whatever frame has been set for them by these other, more organized parties. What's left is a nice simple narrative of "riot," good cops and citizens versus bad punks, and the press happily weaves a tale of disorder and the necessary restoration of order. It's been told a thousand times. It's a news perspective that flows primarily (though not exclusively) from one of Herbert Gans' most potent "enduring values": the need for the restoration and maintenance of order in society--especially, in this case, social and moral order. That's usually how it works. If you were to get caught up on the wrong side of this narrative or these news values, it could be very scary.

Congratulations, Philip, but the Oscars ... sucked

I only have time for a brief mention of last night's Academy Awards, so I have to go with my heart rather than my head. Apologies for the insouciant tone of this entry: I'm genuinely glad that Fairport's own Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Best Actor Oscar for his wonderful performance in Capote, which I really liked (and I got a chance to see him in person at Rochester's George Eastman House last year). But for the most part the Oscars ceremony really, well, sucked! No other word for it. They were dire. Here's why. Fortunately we had friends over last night so we could commiserate with one another, but it was still, IMHO, one of the most boring, lifeless, anodyne performances I've seen. Even Jon Stewart couldn't make it work (see BBC the piece headlined "Stewart's Oscars show lacks edge"--although I think the problem lay more with the producers and the audience than with Stewart). The only injection of life came when Best Song went to Three 6 Mafia (whose "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp," from Hustle and Flow, finally gave Jon Stewart something to work with.) I'm too old and boring to get into rap, but I am very glad those guys managed to get up on stage for a while.

Enough.

Here comes Ma Bell again

The more things change, the more they stay the same. With the announcement that AT&T is to buy Bell South for $67 billion, the world of telecommunications is moving one step closer to the reassembly of an old monopoly: namely the old "Ma Bell"/AT&T local and long-distance telephone monopoly that dominated U.S. telecommunications for nearly 70 years. The monopoly (or near-monopoly) was not dissolved until 1984. It was allowed to remain in place for so long because AT&T managed to argue successfully that its business was a "natural monopoly" that wouldn't work effectively in a competitive environment.

Now one of the "Baby Bells," Bell South, is coming back to momma in a deal that, if approved, will see four of the original 7 Baby Bells brought back together under AT&T's wing. Ironically, perhaps, the old "monopoly" is reassembling precisely because of fear of competition. And it's not exactly a monopoly anymore precisely because of all that competition--which is not from other traditional phone companies but from cable companies, cell phone companies, internet companies and other hi-tech firms all entering the digitally converging new media environment of 2006.

So it's a very different AT&T ("Ma Bell") than the one that used to rule the roost from the 1920s through the 1970s. But although it won't be a monopoly--natural or otherwise--it will be huge. The New York Times notes that with all this competition, "and more and more services available on mobile phones and on the Internet, companies like AT&T are trying to bulk up and turn themselves into one-stop shops for all communications needs." And AT&T is really bulking up for this battle. The "new" AT&T--which, as NPR's Jim Zarolli notes, already has more customers than any other U.S. telecom--will be dramatically expanded under this deal. The combined company "would also have full control of Cingular Wireless, the largest cell phone provider in the U.S." It will have 360,000 employees, 70 million local telephone customers, 10 million broadband customers, and it'll be a massive player in all aspects of the telecom business. And it'll be streets ahead of its nearest rival, Verizon. In fact it might be a bit too big and powerful for its own good. The deal has to be approved by the government's antitrust regulators in the Justice Department. Let's see what happens there.