Part
01
of eight
Part
01
Media Behaviors: Other News Outlets
Although information on how journalists consume information from other news outlets specifically wasn't available in industry reports, studies, surveys or peer-reviewed journals, we found helpful data from various sources and used the available data to pull together key findings: Journalists are increasingly consuming multimedia content instead of text stories. Online newsroom quality and access influence journalists' decision to choose and cover potential news stories.
We found relevant findings from a 2016 survey that shows how news journalists consume news about brands in general, including news brands. We also found other supplementary surveys that show what story elements journalists consider for shareability.
Below you'll find a deep dive into our findings.
THE NEWS MARKET SURVEY
The most helpful resource we found to answer your question is TheNewsMarket's 2016 survey about how journalists consume press relations content. According to TheNewsMarket survey, traditional press releases are moving down journalists' priority list when it comes to news content consumption. Instead, multimedia content and material heavy with images and videos were rated as the most useful by journalists. Below are TheNewsMarket's 2016 survey findings in answer to your questions:
■ Sources
• Journalists see online newsrooms as an important daily resource for information, with 66% of surveyed journalists visiting one every week.
• While agency feeds such as Reuters, AP, etc. are highly valued as 'external hard news' sources, journalists are also increasingly using free online sources such as corporate newsrooms and video aggregation services to build their stories.
• Over one-third of surveyed journalists rated News Agencies as 'very useful'; one-fourth rated video content aggregation sites as 'very useful', and one-fifth rated Online Newsrooms as 'very useful'.
■ Content
• On a scale of 1-5, surveyed journalists rated the following content types based on usefulness:
• The 4 most important content types to journalists were: Text stories with video, Multimedia gallery, Contact information, and Text stories.
• 62% said they would like to receive email alerts from a brand's online newsroom; 17% said they value RSS alerts; and 14% said they value Twitter alerts.
■ Online Newsroom Quality and Access
• 60% of surveyed journalists said brands' online newsrooms are 'satisfactory' while only 17% rated them as 'very useful'.
• 93% said they were frustrated when they couldn't download high resolution content from an online newsroom.
ANALYSIS
In light of the survey's findings, TheNewsMarket concluded in an article that journalists are increasingly consuming multimedia and are looking for quality in brands' online newsrooms. Ed Lamoureaux, senior vice president at TheNewsMarket, said that "News is no longer viable if there isn’t a video, photo or infographic available."
Generally, we only use sources less than two years old, however, because of limited data available on this project, we decided to use a 2015 Edelman study that has valuable insights and is quite consistent with the 2016 study discussed above.
According to the Edelman study, 75% of journalists feel pressure to visualize how their stories can be shared on social platforms. Journalists use 5 elements to make their news shareable: images/video, localization, topic trends, human voice and brevity. A 2017 study from Muck Rack also revealed that 72.4% of surveyed journalists track how many times their stories were shared on social media.
TheNewsMarket also pointed out that journalists need original story material with plenty of ancillary assets to write and repackage stories. Therefore, brands which provide journalists with quality and numerous material end up attracting journalists to their newsroom sites.
Ominously, the report notes that "If multimedia material is not offered to supplement press releases, brands are at risk of discouraging over half of media targets from publishing their story, or even being interested in their content and returning to them as a source long term."
CONCLUSION
To wrap it up, despite lack of publicly available data around journalists' consumption of news about peer news brands, we've used available data to pull together the following key findings: Journalists are increasingly consuming multimedia content from brands instead of text stories. Online newsroom quality as well as access to ancillary material also influence journalists' decision to choose and cover potential news stories. Finally, brands which don't provide supplementary multimedia material to press releases risk discouraging journalists from covering their story.