Tag Archives: research

Help PhD research into women in journalism

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A former newspaper reporter is appealing for women working in journalism to take part in a survey to help her PhD research.

Amanda Geary, a lecturer at the University of the West of Scotland, hopes to gather information from women who have worked in different types of journalism, between 1970 and the current day.

She says:

The information gathered from this study should help provide a clearer knowledge and understanding of the experiences of the professional lives of female journalists working in the UK since 1970.

The 10-minute survey can be found here, and all personal information collected will be kept confidential.

Is your blog in this PR database of 1.3 million blogs?

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Press officers have long relied on databases of journalists in order to approach them for stories. PRs are now increasingly targeting bloggers, recognising their reach. One start-up has seized on this trend, creating GroupHigh, “a research engine” which crawls 1.3 million blogs in real-time.

Launched in April 2011 in Boulder, Colorado, the software allows PRs to search by keyword, location and blog traffic.

Listed in the Next Web’s top 20 social media tools of 2011, GroupHigh gets a ringing endorsement.

13. GroupHigh.com – If you haven’t tried GroupHigh yet, the next sentence might encourage you to do so. Ready? GroupHigh.com is the best blogger outreach research and engagement tool on the planet. The latest update (version three) makes it even easier for you to discover the most relevant blogs by keyword, style and receptiveness. Brilliant.

PRs who pay for access can ask the database for “a list of every mum blog out there”, co-founder of the start-up Bill Brennan told Journalism.co.uk. You can then ask the software to “tell me the ones that have written about baby formula or home schooling in the last year”.

When I tested the software and searched for “UK bloggers”, left-leaning political blog Liberal Conspiracy was listed at number one (see screen shot below).

The location search works by “triangulation”: crawling the blog, its Facebook page and Twitter feed, Brennan explained.

Users can also filter by page rank, Facebook shares or Twitter followers and export the data to Excel.

Version three of the software lists blogs not bloggers, Brennan said.

We’ll probably add contacts for individual bloggers at each blog as part of version four.

GroupHigh is the co-founders’ second start-up. Their first foray was recipe search engine Recipe Bridge, which they sold to an Australian ad network.

Confident in their ability to build software to crawl the web and realising “it’s difficult to make money [from] advertising”, the pair “started to tap into the blogosphere”, Bill Brennan said, noting a changing trend within the PR industry.

It seemed like blog outreach was really becoming a staple of campaigns for their clients.

Brennan added that PRs were finding the big bloggers, such as TechCrunch, but “they were not tapping in to what we call the ‘magic middle'” of less well-known blogs.

The cost of using the software is likely to preclude bloggers from satisfying their curiosity and checking if their site is crawled. An annual GroupHigh licence for PRs costs $3,000 (£1,926), plus $1,000 (£642) for each additional user.

Below is a video demo of how GroupHigh works.

GroupHigh 3 Video Overview from Andy Theimer on Vimeo.

Guardian study finds just 22.6% of journalists are female

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The New York Times newsroom in 1942. By Marjory Collins [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

 The Guardian today published the findings from its research into gender in the press, based on “a simple count of newspaper bylines” and those appearing on the Today programme on Radio 4.

The bylines were said to have been taken from articles published in a total of seven newspapers from 13 June to 8 July. The Guardian reports that the research, led by Kira Cochrane, found that women journalists accounted for just 22.6 per cent, as opposed to 77.4 per cent for male reporters.

National papers were all shown to have large gender gaps in byline averages. The Daily Mail and the Guardian recorded the lowest male dominance at 68 per cent male and 72 per cent male respectively.

In its ever-open approach to data the Guardian has made all the data available as a downloadable spreadsheet and is asking its audience to get involved by posing the question: “What can you do with this data?”

Read more here.

Research published earlier this year, commissioned by the Women in Journalism group, found that almost three quarters of journalists working in the national press were male.

mySociety publishes analysis reports on its own sites

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MySociety, the organisation behind some of the biggest democracy projects in the UK, has today made public two reports which it commissioned to gain greater understanding of two of its sites – TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.

As the site itself says: “We think transparency is a good thing for many reasons, but one of its rarely mentioned virtues is how valuable transparency can be for the people within the organisations which are transparent.”

And there have been some interesting discoveries. According to MySociety one of the reasons that both the sites were set up was to make representatives accessible to newcomers to the democratic process. So it was “heartening” to find, for example, that 60 per cent of visitors to TheyWorkForYou had never previously looked up who represents them, and two in five users of WriteToThem have never before contacted one of their political representatives, was a positive sign.

But, as you would expect with any properly neutral evaluation, it’s not all good news. Our sites aim to reach a wide range of people, but compared to the average British internet user, WriteToThem users are twice as likely to have a higher degree and a higher income. It also seems that users are disproportionately male, white, and over 35.

Find the reports here…

#bbcsms: Call for news organisations and journalists to contribute ideas to research

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Dr Claire Wardle speaks to Journalism.co.uk at the end of the BBC‘s Social Media Summit today having called on those present to share their views for future research in the field.

I caught up with her at the end of the conference to discuss her dream for the short and long-term impact of the event.

Listen!

City University research shows rapid growth of personalised news services

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Automatic personalised news services in UK and US are growing at three times the rate of reader customisation services, according to new report.

Research published by City University today, as carried out by senior lecturer in electronic publishing Neil Thurman, suggests that from 2007 to 2009, personalisation by readers only grew by 20 per cent.

In comparison passive personalisation, where news websites filter and recommend articles based on user browsing behaviour “is outstripping active user customisation by a factor of three” with 60 per cent growth. And since then, Thurman told Journalism.co.uk, a third study at the end of last year appears to show the trend continuing, with social media and mobile playing an increasing role in adding personalisation functionality.

The research was carried out through a series of interviews with senior editors of major news outlets in the UK and US, including Times Online and BBC News Interactive, as well as content analysis of the news sites of these organisations.

This included features such as widgets and SMS alerts, as well as homepage customisation and “contextual recommendations” where contextually-related links are automatically generated from individual stories to other content.

“Although some are saying that personalised news sites are ‘all the rage’, this research is a warning to new sites like Trove, that readers are reluctant to take on the role of editorial selection, and still enjoy serendipitous discovery,” Thurman said in a release today.

Ta-da! Insite goes live – a brand new online research website

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Journalism.co.uk is happy to announce that Insite, a new blog designed to bring users tips on ‘slick research, advanced internet research strategies and news about the best tools’, is now live.

First up is an interview with the founder of the new UK-based search engine MSE360, which has attracted praise from both sides of the Atlantic with a three-tier display, clean design and other unique features such as virus alerts.

Insite is the handiwork of Journalism.co.uk’s consulting editor, Colin Meek.

Colin has been working on investigative and in-depth research projects for over 15 years as a journalist and policy analyst, and was founding editor of the online news channel on journalism.co.uk.

Over the last three years he has delivered courses in advanced internet and investigative research.

Since starting as a freelancer 10 years ago, Colin has worked for many clients including Which?, Health Which?, BMJ (British Medical Journal) Knowledge, The Times, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, journalism.co.uk, the Pharmaceutical Journal, the RSPGB and many others.

RMRF: Trinity Mirror Regionals presents user profile survey results

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In a follow up to Tuesday’s announcement that the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) will provide user profiles alongside stats on page impressions and unique users, Guy Lipscombe, managing director of Survey Interactive – the firm behind the on-site surveys being used for the research – explained how the ‘enhanced ABCe certificates’ would work at yesterday’s Regional Media Research Forum (RMRF) event:

[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/GuyLipscombe.mp3]

Lipscombe was joined by Sally O’Donnell, strategic marketing manager for Trinity Mirror Regionals (TMR), who let us in on some key findings from Survey Interactive’s audience research with the group, which involved on-site questionnaires completed by 53,313 interviewees across TM’s 110 regional and national websites:

  • TM’s online portfolio in Feb 08 was reaching 3.8 million adults a month according to the surveys – a different figure from the 5.5 million unique users calculated for the sites at the same time
  • More than a third of internet users from an area covered by a TM regional title accessed the paper’s website on a regular basis
  • A third of TMR website users regularly use more than one TMR website
  • The group’s regional sites had a higher proportion of ABC1 (the National Readership Survey classification for middle class) users
  • TM regional sites were given an average rating by interviewees of 8/10
  • The regional sites attracted a young audience, but not as young as expected, said O’Donnell: majority of users were in the 35-54 age bracket

According to O’Donnell, further research will be conducted soon, as the group’s digital audience continues to grow. Sales staff training on how best to use the figures collected by the research will also be implemented – with particular attention paid to the difference between stats for ‘adults’ and ‘unique users’ to the sites and how behaviour differs amongst print and online consumers.

RMRF: Regional Media Research Forum in new web launch

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The regional media will now be able to share research into readership, marketing, advertising and digital courtesy of a new website from the Regional Media Research Forum (RMRF).

Announced at yesterday’s RMRF Insight, the site will allow regional publishers to search and share research plans and results to assist them with future surveys, data analysis and media planning.

The new launch is part of a rebranding process for the forum previously known as the Regional Newspaper Research Forum.

A design for the site has been approved, but www.rmrf.co.uk is not yet public.