EVANSTON, IL - Six special capabilities "could well prove the difference between winners and losers in the next generation market for news and information," according to a new Media Management Center study of technological trends affecting news and information businesses.

"Emerging technologies are opening up both enormous possibilities for news organizations as well as threats. It's vital that news organizations understand these trends and learn how to harness them to their advantage," said Michael P. Smith, Executive Director of the Media Management Center (MMC), in releasing the report.

The report, "Six Competencies of the Next Generation News Organization," is by innovation expert Annette Moser-Wellman. She is also the author of another MMC report, "Running While The Earth Shakes: Creating An Innovation Strategy to Win In the Digital Age," released last year.

The Six Competencies report, the result of interviews with 24 technology leaders and thinkers, identifies major technological trends that promise to have significant impact on the collection, production and distribution of news and information. It outlines a series of special skills and capabilities organizations should develop, acquire or strengthen as a result.

Moser-Wellman calls the six special competencies "The Platform Strategist," "The Marketer," "The Community Builder," "The Data Miner," "The Complete Storyteller," and "The Entrepreneur." These competencies encompass many specific skills, from smart product differentiation and advanced digital storytelling to the abilities to technologically extract maximum value from archives, leverage content across platforms, and drive contact and collaboration.

The technological developments reviewed range from the Semantic Web, 3G and 4G connectivity, cloud computing and mesh networks to the democratization of the tools of media, the rise of location-based information and the increased ability to target both content and advertising.

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NOTE: The Media Management Center has created a special Webinar presentation that outlines and explains Moser-Wellman's findings. Moser-Wellman is also willing to do a small number of customized, interactive live Webinars for interested companies or associations. For more information, contact Vivian Vahlberg at v-vahlberg@northwestern.edu, or 847-467-1790.

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"As the report points out, greater sophistication of devices and software will lead to growing consumer expectations for different levels and types of content from each platform" said Vivian Vahlberg, MMC Managing Director. "To successfully deliver experiences on and across multiple platforms, news organizations must understand what function each platform plays - and then develop products suited to the unique dynamics of each platform."

To remain viable, the report concludes, news organizations will need to partner with companies that have skills (particularly technological) they don't have, that have high engagement with Web audiences, and that can help solidify their market leadership and shore up their consumer base.

Here are the six recommended competencies:

• The Platform Strategist: To capture market opportunities by leveraging content over and across multiple platforms, news organizations must understand the unique attributes and capabilities of each platform; know consumers and spot their unmet needs; understand their own strengths and offerings, and develop products accordingly.


• The Marketer: News organizations need to think like the best marketers – carefully defining their brands and working to develop deep consumer engagement with them. The essential first step: identifying more clearly what differentiates them in the marketplace and determining what unique value and role they provide.


• The Community Builder: News organizations need to become more expert community builders, using technology to help connect people around shared interests. Using the increased technological capacity for information-sharing between individuals and groups, news organizations can more effectively shape dialogue and enable consumers to link to discussions of increasingly wider context.


• The Data Miner: News organizations that become expert data miners and managers can develop unmatched depth of insight about consumers that they can use to profitably deliver both personalized content and targeted advertising. They can also unlock the value of their current and archival content.


• The Complete Storyteller: Digital technologies give news organizations a much broader palette and set of tools to use in thir storytelling. It's not just text, photos and videos - it's a mix of all three plus interactivity, games, charts and much more. Excelling at these new kinds of storytelling is a competency that can differentiate news organizations from competitors.


• The Entrepreneur: In this environment, news organizations must develop their ability to think like entrepreneurs and identify assets they can leverage and new services they can provide, by pursuing partnerships, experimenting smartly and developing new models of advertising.

The Media Management Center is an executive education, research and development institute at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

To download the complete report, go to: www.MediaManagementCenter.org/research/sixcompetencies.pdf.

A new report and seminar from Media Management Center

Many online users stick to a few favorite Web sites while ignoring an infinite number of alternatives, a strong habit that is hard to break for those Web sites seeking users' attention, according to a new study by Northwestern's Media Management Center.

The report titled, "What It Takes to be a Web Favorite," is based on joint research by MMC and the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. Noting that users form particularly strong habits when it comes to news, the report concludes that news Web sites must strive to be on a user’s short list of three to five favorite sites or be lost among hundreds of largely overlooked alternatives. This poses particular challenges for local sites, because major national events and sources are currently more important to many users than local ones.

The Web favorites report makes clear that being perceived as “easy to use” is the single most important factor in determining Web favorites.

• MMC has already conducted follow-up research to pinpoint in much more detail what consumers mean when they say a Web site is "easy to use."


• That research will be released at a new MMC seminar, Beyond Commodity: Customer-Focused Strategy for Digital Media, October 5-8, 2008 at Northwestern.


• The conference also will provide additional detail and explore the implications for people who manage news of the Web Favorites and Easy to Use research projects, as well as from a third MMC released Monday (October 8, 2008), exploring how to engage young adults in election news on the Web.

To download the complete report, go to: www.mediamanagementcenter.org/research/webfavorite.pdf.

"To make the 'favorite' list, being unique isn't particularly helpful because so few sites can truly deliver unique content," said Stacy Lynch, MMC associate and author of the study. "What really matters is being 'easy to use.' This goes beyond being attractive to presenting information in a way that makes sense and avoids the problem of being 'too much.'"

These results reflect in-depth interviews with 27 heavy online users in the Atlanta and Chicago markets. Participants were asked to identify and describe "favorite" Web sites and to explain why they chose them over other alternatives. The research found:

• Many of users' preferences are driven by a desire to manage and cope with overwhelming amounts of information and a seemingly infinite number of choices online. Web users performed a variety of techniques to sort and sift information more easily and, when that failed, to limit the amount of information coming in. Light news consumers, in particular, struggled with the volume and perceived sameness of news and information online. As they described the experience of sifting through the daily news, they expressed feelings of being overwhelmed and bored by the monotony.


• Online users have strong Web habits that rarely change. Participants described a routine focusing on three to five "favorite" Web sites that they have used for at least several years. Habitual behavior appears to be even more pronounced for news and information Web sites, with strong preferences for familiar sites.


• The experience of getting news online varied greatly depending on the knowledge and experience users brought to the task. Unlike light users, heavy news consumers enjoyed sites with large amounts of information. They also required very few cues in order to figure out which items were important or interesting.


• For Web sites with a traditional media "parent," much of their perceived personality and functional benefits are borrowed from that parent. Television Web sites were seen as being more up-to-date than newspaper counterparts because "television broadcasts several times a day while the newspaper publishes only once."


• Brand has power. For "cognitive misers" trying to sift through the almost infinite choices online, familiar brands have a lot of weight. Users often looked for sources that were familiar from other contexts – TV watchers tended to choose TV Web sites, for example.


• Looking at news online is really a variety of different kinds of activities. Participants described different occasions when they are scanning the news, searching for something specific or taking a break.

Media Management Center is an executive education, research and development institute at Northwestern University.

For more information contact Stacy Lynch (stacy.l.lynch @gmail.com) or Vivian Vahlberg (v-vahlberg@northwestern.edu).

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A new report

The drama of the 2008 presidential election is the perfect entrée for news organizations to gain the attention of millennials, satisfy some largely unmet needs and foster their continued interest in serious news, according to a new Media Management Center research report released this week.

The report, titled "From 'Too Much' to 'Just Right': Engaging Millennials in Election News on the Web," is based on a qualitative, in-depth study of a diverse group of 89 Chicago-area adults between the ages of 17 and 22, a demographic frequently referred to as millennials. MMC researchers found that young people often click away from election news online because they feel the sites bombard them with too much information and too many choices.

"To serve and attract this important group, news organizations need to develop online election resources that are specifically designed to minimize this "too much" sensation," said Michael P. Smith, executive director of the Media Management Center, noting that MMC provides many concrete suggestions in the report for how to deal with the problem.

To view the complete report, go to: www.mediamanagementcenter.org/research/youthelection.pdf. If you are interested in attending a free webinar on the report, please contact Jim Galloy, j-galloy@northwestern.edu.

The MMC report found that while millennials are interested in the elections and want information about the candidates and issues, they don't want to spend much time following day-to-day developments. However, they do appreciate news sites that help them -- and other new voters -- understand the basics about the candidates, issues and election process.

Vivian Vahlberg, MMC Managing Director and one of the report's co-authors, said, "More than three quarters of the young people we interviewed said they have found the election itself interesting. But the experience they have with reading and hearing about the election online leaves much to be desired."

Among other research findings and recommendations:

• Millennials prefer to get election news from and trust sites that are in the primary business of news.


• They don't particularly like commenting about the news online or reading comments.


• Attempts to infuse the news with social networking features, amateur content, humor and youth oriented content can backfire if they diminish the seriousness and professionalism young people expect from news Web sites.

"This group is selective about how it spends its time," said Vahlberg. "Our report provides news organizations that want to compete for the time and attention of millennials with a better understanding of their news needs, preferences and habits."

Researchers found the subject of the news doesn't usually trigger a "too much" reflex unless the subject has been over covered. The reflex is more about presentation and quantity. For example, things that turn off millennials include sites that are or have:

• Too many things competing for attention, without clues about what is most important;


• Too many details;


• Too wordy; not distilled to the essence;


• Too many choices;


• Too much text, too high a percentage of text to graphics, or a screen of mostly text;


• Site features that they don't immediately understand;


• Pages or stories that go on and on and on.

To prevent overwhelming millennials, the report recommends that news organizations:

• Place huge emphasis on clear, helpful, immediately understandable organization and design that signals what to focus on and conveys the relative importance of offerings on a page. Short, meaningful, compelling headlines are essential.


• Offer content in manageable layers and chunks, letting the reader decide how deep to go. When stories go more than a page, young adults tend to tune out. However, if stories maintain their interest enough to click on a link, the millennials want some substance.


• Have a lot but display a little. It's better for this audience to be selective in what is presented (with links to more information) than to overwhelm with "too much."


• Concentrate most on information resources that help young people (and other new voters) understand the basics about the candidates, the issues and the election process.

The youth online engagement study, supported by a generous grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, is part of an ongoing body of research by the Media Management Center into consumer "experience" and the factors that contribute to greater engagement and involvement with news products.

Media Management Center is an executive education, research and development institute at Northwestern University.

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