Journalists love Twitter, favour personal contacts over press releases, rate NGOs highly and companies poorly, and think that PR people don’t understand their needs. These are some of the key takeaways from a major survey of Brussels-based correspondents written and published by Dober Partners today.
The poll of 80 correspondents, almost 10% of the total number in Brussels, offers a unique insight into what journalists are looking for from the army of communicators that tries to influence them.
Trust in the media is down, online video use is up, more and more people get their news on mobiles and social media and consumers are still not willing to pay for online news. These are some of the key findings from this year’s Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Here are five takeaways from the report, which is based on a survey of 50,000 online news consumers from 26 countries:
Just over half say they use social media as a source of news, while around one in ten say it is their main source. Facebook is the biggest platform for finding, consuming and sharing news (44%), while over a quarter of 18-24s say social media (28%) is their main source of news, overtaking television (24%) for the first time.
STORYTELLING MASTERCLASS AND BOOK SIGNING
Join us as actor, author and film director Danny Scheinmann (pictured above) leads a free, two-hour masterclass on the importance of storytelling for business on Monday 13th June. Danny will also be signing copies of his latest novel The Half Life of Joshua Jones over bubbles and nibbles.
SILICON JOURNALISM – HOW TECH COMPANIES ARE BECOMING MEDIA GIANTS
After Facebook’s recent launch of Instant Articles, we look at how tech companies are becoming more influential in the media industry. As platforms like Snapchat become publishers, what effect will this have on journalism?
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More than nine in ten journalists prefer to be pitched by email rather than phone and over half rely on social media to write their stories. These are some of the headline conclusions from Cision’s State of the Media Report 2016, which explores journalist practices in the United States and Canada in 2015 and looks at future challenges and trends.
A key difference from previous years is the way journalists prefer to be approached by communication professionals. 93% of journalists said email was the best pitching platform, while 37% considered the phone off limits.
But what makes journalists follow up the pitch? In the US, 54% said they would pursue the pitch if all the details were included, while 13% of journalists only followed it up if they had a personal connection with the PR person. Surprisingly for a profession enamoured by scoops, only 7.5% considered exclusivity as important.
