When people around the globe log on to an Internet site, 80 percent are seeking news - not entertainment, generic investment information or the latest chat.
Say hello to the nature of news in the '90s.
At the height of when the Starr Report broke, "We had 20,000 requests per second, doubling our traffic," said CBS New Media Executive Producer Steve Jacobs at a Medialink seminar in Washington, D.C., last week on "How Broadcast News and the Internet Are Changing Each Other." Jacobs heads up CBS.com, which in less than a year has become one of the major news operations, confirming that people are using the Internet as a main news source.
"The Internet empowers, but it also raises the bar for message control," cautions Harry Motro, CEO and president of Infoseek Corporation and founder of CNN Interactive. "And if your company has a spin-control problem, you can bet it's on the Internet."
Corporations, and their PR executives, which view Web sites as advertisements instead of hard news sources better rethink that strategy.
The Mix of People
More than 300 PR representatives participated in the the first-time video conference broadcast both via satellite and Web casting.
Satellite audiences in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C. tuned in to the discussion moderated by Paul Sagan, senior advisor to the World Economic Forum.
When people first began logging onto the Web, there was many a new media guru who believed that users mostly saw the Net as an entertainment source, a newfangled toy.
But studies rattle that theory and help resolve the question of how powerful a medium the Internet has become in delivering the news. It's become a "poignant testament to how new and old media can be leveraged off" one another, Sagan said.
According to Jacobs, CBS research shows that those people trolling in cyberspace want:
News: 80 percent
Hobbies & Leisure: 68 percent
Special Interest Group Information: 66 percent
Education & Training: 60 percent
Music & Entertainment: 57 percent
Product Information: 47 percent
Health & Medicine: 38 percent
Investment Information: 32 percent
Motro says that ABCnews.com nets two million visits a day. Good Morning America, a standard of morning television, garners an only slightly larger audience of 2.4 million households a day.
Now, Let's Get Serious
People who have been blindsided by the salacious details of the Starr Report tend to overlook one major lesson: when Congress opted to release the report over the Internet, history was made. And there is no turning back.
For communicators, the Internet has proven to be a double-edged sword: corporations are making financial information such as their 10ks and 10qs easily accessible, but they are also facing a runaway train when it comes to message monitoring and management.
Sagan, Jacobs and Motro said that PR executives face a cumbersome challenge finding the balance between courting the mainsteam media and courting their publics directly through Internet communications and other computer technologies.
Among the recommendations made by the speakers:
- Most executives at major media outlets are deluged with e-mail, so pick your targets carefully. Jacobs say he gets between 150 and 200 e-mails a day;
- Make sure key information is available in HTML, MS Word and WordPerfect and through an FTP site;
- Sending large text or graphics files consumes too many resources if the information can be delivered another way;
- If you use streaming video, make sure it is AVI or transcoded (AVI means audio video interleaved and makes sure your software is in sync and meets compression standards for audio and video signals);
- As a rule, you should consider lower bandwidths and smaller downloads to make the retrieving process easier for your audiences;
- Provide information hyperlinks to partners;
- Use your Internet site to respond to information and product requests. For example, CBS's "Chef on a Shoestring" Saturday show responds to about 20,000 recipe requests a week, up from 20 a week when its Internet site began to take requests two months ago;
- Infoseek can turn around your request to be indexed on its search engine within 24 hours; and
- There is a viewership drop-off for video accessed via the Web after a minute; keep it short.
(Medialink, Greg Jones, 212/682-4416)
A Checklist for Making Your Video and Audio Compatible for TV ... and the Web
You can probably count well beyond all your digits the times you have been told to forget the bells and whistles when it comes to message delivery online, so we won't add to that cascade of cliched advice. What follows is a quick - and easy to digest - rundown of simple rules you should adhere to so that your images transfer well to the Web.
According to Medialink:
- Minimize quick movements and rapid screen shifts.
- Play up strong foreground images and avoid shadows.
- Remember that tiny details are often lost through digital encoding. Provide sharp, clean screens.
- Audio should be clean and without the clutter of confusing background noise.
- Keep in mind that a fully produced VNR is always better than B-roll footage on the Web since the full narration and editing tells your story completely.
Source: Medialink, Webcasting Handbook, 800/843-0677