Team project 1 - Team Traditional Media

Research object

 

Our team picked companies from the field of 'traditional media' to be the objects of research. The companies were The Guardian (newspaper), USA Today (newspaper), National Geographic (monthly magazine), MegaStar FM (radio) and Televisió de Catalunya (TV).

The term 'traditional media' refers to print, tv and radio media.

Research questions

 

Our team's research questions focused on how the 'traditional media' companies have adapted to the world of social media. Do they have a Facebook page? Twitter account? Instagram? Pinterest? Something else?What type of content gets to be shared there: Everything? Only big news/important content? Do they share with automation (via RSS feed etc.) or do they actually manage different accounts?

Does “the brand” communicate with the followers? Do they share for example the Twitter accounts of their staff there (for example in the end of an article “follow John Doe @johndoe”)?

How we did it

 

We tried to find the social media platforms of the chosen brands and see how they use the potential of the certain service.

Discussion and the gathering of all material were done in Google Doc.

The end result is this blog post.

What we found

 

USA Today

 

USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded in 1982.

USA Today use social media to a great extent, they have 1,6 million followers on Facebook and they even have specialised paged for different subjects. They use Twitter heavily, over 1 million followers, 39 different Twitter accounts for different subjects (like sports, style…) over 100 reporter of Twitter (whaaaat!). The reporters are able to use Twitter to bring the articles right in front of the readers and ask questions and create discussion. They don’t use any personal identities on their tweets (probably better so as there are so many reporters) but it seems that they don’t use automation, since the tweets aren’t just the beginning of the article.The activity on Facebook seems to differ from the activity on Twitter - there are a lot of “non-sense” stuff too, like competitions and stuff, but the discussion in very active on Facebook as well! There are a lot of commenting going on from the readers.

https://twitter.com/USATODAY

https://www.facebook.com/usatoday

They also use Foursquare and Gowalla and link them to their travelling pages and “where to visit”-pages, so that people who visit those places, can check in and get points etc.

They also use blogs, which I found interesting, since I haven’t seen such thing at least in Finland - have you guys? There are blogs about every current issue on the newspaper and the blogs go deeper into the subjects.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/blog-index.htm

Those blogs are connected to Twitter and they have feeds to follow, there’s everything from Idols to politics and sports.

All in all, USA Today seems to have the social media field well in grasp - they are very active and versitile!

National Geographic

 

National geographic is a famous magazine about photograph of natural or human being. They are using SNS instagram that specialized at posting picture. And they have 4,455,242 followers. They post nice pictures everyday and it makes followers easy to approach to their magazine.

 

I found the press which is active in using SNS media. AP News. They have accounts on twitter, facebook and youtube. And they also have a lot of followers each platform. Especially on facebook, AP News’s wall is used as a place for debate. People suggest their own opinions by comments. So we can see various view of person on articles that AP posted. I think it is the successful example of using social media in traditional media.  

 

Megastar FM

 

MegaStar Fm is a quite new spanish radio station which belongs to COPE, a really important radio group created in 1980. It started to broadcast in September 2014 and their philosophy is to create a new channel addressed to young people, full of energy and nonchalance, but mostly with their own style and different from anything else.

The most remarkable thing is that they have been working really hard in the online development both on the website and the social network. They have also developed an app for smartphones and I want to stress it’s quite cool.

When you open it the music they are broadcasting begins to play, if you press one button you can share via SMS, mail, Facebook and Twitter the song. It has another option where you can see the lyrics of the song played like a karaoke. Finally, you can send tweets directly to @MegaStarFM their Twitter account.

Concerning to their Facebook page I have to say that they only have 2227 followers but I think it’s because I have been promoting more Twitter. They don’t upload content everyday so that can be the reason. They post some funny videos and video clips but not relevant information.

Nevertheless their main channel to be in contact with their listeners is via Twitter, they retweet constantly their tweets, which is a good way to retain them because Twitter users like to be seen, especially through famous users. Currently they have 25,261 followers but increasing every day. It is a channel to organize contests and to make people to participate in their interactive programme during the morning and the afternoon.

Finally, their website is really similar to the application. A really simple design, based on their Twitter activity being updated constantly. It also has a karaoke and some videos of the events they organize around Spain.

To sum up, MegaStar is a really interactive media basing their activity and schedule on their listeners. So they are the most important aspect and everything revolves around them. Despite is a quite new radio station I consider they are doing their work really good because they are gaining followers quite fast. 

 

Televisio de Catalonya 

 

This is the public tv channel from Catalonia (Its capital is Barcelona). It’s very curious to realize that a television only available for seven and a half million people has the same amount of followers in Facebook than the public tv channel from Spain: Televisión Española (TVE), available for more than 47 million people.

TV3 started their broadcasts in 1983, seven years after the dictatorship in Spain finished. There was a general feeling of making and building a television adapted to the catalans, the catalan language and Catalonia’s folklore. And they managed to do it.

Since the beginnings, TV3 was a very modern and advanced channel if we consider the fact that was not a public television from Spain. It soon had its own news, series and programs. All of them, in Catalan.

But apart form the basic and usual programming that offered, it soon started to introduce different events that were not seen until then, and even less in an Autonomic television. For instance, in 1992 it started a special program broadcasted every year, that is only around 12 hours long and it tries to collect donations for different illnesses. It mobilises thousands of people not only donating but also taking part in the activities that are organized all over the country (Catalonia).

In this event for example, the social networks always play a very important role. It is obvious that the main distributor of the information is the tv channel itself, but thanks to Twitter or Facebook it is very easy to get to many people who may not be watching tv.

As any other company who joins a social network, in the beginning there were hardly any likes, followers or people commenting on the Facebook page, however, it is now one of the most followed media companies in the whole country. A reason that helped this to happen was the interactivity there has always been between the tv channel and the audience not only in the programs but also and even more in the social networks. It is pretty sure that every time that there is a post on Facebook, it tries to involve people by commenting and giving their opinion. By doing this they can also find a way to know and maybe apply to their programming schedule what the audience thinks or wants.

Despite the fact that many of the posts (not even in Facebook but also on Twitter) are about news or future programming, there’s an important part in which we find conversations and comments between the audience and the tv channel, as well as questions about how much did the audience liked an already emitted program. That creates a very friendly and reliable environment between both the spectators and the professionals. And at the same time, the audience of the channel increases by winning the confidence of people… (or at least, that’s what they try to do).

All in all, I think TV3 is a very good example of a modern tv channel, not only because of the diversity of programming that offers but also for the quality they have, and how the audience relies on it day after day. Basically it is a channel to be proud of and even more if we have in mind that is only subsidized and seen by a 15% of the total population of Spain but fights equally to the rest of tv channels of the country.

The Guardian

The Guardian is a British national daily newspaper. Founded in 1821, it was known as The Manchester Guardian until 1959. From its beginnings as a local paper it has grown into a national paper associated with a complex organisational structure and an international multimedia and web presence. It has two online outlets based outside the United Kingdom, Guardian Australia and Guardian US.

”The Guardian has become the world's third most read newspaper website, with 30.4 million readers in June 2012, according to industry analyst ComScore.” [http://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/8]

The Guardian is known for its involvement in Twitter. According to twittercounter.com, The Guardian's Twitter account has 2 058 374 followers (checked 28.3.) and the account follows 1071 'tweeters'.

It's hard to get exact time the account has been founded but twittercounter.com has been tracking their statistics since 26^th of September 2008.

The Guardian's @guardian account seems to share all their new articles published on their website by automation. However, they have founded several other accounts for specific genres (see picture below).

There are 24 Twitter accounts with the certificate tap that connect to The Guardian. The accounts share specific news from topics such as politics, lifestyle, films and so on. There are, however, more accounts that seem to use The Guardian's G logo but don't have the certificate tap on them.

The Guardian's journalists are known to be pro-social media type. One can find many of their journalists, editors and other staff by searching 'Guardian' Twitter accounts.

As the ”brand” doesn't seem to communicate with the other users on Twitter, the employees do. They use Twitter a lot for crowdsourcing and discussing about the articles they've written or shared.

Paul Lewis, working for Guardian US now, has been the pioneer of using Twitter for journalistic purposes. Back in 2011, he used Twitter to locate events during the riots of London. He later collected tweets and other material shared on social media and gathered a data package of them, creating a timeline of the events.

The Guardian's official account has 26 055 followers and 360 posts. Instagram has yet to be taken advantage of by traditional media, and the amount of posts tells that even The Guardian isn't using Instagram with its full potential.

The Guardian has pinned 562 times. They have categories from 'behind the scenes' to infographics and themes such as 'vintage'.

The Guardian's Pinterest account is being followed by 4807 users. They follow 59 accounts.

Guardian has accounts similarly to Twitter. They have multiple pages for certain topics.

Their main page has almost 1,9 million likes. 

Team Members

Sami Lindfors

Noora Tolvanen

Hyerim Kwon

Adriana Gil

Albert Arrabal