The Media Oxpecker: What’s Next in 2013?

Every week we round up media news you may have missed while you were busy tying the knot.




  • A new study by the Pew Research Center and the Economist Group, The Demographics of Mobile News, finds that while young adults are abandoning print, they are avidly consuming news on their mobile devices in numbers that “rival or even surpass their parents and grandparents.” And that’s not all:

    There’s more good news for media companies hoping to reach younger readers: They are more likely to share the news they read on mobile devices and to engage with ads on smartphones and tablets. For ads in particular, readers 18-29 were twice as likely to “at least sometimes” touch an ad on a tablet than people 30-49.

  • “Anybody who really focuses on the newspaper business should be studying one company this year: Berkshire Hathaway,” says Washington Post chairman and CEO Don Graham. While the company is more widely known for being led by billionaire investor Warren Buffett, Berkshire’s newspaper division is being run by Terry Kroeger, who laid out the company’s philosophy in a recent Bloomberg spotlight:

    The goal, Kroeger says, is to reintroduce newspapers to what they do best: delivering urgent, local information that readers can’t get elsewhere — and coaxing people into paying for it. He’s also creating offshoot websites with corporate sponsors and branching out into Internet video.

    “We’ve got to evolve with what people are looking for, and I think our industry has done kind of a crappy job with that,” Kroeger, 50, said in an interview.


  • Positive trend alert: 195 print magazines launched in 2012, an increase from last year, and only 74 magazines folded compared with the 142 that ceased publication last year.

  • So what does 2013 have in store? It’s prediction season! paidContent’s Robert Andrews predicts a big year for branded content, or “advertorial 2.0”:

    The tactic of producing marketing that mimics editorial has been around for some time, but a new wave of online publishers are blurring church and state further and further. In 2013, this branded content will become more popular than ever, helping to fund publishers struggling with conventional revenue approaches and helping advertisers communicate in a world of cacophony and dubious ad effectiveness.


    Mashable’s Pete Cashmore says 2013 will be the year responsive web design takes off:

    The benefits are obvious: You build a website once, and it works seamlessly across thousands of different screens … For publishers, it offers the simplest way to reach readers across multiple devices. For users, it ensures a great experience on every screen.


    And a bold prediction from Jeff Roberts:

    BuzzFeed will earn a Pulitzer prize: Yes, you read that right. The goofy viral site has not-so-quietly become a big-time media machine that is investing heavily in serious political, feature and long-form journalism.

  • Will the Washington Post be the next major daily to go behind a paywall?

  • How Medium — a new self-publishing platform from Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone — might transform blogging:

    The core idea is that regular people want to consume content published by other regular people. Medium automagically curates a stream of the posts that are most relevant to you — which means the authors of those posts are also reaching their ideal audience. Medium then susses out the best content using a combination of algorithms and human guidance, and promotes via official collections like “Front Page Picks.”

  • Why do major newspaper reports of notable deaths overwhelmingly feature men? Dana Liebelson of Mother Jones asks, “Is the issue that notable women aren’t dying—or that newspapers aren’t reporting it?

  • Big advertisers are ignoring online video and relying overwhelmingly on national TV ads, says a recent Kantar Media study.

  • Ads with video and rich media are driving demand for mobile advertising.
    At the same time, two-thirds of consumers say they find mobile ads annoying and intrusive, according to a new Forrester survey.

  • Some media buyers are warming to native advertising.

  • What’s next in local small/medium business (SMB) advertising? Here are 7 key takeaways from BIA/Kelsey’s recent Interactive Local Media conference.

  • Eight great location-based mobile campaigns from 2012.

  • How social search changes the way we find local businesses.

  • And finally, the McClatchy-owned Kansas City Star set a new low in the annals of newspaper management when, according to Romenesko, two reporters were forced to decide which of them would be laid off.