BigShinyThing

The key bits:

A sizable minority of Americans find themselves at the intersection of these two longstanding trends in news consumption. Integrators, who get the news from both traditional sources and the internet, are a more engaged, sophisticated and demographically sought-after audience segment than those who mostly rely on traditional news sources. Integrators share some characteristics with a smaller, younger, more internet savvy audience segment – Net-Newsers – who principally turn to the web for news, and largely eschew traditional sources.

Net-Newsers are the youngest of the news user segments (median age: 35). They are affluent and even better educated than the News Integrators: More than eight-in-ten have at least attended college. Net-Newsers not only rely primarily on the internet for news, they are leading the way in using new web features and other technologies. Nearly twice as many regularly watch news clips on the internet as regularly watch nightly network news broadcasts (30% vs. 18%).

Net-Newsers do rely on some well known traditional media outlets. They are at least as likely as Integrators and Traditionalists to read magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and somewhat more likely to get news from the BBC.

So, in short, good news for those traditional operators — like CNN and the BBC — who have invested in developing their offerings into video and TV reporting. Also good news for heavy hitters such as The New Yorker - suggesting that good print journalism does, in fact, have a future.

There are also some worrying trends:

In spite of the increasing variety of ways to get the news, the proportion of young people getting no news on a typical day has increased substantially over the past decade. About a third of those younger than 25 (34%) say they get no news on a typical day, up from 25% in 1998.

Believability ratings for national news organizations remain very low. If anything, believability ratings for major online news outlets – including news aggregators such as Google News and AOL News – are lower than for major print, cable and broadcast outlets.

Anyone interested in the media (hello?) can read the full report at Pew’s main site.

Picking up on the grown-up-toy trend, TDP Design have created a site where designers and users can mix and match a monster. There are already over 40,000 character combinations and they are asking for more submissions of arms, legs and heads.

Currently, the ads on Microsoft’s MSN’s search engine have been sold by Yahoo! The company now intends that all of its ads will be sold in-house by Spring next year. Microsoft founder Bill Gates will demonstrate his commitment to online advertising as a sector when he opens the inaugural conference of the UK’s internet advertising industry next month (as reported in The Guardian).

Last year online overtook radio advertising in terms of overall share, reaching a level of nearly 4% in the UK - the Internet Advertising Bureau says it is on track to overtake the market size of outdoor by the end of 2007. Last year spending on ad searches, pop-ups and other forms of online advertising rocketed 62% year-on-year to hit £653.3m in 2004, from £407.8m in 2003.

The New York Times reports that the search-based advertising system to be used by MSN aims to improve on the services already offered by Google and Yahoo! by allowing marketers to target users based on their sex, age and location. Microsoft already owns a lot of demographic information on its users gleaned via services such as hotmail and its Passport identity service. Google and Yahoo! only allow a limited targeting of search ads by location, with Google arguing that it doesn’t need demographic data to direct its ads because Web searchers can directly indicate what they may want to buy through their keyword search queries. Tim Armstrong, vice president for advertising at Google, also plays the privacy card: “We are very heavy on user privacy. So our way of targeting advertising relies heavily on what we know about the content people are looking for.” Google already takes into account other factors such as the time of day and the geographical location of the user.

Microsoft also believes it has another advantage over Google: the building of relationships with web site owners, many of whom are users of its software and online services. But Google ads is already an appealing option for small businesses looking to raise their profile online in a cost effective way. It remains to be seen if Microsoft can achieve the same resonance with these entrepreneurs that Google has.

In recent months Nanette Hoogslag has been heading a small editorial team for the online version of the Dutch paper de Volkskrant to develop “Oog” (Eye), a new kind of online platform in which artists in sound and image are asked to respond, on a regular basis, to news and current affairs. Each week a new work will be displayed. As the project develops, all the works made for Oog will be archived and accessable. This week’s art is rather cute - oddly. Check it out at the Volkskrant site.