Real Media Riffs: WE’RE KEEPING OUR EYE ON THE BALL

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WE’RE KEEPING OUR EYE ON THE BALL – Until this year, there were only two things we knew about Ball State University: That it is David Letterman’s alma mater; and that it has a funny name. Now it’s beginning to rival such ivory media towers as Syracuse’s Newhouse School, NYU’s Tisch School, and MIT’s Media Lab as an academic authority about media.BSU’s Center for Media Design kicked the year off with the release of its ground-breaking Middletown Study, which found media consumption patterns to be much higher than what’s been measured by official ad industry sources like Nielsen, Arbitron, and MRI.

The implications of that study are still resonating on and off Madison Avenue, even as BSU prepares to field a larger, more robust and more statistically projectable version of the research, which directly observes how people actually consume media during their day. Now BSU has released yet another media study. This one finds that the newspaper industry is still struggling to define its role in so-called “convergence” news operations with TV news organizations.

The finding, which is based on the results of a survey of 372 newspapers editors polled by BSU, indicates that nearly a third are involved in news-gathering relationships with TV stations, but most feel their papers are not taking advantage of the cross-promotional opportunities between the two media. Only 8 percent of newspaper editors said they urge their readers to view stories on their TV partners’ outlets at least once a week, while two-thirds say they “never do.”

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