Category Media
New Reuters Institute Report on distrust in the news by disadvantaged communities
An anthropology of algorithmic recommendation systems
[Book] Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms
Co-design at the BBC
The story of Spotify personas
Spotify’s product designer Mady Torres de Souza and senior user researchers Olga Hörding and Sohit Karol explain how they developed their personas tool, how they use it today and why it’s so useful for an autonomous, cross-functional organisation like Spotify.…
Old, online, and fed on lies: How an aging population will reshape the internet
Although many older Americans have, like the rest of us, embraced the tools and playthings of the technology industry, a growing body of research shows they have disproportionately fallen prey to the dangers of internet misinformation and risk being further…
[Report] How US youth navigate the news landscape
Yesterday, the New York research institute Data & Society released the report How Youth Navigate the News Landscape (download) that explores how young people use mobile devices, messaging apps, and social media to consume breaking news. Co-authors Mary Madden, Amanda…
Design research at the New York Times
The pressure to anticipate an audience’s needs and desires is intense—no longer only of concern to business sides of media organizations but a part of the editorial mission, writes Heather Chaplin in the Columbia Journalism Review. Certain newsrooms, including the…
Why We Post: social media through the eyes of the world
Nine UCL anthropologists spent fifteen months living in nine communities around the world, researching the role, uses and consequences of social media in people’s everyday lives. University College London just launched an enormous repository with the results of this global…
“How we used design research to launch The New York Times en Español”
A year ago Juliette Melton led a design research field project to explore how The Times could best share its journalism with the Spanish-speaking world. What the team learned from that in-depth research, as well as from subsequent explorationâ, led…
Digital media companies need to make user experience a priority — or else
Digital publishing, seeming perpetually up against terrible economics that prize quantity over quality, has reached a point where navigating it is akin to “walking across a sticky cinema store,†according to Barbarian Group executive director of media and distribution Colin…
Peeps Magazine: anthropology for non-anthropologists
Today we received a hard copy of Peeps, a new and impressive magazine that presents itself as “anthropology for non-anthropologists”, aimed at putting “culture and context before events, bringing investigative stories from corners around the world, and offering readers engaging…
New qualitative research on video consumption by UK youth
TV viewing (live, playback and Broadcaster VOD services) dominates the video viewing of all ages; however 16-24s have a more varied video diet, with TV accounting for two thirds of their total video viewing compared to the UK average of…
The user experience of binge watching (and other behavioral shifts in the multiscreen home)
Today, consumers are prepared to spend significant amounts of time binge watching because they can determine their own viewing schedules, allowing them to watch what they want, when they want, writes Colin Morrison, Vice President of Global Sales Operations for…
Ethnographic study on use of metrics in newsrooms
The Traffic Factories: Metrics at Chartbeat, Gawker Media, and The New York Times A report by Caitlin Petre Tow Center for Digital Journalism Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University Audience metrics have become ubiquitous in news organizations, but there…
Experientia’s mini-doc for the UN’s International Labour Organization
The first destination: The path to decent work in rural economies Experientia’s short documentary for the UN’s International Labour Organization It’s always a pleasure to work on a project that is out of the ordinary. Experientia’s short documentary for the…
Screen Life: The View from the Sofa
A new study carried out for Thinkbox by COG Research and designed to help the advertising community understand the context of multi-screening (watching TV and simultaneously using an internet-connected device such as a laptop, smartphone or tablet). Using a combination…
‘Why newsrooms need anthropologists’
Journalism and anthropology both purport to observe and analyse human behaviour and experience, albeit in different ways and over extremely divergent timescales. And they both serve up their findings to the wider world in order to give it greater understanding…
The consumer has spoken but is anyone listening?
One would expect that listening to your customers’ needs and wants is a basic prerequisite for any business active in a competitive industry. It also is understandable that no business can satisfy all of its customers’ needs nor always meet…