by Eve Pennington
One of the things that turned me off listening to the news over the past few months during Covid-19 was the masses of fake news stories populating my social feeds and my WhatsApp groups.
As a media strategist I love data and facts, it is my ammunition and my lightsabre to uncovering human truths, behaviours and media trends. It is also my shield to defend my point of view. I think that is why fake news disturbs me so deeply.
Fake news is not always an outright lie, but more insidiously, it is often a half-truth or worse, an unsubstantiated belief.
Unfortunately, fact-checking takes effort. Having been a freelance consultant for over six years, the one thing I really miss from my corporate agency life is the free access to so much wonderful data to check my facts.
The writing of this piece was incidentally triggered by the discovery of the data that the PRC have made freely available recently through their collaboration with Nielsen in the form of the new PRC dashboard, which got me digging through the data like a girl going through a year-end sale rack.
Did you know, that though TV viewership spiked over Covid by 25% and then normalised in July, publisher news sites almost doubled their traffic and have continued at 45% higher levels than pre-Covid? You may not only want to count the reach but reach the people that count. I suspected there was a correlation between print and wealth, because readership increases as you move up the SEM scale, but what I didn’t realise is that the reader universe accounts for 65% of the total income in this country, how crazy is that?
Finally, if attention is the new economy it is important to score media consumption accordingly. Kantar set out to reveal this by conducting a study to explore how many other things people were doing when consuming a medium. Not surprisingly, cinema and print came up tops, because they tend to be environments where it is really hard to do anything other than eat at the same time.
The next piece of the puzzle I would love to investigate is how the money, and therefore the decision-making, is split between traditional strategists and online strategists. My question is: “If a medium such as print should actually be viewed as “published brands,” is anyone looking at the whole picture, and seeing the whole truth?”
I will try to be more vigilant at exploring the data and checking my facts.
* Eve Pennington is a media strategist at the Publisher Research Council.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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