Now that it’s become clear that many journalists covering politics and government agree to quotation-approval as a condition of access, it’s tough not to see the pageant of democracy as just that: a carefully constructed performance meant to showcase the participants in the best light.

via The Puppetry of Quotation Approval – NYTimes.com.

Last year the total revenue was more than $110 million and Vice is “on track in 2012 to generate significantly more”, Dan’l Hewitt, general manager of AdVice, a division of Vice Media, told Journalism.co.uk.

As Vice moved online its focus evolved into online video, which has been driven by developments in technology. “The cost of video equipment and editing software came down, so we were able to create more video content for ourselves,” Hewitt said.

“That started around five or six years ago and then with new platforms coming into the fold, places like YouTube and Vimeo and Facebook, we were able to syndicate and distribute our content to new audiences in those places.”

via From fanzine to HBO: How Vice became a video success story | Media news | Journalism.co.uk.

If you work anywhere near media, you’ll want to take a long look at this graph. It tells you where Americans direct our attention (in BLUE) and where advertisers pay money to capture our attention (in RED).

— Takeaway #1: We still love TV.

— Takeaway #2: Advertisers still love print.

— Takeaway #3: Audiences move faster than advertisers.

According to this chart — adapted from a Mary Meeker slideshow excerpted by Bill Gross — we spend more time engaging with mobile devices than reading print. But print publications still get 25-times more ad money than mobile. Either the eyeballs are moving faster than the advertisers, who will eventually stop paying for print … or the ad teams don’t think a minute spent around mobile ads is worth a minute spend around print ads. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.

We can take this chart in a lot of directions. Could print see another mass exodus of money? Is mobile advertising about to explode?

via Business – Derek Thompson – This Graph Is Disastrous for Print and Great for Facebook—or the Opposite! – The Atlantic.

What’s the most significant journalism trend of 2012 so far?

This isn’t a trend yet. I have one of the new iPads. For both my email and Twitter, I’m able to talk into it and get speech to text (with Dragonfly voice-recognition software). It’s become more and more efficacious, which is great and convenient. If you start to think — one of the only barriers of people publishing is people have to type. What if that goes away? Just a huge explosion. Instead of going on the phone and talking about prom night, we’re either at or near a place where they can speak it in their phone and it’ll appear in text. What if people don’t have to type to get it into there? Does that make what we do more or less valuable? There’s more for us to sift through. But we’re the signal in the noise, and it’ll make us more valuable. I’m fairly democratic in my impulses. I don’t want more crap out there, but I think the fact that I need to type my thoughts means I share less of them.

via New York Times columnist David Carr talks media | TPMDC.

“Sixteen months ago we received the same number of monthly referrals from search as social. Now 40% of traffic comes from social media,” Scott Havens, senior vice president of finance and digital operations at The Atlantic Media Company, said in a phone conversation ahead of his on-stage interview at our Mashable Connect conference in Orlando, Fla. last weekend. “Truly [our writers] are not really thinking about SEO anymore. Now it’s about how we can spin a story so that it goes viral.”

via Why ‘The Atlantic’ No Longer Cares About SEO.

However, the smarter operators have realised that they can use social media channels and tools, especially in real-time scenarios, to keep them in their ‘consideration mix’ (this theory that when a consumer is considering between you and your competitors, they will lean more favourably towards you because of the value you have added elsewhere).

via AdamVincenzini.com: 10 Innovative Examples of Traditional Media Using Social Media.

When journalists were asked by MuckRack.com to offer up their biggest PR pet peeves recently, it sparked a spirited Twitter conversation. But then, PR folks got their turn, and what ensued sheds light on both of the industries, how they work together, and what their futures hold.

via MediaShift . Journalists’ Biggest Pet Peeves About PR — And Vice Versa | PBS.

#realtalk from your editor.

News media outlets are increasingly realizing that online readers are finding their websites’ content through people sharing stories on social media.Finding a way to sell advertising against those readers has been a challenge.The New York Times Co. unveiled Thursday a new social-media advertising program that attempts to address that quandary. Called Ricochet, the program lets marketers pick a select number of stories from Times Co. properties, such as the Times or Boston Globe, that are relevant to their social media audiences and create special links for sharing those stories. Anyone clicking on the social media links will see the marketer’s ads next to the stories for a specified period of time.To keep a dividing line between editorial and advertising, advertisers won’t be able to pick stories that mention their brands for at least a week after the stories have run.The program’s launch client is SAP, the business software company, which is picking Times stories about topics like big data and cloud computing. It will share these stories with its 127,000 Facebook friends, 47,000 Twitter followers, 113,000 LinkedIn followers and 2,000 YouTube followers. Anyone of those people clicking on the stories will see ads from a new SAP ad campaign that rolled out last week.

via New York Times Launches Social Media Ad Program – Digits – WSJ.

More than ever, people are using Twitter, Facebook and other social media sources to learn about what’s happening in the world as traditional news outlets become increasingly less relevant to the digital generation.American forces’ raid on Osama Bin Laden, Whitney Houston‘s death, the Hudson River plane landing — these are just a few of many major news stories ordinary citizens broke on Twitter first. Professional journalists, meanwhile, use Twitter all the time to break news quickly before writing up full articles.And the business side is going digital too. Online news now generates more revenue than print newspapers.

via How Social Media Is Taking Over the News Industry [INFOGRAPHIC].