Nielsen tracked total audience — both on air and online — for the ABC affiliates in Seattle and Portland.  The researchers found that “each received at least a 3% bump in the 25-to-54 demo in the May 2011 sweeps period.”

So, at a time when audiences for the on air product may be shrinking, TV stations have an opportunity to make up for some of that loss with their online content.

Also, Web sites may be able to help stations reach more males. In Seattle, late local news viewership skewed 71% female. Yet a majority 53% of komonews.com users were male.

According to the story on mediapost.com, Nielsen is trying to expand its measurement of TV and online usage in local markets.

Gannett recruiter Virgil Smith says employers are looking for journalists who understand the technology and what the audience wants from a mobile device.

“From a writing standpoint, there’s the importance of writing stories that are shorter and more immediately compelling,” says Smith, “but still give the reader the opportunity to go get more on a website or in a printed product.”

Smith says journalists must be ready to adjust writing and other production skills to meet the needs of an evolving mobile environment.

“The fact is that 90% of Americans have some sort of mobile device and that’s going to grow,” Smith says. “Mobile phones more will get more and more sophisticated.”

Just this month, the Society of Professional Journalists launched a mobile newsgathering training module , which is available at low-cost to newsrooms and other journalism organizations.  The module focuses on using smart phones in the newsgathering and dissemination process.

The shift to mobile consumption is already affecting the production of news content, but Smith says the fundamentals remain critically important.

“The reporting skills and values of journalism – that should not change,” Smith says. “If anything that needs to be improved. Consumers rely on professional journalists to cut through clutter, to do good writing and good editing and provide clarity and truth regardless of method of consumption.”

A big chunk of the 30-minute video is devoted to the newish “subscribe” function on Facebook.  Lavrusik says Facebook was very intentional with the word subscribe.  He says it’s all about sharing content, not whether you “like” someone or not.

“It allows you to use your profile in a very professional way,” says Lavrusik.

So, what do you think? Does this end the debate on whether you need to have a professional and a personal Facebook presence? I think yes, one is all you need. But how about you?

The vast majority of the postings promoted the organizations’ own work and sent users back to their websites. On the main news feeds studied, fully 93% of the postings over the course of the week offered a link to a news story on the organization’s own website.

The researchers point out that this is reminiscent of the first news organization websites.

Initially, news organizations, worried about losing audience, rarely linked to content outside their own web domain.

Obviously, social media is a valuable promotional tool, but my belief is that social media 2.0 will emphasize the sharing nature of Twitter and other social networks, and the organizations that figure out how to do that most effectively will profit from audiences that feel they have more of a relationship with their news providers.

“Everyone should have a smartphone in the future; it’s baseline gear,” says Damon Kiesow of Boston.com.

Speaking at the Society of Professional Journalists convention in New Orleans, Kiesow says newsrooms have to get more “intentional and strategic” when it comes to mobile.

“It doesn’t work to just go buy 20 iPhones and tell the reporters to figure it out,”  says Kiesow. “You need to know what you want to accomplish and provide training.

Kiesow also says that journalists’ smartphone should have these features:

• Both still & video cameras
• An active developer community that keeps coming up with new apps
• GPS capabilities
• Wifi  (4G must faster and better for sending video/photo — though iPhone 5 probably won’t have it)

That’s according to the latest figures from the annual RTDNA/Hofstra Survey, which found that 42% of stations increased their news production in the last year.

So which time periods grew most?

Weekdays at 4:30 am came out on top, but it had only a small lead over Saturday morning additions.  Sunday morning and weekdays from 6 pm – 7 pm were close behind.

TV News Check does a great job of explaining exactly what equipment various news organizations are using and how they work.

MSNBC uses generic Windows PCs connected with Barco’s Folsom ImagePro HD ($7,499) and Analog Way’s Broad Scan HD ($6,250) scan converters. These converters can take any video on a computer screen and convert it for broadcast use.

That’s a bit pricey for most college TV stations, for example, but there is a low-end solution.

The basic Convert DVI, priced at $995, allows Skype calls, YouTube videos and other computer video to be used full screen on broadcast TV. The Convert DVI Plus, priced at $1,495 and introduced last April, adds region-of-interest scaling and positioning of the image. With this feature, the anchor’s image and the Skype subject’s face can appear on the screen simultaneously — a popular feature for interviews within newscasts.

And then there’s the mid-range, which the manufacturer says works well when it comes to dealing with lip-sync issues.

Ensemble Design’s Brighteye Mitto converters cost more, but add features. Ranging from $2,500 to $5,900, the Mitto converters can handle video from a wider range of sources with better processing and control. The top model allows several screens to be open at once; offers a memory register to store settings, lip-sync adjustment for audio, iPhone and iPad video inputs, a remote GPI control panel and switching from a PC screen.

However, the sweet spot for broadcasters doing Skype phone calls on the air is $3,900, said Cindy Zuelsdorf, marketing executive at Ensemble Designs. In addition to high-end scaling and filtering algorithms, the $3,900 model features audio delay controls that allows broadcasters to adjust the audio stream with respect to the video in order to achieve proper lip-sync.

The article goes on to include quotes from news managers who use a couple of the options outlined above.   It’s worth a read simply to find out how technology is once again changing the TV news game.

“Want to be a producer? asks Barkley.

He’s not kidding, either.  Year after year, news directors lament that for every reporter job they get dozens of applicants, if not more.  For a producer job, some in small markets get no more than a handful.

But what if you’ve never had the opportunity to produce a newscast?

“Show me some writing,” says news director Jeff Houston of WTVA in Tupelo, Miss.  “But be sure your samples are concise.  Remember, you may have only 20 seconds of a newscast to explain what’s going on in Libya.”

Stan Sanders, news director at WDBD in Jackson, Miss., has been known to take  a chance on hiring new college grads as producers, if they prove that they have three things:

1. Knowledge of the station. 

2. Knowledge of the market.

3. A passion for the work.

“This is not a job,” says Sanders.  He says he wants to hire people who get to work early and stay late because they love what they do.

Sanders also says producers and assignment editors are tough to find and hard to hold on to — once they have experience, they move very quickly to bigger markets or bigger roles at their television stations.

If you are lucky enough to have produced a few newscasts, select the best to show a prospective employer and include a written critique of what you think went well and what you would do to improve the show next time.

Breaking it down to network evening, network morning and cable news, we find that cable spent a major chunk of it’s time (15.3%) on the 2010 election compared to the network evening shows (5.3%). 

That raises a “chicken-or-the-egg” question — did cable start to own politics first or did the networks just stop covering politics as much?  The network morning shows covered all three topics just about equally — in the 9% range.

Online, economic news dominated with 13.9% of the newshole devoted to the topic.

The report has a terrific interactive tool to let you compare other media types, including national radio and newspaper coverage, and allows you to explore how other topics fared in terms of amount of coverage.

Try testing your knowledge of the year in news with the site’s interactive quiz. (I got 9 out of 10.)

According to Adgate, the emphasis on sweeps periods leaves resources depleted throughout the rest of the year, and that certainly does happen in local TV newsrooms.

He also points out that advertisers have been calling for year-round measurement of audience for quite some time.

Add to the that a concern about the methodology Nielsen uses and Adgate’s argument seems pretty strong.

Nielsen sends out hundreds of thousands of diaries every November, February, May and July — the four quarterly sweeps periods — to measure shows’ ratings in local households.

This season Nielsen will mail out TV diaries to 185 of the country’s smaller TV markets. But diaries depend too much on viewers’ participation; have poor response rates, particularly with young demographics and ethnic groups; and suffer from the proliferation of TV sets in every household, which makes it harder to track what everyone’s watching. Last month the Media Ratings Council, an industry watchdog, withdrew its accreditation for Nielsen in “diary-only” TV markets, the first time since 1965 that the council hasn’t accredited the Nielsen TV diary.

At the same time, Nielsen People Meters are continually measuring ratings in the 25 largest TV markets. No diaries, program stunts or sweeps are needed in these markets, which account for 48% of all TV homes and more than 50% of all local broadcast TV revenue. In 2006 Nielsen actually announced plans to eliminate paper diaries, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Now, some broadcast journalists argue that sweeps do give them a chance to do more in-depth stories and to have those stories promoted, so they worry if sweeps go away, so will the opportunity to produce as much special content.

So, what do you think?  Is there any point to sweeps periods anymore?