The September 11 terrorist attacks caused a big spike in users of all media outlets i reported in The Australian post 9/11. The same can be said for the recent bombings in London – just add bloggers to the story below.
IT may be macabre, but bad news is good news for the news media. The
terror and war of the last two months have proved no exception.
Across the board, all media outlets have increased their audiences
since the terrorist attacks on September 11 and the subsequent bombing
of Afghanistan. It is the first significant international conflict to
be covered in the new media age.
Immediately after the World Trade Centre attack, people turned to the internet. Later they were hypnotised by the television news at home, transfixed by newspapers the next morning and mesmerised by news magazines at the weekend.
Ninemsn saw its traffic surge by 500 per cent overnight to 285,966 unique visitors on September 12 and session durations increase to more than eight minutes. Staff online that night pooled ninemsn’s resources to build a mini news site on the disaster as events unfolded. The site included pictures and video footage, which each received 85,000 and 100,000 page impressions respectively.
Joanna Hishon, rating director at Red Sheriff, says: Over the month of September there were massive increases on the news and information sites. People stuck at work were turning to the internet for regular updates.'' According to Red Sheriff, unique visitors to the top three Australian sites during September were up 26.2 per cent to 1,248,823 for smh.com.au, 42.1 per cent to 1,014,24 for ninemsn and 9 per cent to 939,919 for News Interactive.<br />According to Media Metrix, the most visited site was CNN, with 1,290,000 unique users who spent an average of 24 minutes there.<br />The viewing story was similar for free-to-air TV, where Nine was the biggest beneficiary. As the free-to-air stations changed their schedules, it is difficult to compare ratings before and on September 12 -- the first day the disaster was on the evening news. But the weekday news on Nine (averaged over five metropolitan cities) scored 1,596,676 viewers in the week prior to the attacks. On September 12, between 6pm and 7pm it averaged 2,165,249 viewers, peaking at 2,323,216.<br />Once home people slumped in their sofas to digest the horror. Paul Fenn, the Nine network's news chief, says the refugee crisis had already stimulated viewers' interest in news before the World Trade Centre attacks.But September 11 was a whole new ball game. Now we have settled back to the pre-Tampa ratings, but there were five weeks when we were really up.”
Meanwhile, pay-TV viewers were hypnotised. CNN, in the week to September 15, increased its average viewing from nine minutes to three hours and four minutes. Sky News increased viewing time from 50 minutes to one hour and 36 minutes.
The numbers of people watching also increased dramatically. CNN’s viewers, for the first week, increased by more than 2000 per cent, from 85,974 to 1,829,757; Sky News’s figures doubled from 756,945 to 1,479,437.
What this demonstrated was the unique attraction of CNN’s rolling news during times of crisis and war, as demonstrated in the Gulf War in the early 1990s.
What surprised Angelo Frangopoulos, managing editor of Sky News, is that the level of viewing has been maintained and that people want to access news at any time of day. He says Sky’s viewing success is built on the fact that it is Australian and put together locally in addition to having access to BskyB news in Britain and the ABC in the US. It's all about relevance,'' says Frangopoulos.The same is true everywhere.”
The next morning the scramble was to the newsstands, where newspaper sales have been stagnating in recent years. Campbell Reid, editor of Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph, says: Obviously, after September 11 we were expecting very strong sales but what surprised us is that we underestimated what we were selling in the weeks afterwards ... There is a hunger to know what's going on. What we have always known in newspapers is that whatever devices you try and employ, nothing sells like big news. September 11 is the biggest thing in a generation.''<br />Peter Blunden, editor-in-chief of the Telegraph's sister tabloid in Melbourne, the Herald Sun, saw his circulation, which usually hovers around the 560,000 mark, peak at more than 700,000.<br />He says:Often with these big stories like with Princess Di you have a hitch for a week or two. I’ve been editing dailies for 12 years and have never seen anything like this before. We’re a minimum of 20,000 a day up, measuring apples with apples, year on year.” He says there is no sign of his current sales boost disappearing.
According to magazine distributor NDD, immediately after the crisis the circulations of most magazines, except news titles, slumped. The dull newsstand sales of Australia’s two news titles — Time and The Bulletin — were up 8 per cent in the week from September 12 to September 18, and 95 per cent in the week from September 19 to September 25.
Local Time editor Steve Waterson says the magazine usually sells about 10,000 copies on the newsstands. An ad-free newsstand extra with a print run of 80,000 produced in the September 11 week sold out.
The next week 30,000 copies were sold on the newsstands, 26,000 the week after, and 20,000 the week after that. Subscription renewals are also up.
He says: “The reason we’ve done so well is that we are very much an American publication produced out of New York by 200 journalists and editors. There is so much to take in as it is a global war. It’s something that’s not immediately digestible.”