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What Does Murdoch Own in the U.S.?
What Does Murdoch Own in the U.S.?
Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism (Pew Research Center)
Rupert Murdoch and his company have generated scandalous headlines about its activities in the U.K. The News of the World hacking and bribery saga has led to an FBI investigation into whether Murdoch staff might have engaged in any similar actions in the United States.
Murdoch has a range of media investments in the U.S. including film, entertainment and news programming. The Who Owns the News Media Database in PEJ’s State of the News Media 2011 report provides details about News Corporation’s holdings in the U.S. See Murdoch’s media companies in the U.S.
For a list of non-news related properties, including sports channels, and entertainment websites, click here.
Visit PEJ’s Who Owns the Media database to compare and explore other companies that own news properties in the United States.
A New Equilibrium: After Passage of Landmark Credit Card Reform, Interest Rates and Fees Have Stabilized
A New Equilibrium: After Passage of Landmark Credit Card Reform, Interest Rates and Fees Have Stabilized
Source: Pew Safe Credit Cards Project (Pew Research Center)
Credit card holders are seeing stabilized interest rates, the elimination of overlimit penalty charges, a reduction in late fees charged by banks and minimal changes in annual fees since the Credit CARD Act of 2009 took effect. The study, A New Equilibrium: After Passage of Landmark Credit Card Reform, Interest Rates and Fees Have Stabilized, is the latest in a series of reports from the Pew Safe Credit Cards Project that has examined all consumer credit cards offered online by the nation’s 12 largest banks and 12 largest credit union issuers. Together, these institutions control more than 90 percent of the nation’s outstanding credit card debt. For this latest report, which measures how the industry has changed since the passage of the Credit CARD Act, Pew collected data in March 2010 and January 2011.
Pew’s findings, explained in greater detail within the report, are as follows:
- Interest rates have stabilized. Median advertised interest rates for purchases on bank-issued credit cards held steady at 12.99 to 20.99 percent. Likewise, bank cash advance and penalty interest rates remained unchanged from 2010 to 2011. During that same period, median credit union purchase rates slightly increased and cash advance rates declined.
- Penalties cost less. Since the enactment of the legislation, overlimit penalty fees have all but vanished. Only 11 percent of bank credit cards now include them, while the largest credit unions have eliminated them entirely. Pew’s research finds that late fees continue to be widespread. However, the cost of fees has gone down now that the law limits first-time late fees to $25 in most cases.
- Annual fees have changed little. Last year, roughly 14 percent of both bank and credit union cards carried annual fees; in 2011, that number held steady for credit union-issued cards and rose to 21 percent for bank-issued cards. The amount charged for annual fees remained at a median of $59 for banks and $25 for credit unions. Forty percent of cards with annual fees included no-fee promotions for the first year.
- Overlimit penalty fees have become increasingly rare. Only 11 percent of bank credit cards now carry them (down from 23 percent in 2010 and more than 80 percent in 2009), while the largest credit unions have eliminated overlimit fees completely. Late fees continued to be included on more than 95 percent of all credit card products.
+ Full Report (PDF)
+ Charts (PDF)
Where People Go, How They Get There and What Lures Them Away
Where People Go, How They Get There and What Lures Them Away
Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism (Pew Research Center)
Whatever the future of journalism, much of it depends on understanding the ways that people navigate the digital news environment—the behavior of what might be called the new news consumer.
Despite the unprecedented level of data about what news people consume online and how they consume it, understanding these new metrics has often proven elusive. The statistics are complicated, sometimes contradictory, and often introduce new information whose meaning is not clear.
To shed more light on Web news behavior, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has conducted an in-depth study of detailed audience statistics from the Nielsen Company. The study examines the top 25 news websites in popularity in the United States, delving deeply into four main areas of audience behavior: how users get to the top news sites; how long they stay during each visit; how deep they go into a site; and where they go when they leave.
Overall, the findings suggest that there is not one group of news consumers online but several, each of which behaves differently. These differences call for news organizations to develop separate strategies to serve and make money from each audience.
The findings also reveal that while search aggregators remain the most popular way users find news, the universe of referring sites is diverse. Social media is rapidly becoming a competing driver of traffic. And far from obsolete, home pages are usually the most popular page for most of the top news sites.
What users do with news content, the study also suggests, could significantly influence the economics of the news industry. Understanding not only what content users will want to consume but also what content they are likely to pass along may be a key to how stories are put together and even what stories get covered in the first place.
State of the News Media 2011
State of the News Media 2011
Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism (Pew Research Center)
By several measures, the state of the American news media improved in 2010.
After two dreadful years, most sectors of the industry saw revenue begin to recover. With some notable exceptions, cutbacks in newsrooms eased. And while still more talk than action, some experiments with new revenue models began to show signs of blossoming.
Among the major sectors, only newspapers suffered continued revenue declines last year — an unmistakable sign that the structural economic problems facing newspapers are more severe than those of other media. When the final tallies are in, we estimate 1,000 to 1,500 more newsroom jobs will have been lost — meaning newspaper newsrooms are 30% smaller than in 2000.
Beneath all this, however, a more fundamental challenge to journalism became clearer in the last year. The biggest issue ahead may not be lack of audience or even lack of new revenue experiments. It may be that in the digital realm the news industry is no longer in control of its own future.
The Public Renders a Split Verdict On Changes in Family Structure
The Public Renders a Split Verdict On Changes in Family Structure
Source: Pew Research Center
From Overview:
The American public is sharply divided in its judgments about the sweeping changes in the structure of the American family that have unfolded over the past half century. About a third generally accepts the changes, a third is tolerant but skeptical and a third considers them bad for society.
This finding emerges from an analysis that the Pew Research Center conducted of responses to a survey in which a nationally representative sample of 2,691 adults were asked whether they considered the following seven trends to be good, bad or of no consequence to society: more unmarried couples raising children; more gay and lesbian couples raising children; more single women having children without a male partner to help raise them; more people living together without getting married; more mothers of young children working outside the home; more people of different races marrying each other; and more women not ever having children.
About a third (31%) of survey respondents are Accepters. Anywhere from half to two-thirds of this group say these trends make no difference to society. But of the remainder who express an opinion, more say that most of the trends are good than say they are bad. Women, Hispanics, East Coast residents and adults who seldom or never attend religious services are more likely than others to be represented in this group.
A similar share of the public (32%) rejects virtually every trend that the Accepters tolerate or endorse. A majority say five of the seven changes are bad for society; the only trends they generally accept are interracial marriage and fewer women having children. They are the only group in which a majority (61%) says it is harmful for mothers of small children to work outside the home. Whites, older adults, Republicans, the religiously observant and married adults are overrepresented in this group. They are the Rejecters.
The third and somewhat larger group (37%) are the Skeptics.1 While they generally share most of the tolerant views of the Accepters, they also express concern about the impact of these trends on society. On one of the trends — single motherhood — they and the Accepters have stark differences. Virtually all Skeptics say mothers having children without male partners to help raise them is bad for society. Among Accepters, just 2% say this. When asked about the six other trends examined in the survey, a majority of Skeptics say each makes no difference or is good for society. Young people, Democrats and political independents, and minorities are disproportionately more likely to be in this group.
The remainder of this report explores these three groups in more detail. The next section examines how the three groups differ from each other on the seven demographic trends included in the survey. The section that follows looks at the demographics of each group, and a final section examines the views of the three groups on other issues.
