NAEP Media TrendsNAEP Media TrendsAn Informal Review of NAEP Media Coverage Over the Last Year

NAEP in the News Over the Last Year•Trends of “Signal” and “Noise”•Slightly more frequent and consistent follow-up stories in 2007

Source: Topix.net

NAEP Searches on Web Engines•Fairly steady with upward trend

Source: Google Trends

Science

TUDAHSTS

Blog Conversations on NAEP•Explosion of posts, peaking at Grade 12/HSTS release

HSTS

Why the Increase in Blogging?

Short for Web-Log, a “blog” is an opportunity for an amateur-expert to immediately publish his or her expertise and opinion.

Blogs are important because they nurture an online community around common interests, and push forward important conversations in niche fields.

Because NAEP is the Gold Standard in terms of federal educational data, it is considered the barometer of evaluation in an environment of data-based educational reform.

This credibility has been the driving force behind NAEP-based national standards.

As more niche professionals explore blogs to express their viewpoints, and technology (such as RSS) allow consumers to filter their news intake, blogs will continue to flourish as the forum for the discussion of NAEP data.

What does this all mean?What does this all mean?•The upswing in blogs for news-consumption represents the “long-tail” business trend of online-consumption.•The long-tail represents a trend of catering to minority preferences by offering niche lines of distribution.•In the above graph, the green area would represent traditional media-outlets and traffic, whereas the yellow “tail” would represent more blogs with less traffic.

Valuing the TailValuing the TailAlthough blogs are sometimes neglected by communication firms for their perceived lack of journalistic integrity, the area that the long-tail represents (in terms of consumers) is increasingly matching that of traditional distributors.

Moreover, as discussed before, bloggers tend to be experts or aficionados (i.e. target audience members).

Take-awayTake-away

Increased blog-traffic should be a desirable and positively viewed trend,

especially in social-marketing or education-based public relations,

where brand and image-management is less of a concern.