Aug 16th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
Update:
As Allen Stern of Centernetworks notes in the comments here, and Mike Arrington notes in this follow-up post on USAToday, the paper says that its traffic not only hasn’t fallen but is actually up by double digits. Maybe we need to file this one under the heading: “better traffic data urgently needed.”
Original post:
There’s a post up at TechCrunch in which Mike Arrington raises the question of whether the USAToday’s high-profile launch of “Web 2.0″-style features — including comments on news stories, blogs, voting on stories, and so on — is paying off or not. According to the stats Mike has from Compete and comScore, traffic to the USAToday.com site has fallen over the past several months by anywhere from 14 to 29 per cent.
At first, I assumed — like some commenters — that this might be explained by a normal summer decline in readers, a lack of compelling news, etc. But as Mike points out in his graph, the Washington Post and the New York Times haven’t seen any similar decline over the same period.
Of course, all the usual caveats about traffic measurement should be inserted here — neither Compete nor comScore (nor any of the other major measurement agencies, for that matter) have what you would call 100-per-cent reliable statistics. But the fact that both of them together show a similar trend at least leads me to believe they are on the right track.
So what can we learn from all this? Mike wonders whether it’s possible that “news and social networking just don’t mix.” But I think Tish Grier — who was involved with Jay Rosen’s Assignment Zero crowd-sourcing project, among other things — gets closer to the mark with her post, in which she argues (as I have in the past) that, well… social networking is hard.
You can’t just set up shop and expect people to suddenly show up and start contributing and interacting. For one thing, as Chris Heuer argues, online community doesn’t fit with everyone and everything. There also needs to be real interaction from the newspaper side as well, and encouragement and moderation and so on. It’s like gardening, not construction. And there has to be a reason for people to want to participate, as someone notes in the comments on Mike’s post.
Much like gardening, it also takes time for the fruits of your labours to become obvious — I’m not sure we should write USAToday’s experiment off just yet.
Aug 2nd, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
In an effort to stay on top of the overflowing collection of links I have amassed through del.icio.us and my Google Reader shared items, I am going to start posting short items in batches. Let me know if this practice delights and/or annoys you and I will pretend to take that into consideration when it comes to continuing and/or stopping it.
- Vin Crosbie has a great essay over at Corante that is a response to BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine’s piece about newspapers entitled When Do You Stop The Presses? Vin’s point: it’s not just the package — it might just be the content too. (This one came from Paul Bradshaw’s online journalism blog).
- Ben Laurie makes an excellent point about traditional media and their Web stories, which frequently either don’t have links or don’t make them obvious — something that is even true of my employer, the Globe and Mail. (got this one from Adriana Lukas)
- Newser.com is a news aggregation site not unlike Daylife.com or Newsvine.com, and according to a post at PaidContent it is the brainchild of author Michael Wolff, former Hoover’s CEO Patrick Spain, and Caroline Miller — former editor-in-chief of New York magazine. It uses a combination of human editors and a ranking algorithm.
Got something you think I might be interested in? Feel free to email it to me, or share it with me through del.icio.us, where I am user “mathewi” — just tag the page as “share:mathewi.”
Jul 12th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Howard Owens has a great list of mistakes that newspapers have made when it comes to online, including three of my favourites:
1. Newspapers were slow to embrace blogging.
2. Fear kept newsrooms from allowing comments on stories.
3. Newspapers did not want to believe that the web was pull rather than push.
Go read the whole thing. Nice job, Howard.
Jun 14th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Couple of things I came across in the feed reader and elsewhere concerning bloggers — one sort of funny (but with a serious point) and one that looks great on first glance, but less great on second glance. First, the funny: PSFK, the marketing and fashion blog, points us towards a rant from celebrity chef Mario Batali at the blog Eater.com about foodie bloggers. The great man says that:
Many of the anonymous authors who vent on blogs rant their snarky vituperatives from behind the smoky curtain of the web. This allows them a peculiar and nasty vocabulary that seems to be taken as truth by virtue of the fact that it has been printed somewhere.
Batali goes on to mention some scurrilous rumours that were picked up by blogs (after being reported in the New York Post) and spread far and wide.
“This bit of shoddy journalism will be picked up and promulgated by the rest of the gray zone and march its merry way toward the center of the road. Eventually these blog posts become factual information lost in the sauce. But, in the end, I do not hate the blogger. I just expect, and want, more from many of them.”
Points to the chef for the use of the word “vituperatives” — nice work there. And he raises a fair point about blogs and the desire for gossip. But it seems as though Batali’s real issue is with the New York Post writer, not the bloggers. Tabloids have been dishing out questionable gossip since newspapers were first invented.
The second tidbit came from the sporting world, where the New York Islanders have set up a “blog box” for bloggers to cover their games (a slightly different approach from college baseball, which kicks bloggers out). Anyone can sit there provided they want to write about the game, and this seems like a great way to get fans involved in a game that seems to not have a very big audience in the U.S.
The only question in my mind is: Why a special box? Why not just put them in the press box? Presumably that would irritate the real journalists — although as Deadspin (which has an interview with the Islanders about the idea) noted in a post last year, bloggers should count themselves lucky they’re not in the press box, for a whole bunch of reasons.
Jun 3rd, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Great post by Ryan Sholin — whose blog Invisible Inkling has become one of the top media-related blogs I surf through every day — giving a top 10 list of things you should know about newspapers and the Internet, many of which are phrased in such a way as to be a response to popular misconceptions, such as the idea that the industry’s problems are all Google’s fault, or craigslist’s fault, and so on.
As a journalist, I particularly like number 10. Go read the whole post.
