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Nieman: New data on the Daily suggests social media decline

Sarah Marshall — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 16:11:11 +0000

Joshua Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab has been analysing the success – or as he believes the decline – of Rupert Murdoch’s iPad only US newspaper, the Daily, by monitoring tweets sent directly from the app.

This post is interesting, not only as an insight into possible problems at the Daily, but for some of the techniques and tools Benton uses for his analysis.

No one outside News Corp. and Apple has a reliable way of knowing how often people read the Daily. But there is one way in which the Daily’s app interacts with the public web — through Twitter sharing. On nearly every page in the app, there’s a sharing button in the top right that allows the reader to share a link to the story on Twitter or other social networks. (A few pages, like the table of contents and user-customized pages, aren’t sharable.)

Benton has used PostRank, a Canadian social media indexing service that analyses how individual web pages are shared through social media.

It’s easy to think of a tweet as just 140 characters, but there’s a lot of metadata around that little snippet of text: when it was tweeted, who tweeted it, how many followers she has, what date she joined Twitter, and more. Amidst all that data is information about where each tweet was generated. Did it come from Twitter’s web interface, or from the official Twitter BlackBerry app, or a third-party app like Echofon or TweetDeck? That’s in there.

And thanks to Twitter’s requirement that app developers register with its API to allow in-app tweeting, that means you can track every time someone tweets from within the Daily.

The data doesn’t look good for the Daily. Its activity on Twitter seems to match my own perceptions of how they’re doing — an early rush of excitement; a decline as people lost interest and the app struggled with technical problems; a plateau once the tech got sorted out; and then another decline once the app started charging users.

Nieman Lab’s full post is at this link.

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UK publishers dominate top grossing iPhone news apps list

John Thompson — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 18:09:42 +0000

British news publishers are leading the way in the iPhone app download charts, according to rankings displayed in Apple’s iTunes store.

The Guardian (version 1) tops the list, followed by MailOnline in third place. The top five grossing UK news apps are:

iTunes also lists the top free iPhone news apps but apparently uses an algorithm based on the last four days of sales/downloads. So, bearing in mind this is more of a snapshot (which may also be a bit skewed because we are currently in holiday season), the top five free UK news apps are currently:

At the time of writing, they also appeared in the same ranking for worldwide news apps.

The top five paid-for UK news apps are currently:

Journalism.co.uk’s own free news app, which features this blog, our main news, editorial job listings and press releases, is currently ranked 72.

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Magazine publisher Imagine looks to iPads and iPhones with digital editions launch

Laura Oliver — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:45:42 +0000

Specialist magazine group Imagine Publishing – which produces titles including Retro Gamer, X360 and Advanced Photoshop magazine – has made its entire magazine portfolio available for Apple iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users.

It’s no surprise given the publisher’s commitment to creating digital edions, its range of online-only titles and the digital focus of many magazines that it’s decided to launch paid-for apps across these platforms.

But interestingly these applications, developed by technology company PixelMags, while creating digital editions of the titles rather than an iPhone or iPad-specific version, will feature embedded video clips.

What’s more, digital magazine subscriptions created by PixelMag are certified by the Audit Bureau of Circulations electronic, so the apps will potentially count towards Imagine’s circulation figures.

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Metro UK and Metro Herald launch iPhone apps

Laura Oliver — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:26:35 +0000

Both titles last week launched free-to-download applications for the iPhone featuring scrolling editions, which means users are presented with a digital replica of the print edition that can be browsed page-by-page or searched through by keyword.

The apps have been developed by PageSuite, which produces digital, online editions of newspapers including the Metro.

Readers can also use the apps to download articles or editions to read them offline.

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Bloomberg runs false obituary for Apple’s Steve Jobs

Judith Townend — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:51:38 +0000

The death of Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs was prematurely announced yesterday afternoon by Bloomberg.

A pre-prepared stock obituary was accidentally posted to Bloomberg’s corporate client wire service, even through the story was marked ‘Hold for release – Do not use’.

It was quickly spotted by a user, and sent to Gawker.com, where the obituary can still be read in full.

Bloomberg was quick to retract the story, and yesterday published a message on its wire saying: “An incomplete story referencing Apple Inc. was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News at 4:27 p.m.New York time today.”

At Telegraph.co.uk Matthew Moore reports: “The stock obituary was published ‘momentarily’ after a routine update by a reporter, and was ‘immediately deleted’, Bloomberg said.”

According to Moore, ‘Jobs has been reluctant to publicly discuss his health, but recently denied claims that his cancer [from which he has previously suffered] had returned’.

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