Valuing returning readers over vagrant visitors, a strategy extolled by Gawker a few weeks back and termed “reader affection”, has caught on at non-profit investigative site MinnPost. Speaking at the ASNE NewsNow Ideas Summit this week, editor Joel Kramer announced that MinnPost is also a fan of the affection metric, and aims to build up a “community of intensely engaged followers”. From Nieman:

The strategy, for MinnPost, is a financial as much as an editorial one: It’s about concentrating impact, but also about monetising that impact. The outlet’s ultimate goal in developing a core readership, Kramer said, is to “convert that community into enough money to sustain the journalism”.

Full story at this link…

Read Journalism.co.uk’s interview with Kramer at this link.

• Nieman Journalism Lab: MinnPost trials ‘real-time’ advertising
• MinnPost moves ‘Real-Time’ ads out of beta
• Beatblogging.org: Not-for-profit MinnPost news site raises $13,190 in micro-donations
• Nieman Journalism Lab: Gawker’s new traffic metric measures ‘reader affection’
• Nieman Journalism Lab: MinnPost and blog ‘micro-sponsorship’

In 2009, blog network Gawker Media introduced a new, stricter commenting system in an attempt to free the site from certain readers who were dominating comment threads. Nieman Journalism Lab has the full rundown of how the system now works, which includes trusted commenters having greater access to discussions and most recent comments placed at the top rather than bottom of threads to steer discussion.

“We’ll be able to encourage the kind of discussion that *we* want – not one that is dominated merely by the most prolific of our commenters. It’s our party; we get to decide who comes,” wrote founder Nick Denton at the time.

A graph on the blog of Gawker Media chief technology officer Tom Plunkett shows an initial dip in comment volume when the changes were first made, followed by a steep incline:

Though there were some calls to do so, purging commenter accounts is not a solution for the out-of-control commenter community. Nor is a large moderation staff. We believe pruning, and a commenting platform as we have implemented, will lead to increased participation, while at the same time encouraging quality. This data, and the subjective opinion of many, seem to back this assertion.

Full Nieman Journalism Lab report at this link…

• Nieman Journalism Lab: Gawker stirs up online commenting with new #tips tags
• Poynter: NY Times introduces unmoderated comments for ‘trusted commenters’
• WordPress rolls out Twitter and Facebook comments options
• Telegraph writer attacks ‘spooky’ Lib Dem ‘posse’ for critical comments
• Comment Central: New commenting system for Times Online

While others pour over pageviews and underscore uniques, Gawker Media has been quietly working on a new metric, one designed to measure so-called “reader affection”. This new metric is called “branded traffic” and is, according to Nieman Journalism Lab, “both more nebulous and more significant” than traditional forms of measurement.

The idea is to measure the number of visitors that arrive at the site via a direct search for its name or variations on its branding, or by typing in the site URL directly, and distinguish them from more incidental traffic.

The metric comes from a simple compound: direct type-in visits plus branded search queries in Google Analytics. In other words, Gawker Media is bifurcating its visitors in its evaluation of them, splitting them into two groups: the occasional audience, you might call it, and the core audience.

The original Gawker release highlights the value the site places on turning the internet passerby into an affectionate reader:

While distributing content across the web is essential for attracting the interest of internet passersby, courting these wanderers, massaging them into occasional visitors, and finally gaining their affection as daily readers is far more important. This core audience – borne of a compounding of word of mouth, search referrals, article recommendations, and successive enjoyed visits that result in regular readership – drives our rich site cultures and premium advertising products.

Full post at this link…

• Nieman Journalism Lab: MinnPost editor on new audience building strategy
• Poynter: Five ways to turn traffic spikes into return visits
• @SoE: Guardian reporter: planning to use Hitwise figures in Telegraph marketing again?
• Big numbers vs local audience – what should regional newspapers chase?
• Gawker: Gawker to sell three blogs from its network

Dramatically named blogger and journalism entrepreneur Lockhart Steele has guested on mediabistro’s Media Beat video series in the last two days, with the last episode appearing later this afternoon. Steele began blogging around the beginning of the decade while working in magazines. He was recruited by Nick Denton as Gawker began to pick up traffic and later became managing editor of the site, seeing it expand from just a handful of editorial staff to around 150.

In the second installment of the Media Beat series, below, Steele discusses getting traffic through Twitter and Facebook, diversifying revenue streams online, and “looking for niches where we can be a little bit weird”.

Follow this link for the first installment, in which Steele discusses starting out in blogging and breaking away from Gawker to establish his own blogging network.

• Gawker: Gawker to sell three blogs from its network
• Mediabistro: New Gawker.TV powered by interns; hopes site will sell ads
• Wired: Q and A with Gawker’s Nick Denton
• Mashable: How paywalls are changing social media strategies
• Q&A with hyperlocal site boasting 15,000 newsletter subscribers

Mediabistro.com reports on the launch of a new spin-off site for Gawker – a video website, Gawker.TV, manned by around 16 interns working under a video editor.

Videos are a big traffic driver for Gawker and founder Nick Denton has admitted that selling ads will be easier on a site with a less specific focus, according to Mediabistro.

Full post at this link…

• Fishbowl NY: Sacked Gawker editor says Denton’s role is a conflict of interest
• Nick Denton: Gawker revenues up 45 per cent in first half of 2009
• Defamer.gawker.com: Defamer ‘folds into’ Gawker
• Media Beat: Former Gawker managing editor talks niches and revenue streams
• Why Nick Denton wouldn’t set up shop in UK

Last week Gawker asked readers to help it translate an article into Russian from Conde Nast’s GQ, which the publisher reportedly went to great lengths to prevent from being read in Russia, because it contained criticisms of Vladimir Putin.

A full translation of the article has been completed and the process behind it can be read about at this link.

Issues of copyright and press freedom arise from this – Journalism.co.uk will be contacting Gawker to find out more.

• New York Times: No Justice for Anna Politkovskaya
• Journalism Daily: More on online sub-editing and public interest journalism
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – advice on copyright and how to claim for breach
• Washington Post: ‘Whiny WashPost Reporter Makes His Point: Respect the Genuine Article’
• Daily Finance: Conde Nast brings in consultants to ‘rethink business’

Over at the Reuters blog, Felix Salmon does some calculations about Gawker and blog profitability, following a post on the Nieman Journalism Lab.

“(…) overall it’s easy to see how Gawker has now grown to the point at which it’s a highly profitable media company.”

Full post at this link…

• Seeking Alpha: the end of micropublishing in the blogosphere?
• Vanityfair.com: Business Insider’s Henry Blodget vs Reuters’ Felix Salmon
• Felix Salmon: ‘Online subscription revenues won’t make newspapers profitable again’
• Felix Salmon: On business journalism and business blogging
• Is CNN about to buy Mashable?

Well, that’s Ian Shapira’s suggested headline for a follow-up story on Gawker, after the site picked up on and heavily excerpted his story on ‘branding consultant’ Anne Loehr.

Gawker included a link to his original article – but only at the very bottom of the post.

Shapira’s initial happiness at having his story featured on Gawker turned to disillusion as he questioned the benefits of traffic driven by Gawker to his original piece, he writes in a follow-up piece.

Gawker may make money from advertising around its aggregation of original reporting from other sources, which have invested time and money into the report, but does a spike in traffic help the Washington Post’s bottom line, he asks.

“After talking with Denton [Nick Denton, Gawker founder], Nolan [Hamilton Nolan, the Gawker author] and others for this article, I still want a fluid blogosphere, but one where aggregators – newspapers included – are more transparent about whom they’re heavily excerpting. They should mention the original source immediately. And if bloggers want to excerpt at length, a fee would be the nice, ethical gesture,” he writes.

Full article at this link…

• paidContent.org: ‘The fallacy of the link economy’ for news sites
• Citizen Media Law Project: The laws of news aggregation
• Public Agenda: Private newspapers in Africa hit by advertising slump
• Gawker alleges computer cut-backs for WSJ.com staff
• Mediabistro: New Gawker.TV powered by interns; hopes site will sell ads

The plunge has already been pretty terrifying for a range of companies from Yahoo and IAC to the newspapers,” writes Gawker founder Nick Denton, referring to his previous prediction that media companies should prepare for a 40 per cent downturn in advertising revenue over the economic cycle.

“But I was wrong in one respect: a few premium internet brands, Gawker’s among them, have withstood the advertising apocalypse.”

Full post at this link…

• Ad Age: Internet media employment at peak since 2001 despite falls elsewhere
• Washington Post: ‘Whiny WashPost Reporter Makes His Point: Respect the Genuine Article’
• Jo Wadsworth: Where is advertising moving online?
• Ernst & Young: Online search will help reverse fortunes of display and classified ads
• paidContent.org: CondeNet cuts staff across all departments

From Politico: a report on a panel at the Institute’s Ideas Festival in Colarado, asking ‘What’s the News Worth to You?’

For us Brits, this is the interesting part:

“During the panel’s Q&A, Gawker Media’s Nick Denton sarcastically thanked the American newspaper industry for being so unaggressive, making it possible for ‘thugs’ like him to succeed.

“Conversely, Denton said he’d never set up shop in England. ‘Every single day, those editors get up and try to kill each other,’ said Denton. Not so in the U.S.”

(Hat-tip: Martin Stabe)

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• NYTimes.com: Seattle Post-Intelligencer goes web only
• #FollowJourn: @martinstabe/online editor
• Fishbowl NY: Sacked Gawker editor says Denton’s role is a conflict of interest
• Video blogging hits Shropshire
• Does Guardian ‘World Cup Wall’ show a nation’s growing interest in football?

You know how media companies get a hard time for how they treat the ‘workies’? Especially because most internships are unpaid – you might get expenses if you’re lucky. Well, Huffington Post has gone one step futher, by putting up an internship for charity auction – offering bidders the chance to ‘jumpstart their career in the blogosphere’. Ten bids had been placed at the time of writing; the last one was for $13,000. All proceeds go to the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

• Gawker’s take on the HuffPo lot at this link…
  
• Interesting spot from the past: Anya Kamenetz writing at HuffPo in 2006 on ‘the high cost of unpaid internships’:
  “Now you see businesses of all sizes taking on interns, openly for the free labor. I have been at & heard of publications & publishers where they save the slush pile all year for the summer interns to go through. And Gawker, which doesn’t pay its own interns, loves to post job ads wherein well-paid magazine editors, artists, and others seek full-time assistants for free.”

It reminds Journalism.co.uk of prizes offered in the the Independent’s annual charity auctions. In those, you bid to hang out with the Indy’s editors, correspondents and columnists (yes, people coughed up good money to hang out with the likes of Street-Porter, Emin and Kelner), and the lucky victors (a couple listed below) once got to spend a whole day at the office!

Mr Vogels was a lucky winner in 2003:

Lot 1: Hold the Front Page
Ever wondered how a daily newspaper gets put together? Come and see how it works from morning conference to the nail-biting deadline. Meet the staff and marvel at their cool professionalism, creative brilliance and unusual fashion sense.
Winning bid: £1,750, Frederik Vogels, London.

And Amar enjoyed a similar pleasure in 2005:

Lot 1: A Day at the Paper Ever wondered how a daily national newspaper gets put together? Come and see how it works for one exciting day, hearing the news agenda at morning conference, watching the tension build as the deadline hour approaches. Meet the glamorous staff and marvel at their camaraderie and coolness under pressure. Winning bid: amar, £2,251.11. (Last year’s winning bid: £1,101)

Any more examples? Add them below.

• MediaBistro: New ‘evening newspaper’ email for the HuffPo
• Life as an editor – through the eyes of a journalism student
• Daily Finance: Atlantic Media announces it will pay all interns
• Poll: Is Paul Dacre right to criticise Justice Eady’s use of the privacy law?
• YouTube success for Deadline Press & Picture Agency

Defamer is being absorbed into Gawker, but what’s happenning to its writers?

The NYTimes takes a quick look at the reopening MovieLine website, the new home of Defamer’s editors and writers.

“Whenever it is time to leave those [gossip] sites, though, the mocking writers often seem to have a change of heart as they try to change their jobs,” Stephanie Clifford comments.

“The editor and writers at Defamer, the Gawker Media site, have taken a similar turn.”

Full story at this link…

• Defamer.gawker.com: Defamer ‘folds into’ Gawker
• NYTimes: PRWeek’s move monthly (it’s keeping the name)
• Gawker to pay bloggers based on page views they generate
• Mediabistro: New Gawker.TV powered by interns; hopes site will sell ads
• WordPress rolls out Twitter and Facebook comments options

Nick Denton’s decision to merge gossip website Valleywag with Gawker marks the end of the micropublishing business model, according to Felix Salmon.

• Fishbowl NY: Sacked Gawker editor says Denton’s role is a conflict of interest
• Gawker to pay bloggers based on page views they generate
• Vanityfair.com: Business Insider’s Henry Blodget vs Reuters’ Felix Salmon
• Felix Salmon: Gawker sums show why it’s a ‘highly profitable media co.’
• Mediabistro: New Gawker.TV powered by interns; hopes site will sell ads

So Boris might give out Blackberries (well, ‘blackberry-type gizmos’) to Olympics spectators in 2012, but over in the States Wall Street Journal journalists are finding that their technology allowance is being cut back.

Or so this ‘internal memo’ on Gawker.com would have us believe. Is it for real? Apparently, all WSJ news staff have been told that a new money-saving measure is in place: ‘at its core is the concept of “one person/one machine.’

“If you are an office-based editor, you’ll get a new desktop. If you are a reporter or editor who travels on assignment, you’ll get a new laptop with a docking station, keyboard and monitor for office use.”

That’s what the alleged internal memo reads. Comments below the Gawker article are sceptical: surely the typos in the memo are a bigger story than the computer cuts, writes ‘drunkexpatworker’.

Hmmm. Authentic or not? It seems an odd kind of prank if not: it wasn’t that funny.

• Overheard something humorous in your newsroom?
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• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – preventing back strain at work

Head of Gawker.com, Nick Denton, announced on Friday that he was letting go 19 members of the editorial staff in a ‘preemptive move’, including Moe Tkacik, who was only recently recruited. Page view bonuses for the first quarter of next year are also to be cancelled in light of the ‘upcoming fiscal crisis’.

• Telegraph.co.uk: BBC spends £17.5m on staff bonuses
• Radar: Gawker cuts staff pay rate for 2nd consecutive quarter
• Announcement of pay cut for Rusbridger and no bonus for McCall following NUJ comments
• Fishbowl NY: Sacked Gawker editor says Denton’s role is a conflict of interest
• Why Nick Denton wouldn’t set up shop in UK