Mainstream media drives a large number of trending topics on Twitter, according to a new study by Hewlett Packard.
The HP research analysed more than 16 million tweets over 40 days last year, finding that mainstream media accounts belonging to CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Sky, Reuters, the Telegraph, the BBC and El Pais were among 22 accounts identified as the source of the most retweets related to trending topics.
Full study on HP at this link and embedded below.
Al Jazeera has started paying for tweets to promote its English-language Egypt coverage in the US.
Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog compares the move to newspapers using Google Adwords to drive traffic to their sites – except that the sponsored tweets can be replied to and re-tweeted just like any other.
Twitter’s media team says Riyaad Minty, head of social media at Al Jazeera English, is operating the campaign like a news desk.
It also claims that Twitter has helped drive Al Jazeera site traffic up by 2,500 per cent in the last month and that the English language version is on course to triple its number of followers.
Journalisted is an independent, not-for-profit website built to make it easier for you, the public, to find out more about journalists and what they write about.
It is run by the Media Standards Trust, a registered charity set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public, and funded by donations from charitable foundations.
Each week Journalisted produces a summary of the most covered news stories, most active journalists and those topics falling off the news agenda, using its database of UK journalists and news sources.
Jack Shenker – 13 articles (The Guardian), James Hider – 11 articles (The Times), Peter Beaumont – 10 articles (The Guardian), Roula Khalaf – 7 articles (Financial Times), Adrian Blomfield – 6 articles (Telegraph)
More from the Media Standards Trust:
The Media Standards Trust’s panel event ‘Libel reform: in the public’s interest?’ is available to watch on our website
The Media Standards Trust’s unofficial database of PCC complaints is available for browsing at www.complaints.pccwatch.co.uk
For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe
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.
OK, we know it’s quality not quantity that counts, but it’s still fascinating (to us at least) to learn which stories have attracted the most traffic over the course of a year.
Unsurprisingly, Wikileaks is prominent as was the televised leaders debate during the general election. And some old faithfuls continue to pull in traffic from jobseekers and ‘wannabe’ freelancers (this year that was probably mostly unemployed journalism graduates and recently ‘redundant’ journalists).
But stories about paywalls failed to even come close…
News:
Features:
Blog posts:
Source: Google Analytics
Newspaper industry journal Editor & Publisher is to partner with digital content management organisation MediaSpan to help improve navigation of its online content.
According to a report by E&P this week the agreement, which was finalised last week, will enable the site to focus more on new content production than daily site upkeep.
Soon, visitors will be able to easily browse E&P’s deep archive database of more than 51,000 articles dating back to 1993.
In addition, the Newspeople section, which details the comings and goings of news, advertising, and circulation professionals, will be expanded and will include obituaries.
Earlier this month E&P removed its website paywall to “build more traffic and make exclusive content available to visitors”, it claimed.
Non-profit investigative journalism outfit ProPublica is to start using Press+, a payment plaform launched last year by startup Journalism Online.
ProPublica will use the tool to manage public donations, with Press+ logos across the site to encourage users to give money. Following an arrangement with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which has provided 10 non-profit news sites with the platform, ProPublica will not have to share revenue with Journalism Online for the first year. The New York-based non-profit is the second outlet to take up Press+, following its launch on the New Haven Independent site in June.
Journalism Online was launched in April 2009, and won investment from News Corp in June 2010. Its first client was LancasterOnline.com, which began using the Press+ system in July to charge for its access to its obituary pages.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) report for September was released yesterday, outlining the latest figures for unique visitors to the UK’s national newspaper websites.
The biggest month-on-month increase in average daily browsers was recorded by Independent.co.uk with 12.86 per cent, while guardian.co.uk saw the number of its browsers pass the two million mark with a 4.99 per cent increase.
The Mail Online again recorded the highest daily and monthly average browsers, increasing for the ninth month.
The full figures for the four audited titles and Mirror Group’s websites are listed below. The percentage in brackets indicates the month-on-month change compared with August’s ABCe report.
Mail Online
Average daily unique browsers: 2,670,371 (+4.62 per cent)
Monthly unique browsers: 46,910,754 (+3.01 per cent)
Guardian.co.uk
Average daily unique browsers: 2,038,493 (+4.99 per cent)
Monthly unique browsers: 35,975,755 (+2.88 per cent)
Telegraph.co.uk
Average daily unique browsers: 1,669,773 (-0.68 per cent)
Monthly unique browsers: 32,007,189 (-1.05 per cent)
Mirror Group
Average daily unique browsers: 525,914 (+5.26 per cent)
Monthly unique browsers: 11,277,113 (+7.03 per cent)
Independent.co.uk
Average daily unique browsers: 553,593 (+12.86 per cent)
Monthly unique browsers: 12,029,545 (+11.49 per cent)
TheSun.co.uk
No data available
Times.co.uk
No data available
Facebook sends 13 times more click-throughs than Twitter to French news sites, according to a recent study.
The AT Internet Institute research reports that Twitter was responsible for just 0.1 per cent of referrals to the country’s top 12 news websites, compared to Facebook which sent 1.3 percent.
By taking the same number of websites into consideration, Google’s share was 40.6 per cent in France, in other words 30 times greater than Facebook. This figure remains high, but we should not forget that the main function of a search engine, such as Google, is to suggest links to Internet users. This is not the case for Facebook. Moreover, on average for French news websites, Facebook generated more traffic (1.3 per cent) than the search engine known as Bing (0.8 per cent).
The French study looked at the average share of visits from 6th to 12th September.
According to its own report on the figures, paidContent:UK said Facebook was rated as the seventh “referral giver” to UK newspaper websites by the Newspaper Marketing Agency in May.
The battle to increase audiences is hardly a new challenge facing the media environment. Whether print readers, radio listeners or television viewers, it has generally been a case of the more the merrier.
In the world of online journalism, where there is instant access to page view and retweet counters, the ‘success’ of a story has perhaps come to be defined by these metrics. Howard Kurtz, columnist for the Washington Post, has an interesting post on the site this morning discussing the potential impact of this environment on the work of online journalists and the resulting balancing act between appealing to the search engine and maintaining a quality brand.
Naturally, those who grew up as analog reporters wonder: Is journalism becoming a popularity contest? Does this mean pieces about celebrity sex tapes will take precedence over corruption in Afghanistan? Why pay for expensive foreign bureaux if they’re not generating enough clicks?
Doesn’t all this amount to pandering?
Potentially, sure. But news organizations such as the Post and the Times have brands to protect. They can’t simply abandon serious news in favor of the latest wardrobe malfunction without alienating some of their longtime readers. What they gain in short-term hits would cost them in long-term reputation.