“The amount of time people spent at the top [US] 30 newspaper websites is stuck in neutral if not reverse: more than half saw significant falloff in May,” Editor & Publisher reported yesterday.
“The list is for May Nielsen Online data for the top 30 newspapers’ websites ranked by unique users. Nielsen (owned by E&P’s parent company) defines the average time spent per person at a site during the month.”
“Many editors are still not sure how to police the growing Twitter trend and Facebook ‘friending’ phenomenon. Since much of it relies on casual and candid conversation, standard newsroom regulations may not apply,” comments Editor&Publisher’s Joe Strupp. He rounds up recent discussion and regulation at news organisation in the US.
“A PR message has no authenticity. It won’t go viral. Organizations are looking for a new way to get their message out, and journalists can play a role in that,” says Brian Storm, founder of MediaStorm, in this piece, which looks at how US photographers, videographers and videojournalists are finding new commissions outside of traditional journalistic gigs.
Newspapers posting online video reports will now be eligible for prestigious broadcasting prize, the duPont awards.
The new category will reward an original news story using video or audio that is broadcast solely online.
Speculations of plagiarism were zipping round Twitter yesterday, following this blog post hosted on myTPM Blog. Visit Huffington Post for an explanation from New York Times’ Maureen Dowd.
Editor&Publisher does a good job of summing it up, at this link. Extract below:
“(…) by mid [Sunday] afternoon she [Maureen Dowd] she was on the hot seat for using a paragraph almost word-for-word from one of the most prominent liberal bloggers, Jost [sic] Marshall of Talking Points Memo, without attribution. Charges of ‘plagiarism’ ensued.
“By early evening, Dowd had admitted wrongdoing, in an email to Huffington Post, and said she wanted to apologize to [Josh] Marshall. She also said that the Times would issue a correction tomorrow – and the copy was changed in her column to attribute the line of thought to Marshall.
“She seemed to be suggesting, however, that she had merely heard the line of argument from a friend, who did not attribute it to Marshall. This wouldn’t explain, however, why the rather lengthy sentence, a full paragraph, matched Marshall’s writing virtually word for word.”
Editor&Publisher reports Michael Wolff’s keynote speech at the E&P/MediaWeek Interactive Conference on Thursday:
“…[Wolff] again predicted the ‘death of newspapers’, adding that he’d been having ‘fun’ pushing the proposition in recent months to the point of being considered a ‘Dr. Doom.’
“Newspapers ‘not only will go away but they should go away,’ he said, adding that today’s talk would ‘cap’ his statements and then he would ‘never speak of the death of newspapers again.'”
US newspaper websites recorded a total average of 73.3 million unique users in Q1, according to new figures from Nielsen Online – a 10.5 per cent rise year-on-year.
“Enough already. Partial facts and misinformation about newspapers are distorting the view for everyone, including readers and advertisers,” writes Donna Barrett over at Editor&Publisher.
“(…)The crisis facing newspapers is not an audience problem. It is a revenue problem.”
Also related: Nieman Journalism Lab: ’80 per cent of newspapers gone in 18 months. Not likely.’
Following on from last week’s City University study, which suggested that traffic drops when a news title goes online-only, Editor&Publisher reports on a decrease in unique users to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer since it abandoned its print run.
The site was not among the US’ top 30 newspaper websites last month, according to data from Nielsen Online and posted a 23 per cent year-on-year drop in unique users.
It’s local counterpart and former online collaborator before it went online-only, the Seattle times, posted a 70 per cent year-on-year gain in unique users last month to its own website – recording 2.2 million.
However, according to a spokesman for the Seattle PI’s owners, in an article on the Puget Sound Business Journal, the Nielsen data is flawed and internal data suggets the site actually showed a 10 per cent growth in year-on-year traffic last month.
An interesting debate over at WebProNews, following publication of the NYTimes’ article looking at new hyperlocal news models. Chris Crum asks: “‘What separates a blogger from a journalist? I’ve seen plenty of credible and non-credible bloggers, as well as credible and non-credible ‘journalists.'” A range of views follow his post.
Particularly interesting is a comment from Editor&Publisher columnist Steve Outing – claiming that he was quoted out of context in the original NYTimes’ article: “It appears to contradict what I believe, which is that for many niche-topic bloggers, they know far more than the journalist who’s parachuted in to cover a story without being an expert,” Outing writes, as part of a longer comment at this link.
[NB – Outing made a similar point via Twitter yesterday]