The Washington Post has launched a new tool which integrates Facebook with its site, reports Nieman Journalism Lab, “allowing users to ‘like’ any story and follow what their friends like or share on Facebook, all within the confines of the WaPo site”.
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.
From Nieman, former Washington Post executive editor and Centre for Investigative Reporting board member Len Downie claims that the for-profit model can no longer support the kinds of investigative journalism that society needs. Journalists must instead embrace a variety of new economic models, he says. Downie also questions the sustainability of the non-profit organisations that have launched in recent years:
That leads to the other big question of sustainability: it’s not clear that all the non-profits that have launched in recent years will survive. “How many will succeed and for how long?” Downie wondered. A related question: how will the collaborative model settle out, and where will non-profits find productive niches?
So where does news aggregation get in the way of original reporting? Nieman Journalism Lab took a look at one big story – the attack on Google in China – and analysed its treatment by various news organisations. A spreadsheet shows the full results (download file at this link).
[Jonathan Stray] I chose a single big story and read every single version listed on Google News to see who was doing the work. Out of the 121 distinct versions of last week’s story about tracing Google’s recent attackers to two schools in China, 13 (11 per cent) included at least some original reporting. And just seven organisations (six percent) really got the full story independently.
Starting today, the editor’s blog will feature an afternoon roundup of all things media from over the pond. From the hugely important to the very inconsequential, check in for a choice of America’s journalistic goings on.
paidContent 2010
The issue of paid content was high on the agenda at the end of last week with the paidContent 2010 conference in New York. In attendance were big names from the New York Times: Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman and publisher; Janet Robinson, president and CEO; and Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations, who were interviewed at length by ContentNext’s Staci D. Kramer on “metered news and more”.
According to the paidContent coverage, “while they were willing to buy lunch, they weren’t ready to feed the appetite for detail about plans for NYTimes.com to go metered in 2011”.
And the full conference coverage from the paidContent site here
“Does the bleeding ever stop at 425 Portland?”
image courtesy of Stephen Cummings
Presumably, ways of making newspaper journalism pay were also high on the agenda over in Minneapolis at the end of last week, where the Star Tribune announced that five voluntary redundancies would be offered to reporters and editors. “Does the bleeding ever stop at 425 Portland?” asks MinnPost.
Pessimistic stories of this kind, including this one, continue to be thoughtfully aggregated by blogger and pessimist extraorinaire Fading To Black. Not featured on this chronicle of US newspaper decline was the story that down in South Florida, rather than asking him if he’d like to pack his things, the Sun Sentinel handed production maintenance manager Bob Simons a $25,000 spot bonus and a Caribbean holiday. Simons’ suggestion of a different supplier for equipment apparently saved the paper $1 million.
A very different staff memo here
AP underperforms on non-profit content distribution
An interesting story from the Nieman Jounalism Lab reports on the outcome of Associated Press’ decision to distribute content from America’s top four non-profit news outlets: ProPublica, Centre for Public Integrity, Centre for Investigative Reporting, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop.
The six-month project was launched back in June 2009 at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Baltimore, “with great fanfare” according to Bill Buzenberg, executive director of Centre for Public Integrity.
It seems however that the scheme hasn’t been successful so far, with admissions from both the AP and the non-profit directors that very little content has made it into print. A poor distribution model is to blame apparently, with new non-profit content not being sufficiently flagged.
“They haven’t done the technical backup work to really make it work,” said Buzenburg. “They haven’t made it a priority.”
However, hope remains for the project from both sides. Buzenburg added: “This is a good idea. I’d like it to work […] The potential of this remains.”
“It’s early yet – we’re only six months into it,” said John Raess, AP’s San Francisco bureau chief.
“We want our celebrities to show a little leg”
image courtesy of Jim Epler
Much of the weekend’s media coverage in the US was given over to Tiger Wood’s much-publicised public apology on Friday morning. Mediabistro nailed the best format for coverage by inviting readers to pen Haikus for the Mediabistro facebook page. Submissions include this clear frontrunner from Pamela Ross:
“Questions? Don’t go there.
My Thanksgiving meal was ruined.
Thanks. Now. Watch this swing.”
With more syllables at his disposal, David Carr of The New York Times’ Media & Advertising pages goes into a little more detail, considering the relationship between celebrity sportsmen and the media:
Athletes and actors would like for us to focus on the work, while reporters know that their editors and audience want more, because while the work is visible, we want our celebrities to show a little leg.
But once this bit of leg, so strictly concealed by Woods for so long, has been shown, why are the media who feed on it so relentlessly owed some sort of apology?
Those of us who have had some experience with human frailties all know why Tiger Woods did what he did last Friday, which was to get in a room with people he had hurt or embarrassed to say he was “deeply sorry” for what he had done. That part made sense, the beginning of a process of amends.
I just don’t know what the rest of us were doing there.
A sentiment echoed this side of the pond by Charlie Brooker today in the Guardian.
There are those that must hope that, now this enigmatic character has addressed his hushed audience, and delivered his much anticpated talk, that the hype, rumour, pontificating, and endless media coverage will die away.
Apple wields knife over TV show prices
It is fair to say that at least a few people thought exactly the same thing about Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the iPad. But the so-called saviour of the newspapers is back in the media spotlight this week with news that Apple are considering halving the current price of television shows on iTunes from $1.99 to 0.99 cents. Media commentators have hailed the iTunes store’s 125 million registered customers as a potential liferaft for sinking newspaper publishers, and major networks may be wary of waving a pin anywhere near that customer base by rejecting the move, instead gambling on even a small percentage increase in those paying for TV offsetting the significant price drop.
image courtesy of curiouslee
Meanwhile, Adobe and Conde Nast have jumped right aboard the good ship iPad, unveiling “a new digital magazine experience based on WIRED magazine” at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California.
The Church of Scientology vs. the St. Petersburg Times, Round 1
And finally, from Howard Kurtz’s Media Notes at the Washington Post, the improbable story that the Church of Scientology, in a tit-for-tat response to investigations by the St. Petersburg Times of Tampa Bay, has organised some investigative journalism of its own.
image courtesy of Ben Sutherland
The church has officially hired three ‘veteran reporters’ – a Pulitzer Prize winner, a former “60 Minutes” producer, and the former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors – to look in detail at the newspapers’ conduct. Steve Weinberg, the former IRE executive, who was paid $5,000 to edit the study, says that the agreement stipulates the church publish the study in full or not at all.
Weinberg claims that in spite the study being bankrolled by the church, it will be objective. Neil Brown, executive editor of the St. Petersburg Times, thinks otherwise:
“I ultimately couldn’t take this request very seriously because it’s a study bought and paid for by the Church of Scientology.”
Brown seems to feel a bit hard done by in this instance:
“I counted up something like six or seven journalists the church has hired to look into the St. Petersburg Times. I’ve just got two looking into the Church of Scientology,” he complained.
No fair.
Jim Barnett, currently researching non-profit news, has a few questions for the executive editor of the non-profit investigative journalism organisation ProPublica, outlined in a post on the Nieman Journalism Lab.
Paul Steiger, speaking at the Federal Trade Commission event in Washington DC, said that a major goal of ProPublica is to create ‘nothing less than a new class of cultural institution in this country’.
“That’s pretty lofty stuff,” writes Barnett. “And it would seem to carry a lot of implications not only for how news is created, but the regard in which a news organisation is held by community leaders.
“Does that mean it would operate like a major metropolitan opera or a symphony? Exactly how would it build that kind of image and gravitas? And what kind of fundraising would it do? How would it work with for-profit legacy media?”
The Huffington Post is applying A/B testing to some of its headlines, reports the Nieman Journalism Lab.
“Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees.”
Ah, Nieman Journalism Lab, how we love your full transcripts and audio.
Publishers must take back control of their content from search engines, aggregators and bloggers, which have become the ‘preferred customer destinations for breaking news’, the Associated Press (AP) president and chief executive Tom Curley told an industry summit in Beijing last week.
But as Nieman Journalism Lab reported on Friday, Curley was ‘far more revealing’ when he spoke without a prepared text on October 6 at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong.
NJL is kindly sharing the audio and transcript.
So what’s a blog and does it matter? Google News has started – arbitrarily it seems – applying the ‘(blog)’ label to some sites and not others.
It’s all a bit weird, says the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Zachary M. Seward.
“On both technical and philosophical levels, there’s no meaningful difference between blogs that publish news and news sites that aren’t published as blogs. Many news organizations place material on both types of platforms without considering the content any different. Some use blogging software like WordPress to produce sites that look nothing like blogs.”
His analogy explains it brilliantly:
“Dividing content along these lines is like classifying brownies based on whether they were baked in aluminum or glass pans. There’s no difference, and it obscures what you really want know: if they contain chocolate chips.”
The Nieman Journalism Lab has helpfully supplied the audio and a transcript for a talk by Clay Shirky, NYU professor and internet theorist, at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University this week. Shirky looked at social accountability in the context of shifting business models for news.
“I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.”