Tag Archives: web traffic

#su2011: New online open newsroom a hit for Swedish newspaper

15 Replies

A pioneering Swedish newspaper that involves its readers in the daily editorial decision-making process says the new approach has been a massive hit with users and advertisers.

Norran, a large regional daily in the north of Sweden, has opened up its newsroom with a tool called eEditor, a live chat powered by CoverItLive where readers can discuss story ideas with journalists in real time.

The blog is monitored by a senior journalist throughout the day. The newslist and minutes from conferences are published online and readers suggest possible angles and ask questions.

Editor-in-chief Anette Novak said Norran had completely overhauled its image by involving readers and being more transparent.

Speaking at the WAN-IFRA summer university in Paris today, she said: “I realised that if anybody asks: ‘do we need Norran?’ they would decide: no we don’t. We had to stop it before the question even occurs in their heads.”

She said web traffic and Facebook referrals were up – and key motoring and property advertisers who deserted during the recession had come back. The experiment has also allowed the paper to broaden its coverage.

“We believe that we have strengthened our brand,” Novak said.

“Transparency is the new objectivity. We post the job list – the stories we are working on today.

“The instant feedback and the personal reply is extremely important. It’s the feeling that there’s somebody there live now.

“You have to answer in a good way, a polite way and a knowledgeable way, or you can lose trust.”

Novak said some news organisations were so focused on getting a return on investment from digital projects that they lost sight of their readers’ needs.

“If we follow the money… that will make us go for projects that we know will make money and we will keep doing the same thing over and over again. We have to experiment.

“Get readers involved with your brand, engage them with their hearts and minds and the money will follow.”

Related content:

‘Readers may have the last say in what is and is not journalism’

ScribbleLive: Four ways to make money from liveblogging

paidContent: Which news sites post the most stories and do they get more hits?

Japan quake sends record audiences to broadcast and online news

Leave a reply

The unravelling disaster in Japan has seen record online traffic and a hike in TV audiences.

A spokesman for BBC News told Journalism.co.uk that there were 15.9 million unique users on the site last Friday (11 February), an all-time record – beating the previous best, election results day, which saw 11.4 million unique users.

There were 9.5 million page impressions for the main story, and 6.1 million for the live text page.

And this very visual story saw record video views too. The BBC News site had more than six million hits on its live video stream on Friday and seven million unique users of video, compared to a previous high of 2.7 million, for video views on the day of the general election.

The BBC News website also had a record weekend in terms of web traffic, with 10 million unique users on Saturday, and nearly eight million on Sunday.

BBC News unique users on the day of the Japan earthquake (Mar11) Many Eyes

CNN is also reporting a large increase in traffic. In a release, CNN Digital said between Friday and Sunday, CNN.com had 264 million global page views and 87 million global video streams.

The network said more CNN.com video was watched in those three days than during the previous 30 days.

Sky News said by 4.30pm on Friday, page impressions had more than doubled – to nearly five million – and unique users had also doubled.

Channel 4 has told Journalism.co.uk that it had trebled its usual web traffic on Sunday.

Bar graph of UK TV ratings after the earthquake in Japan Many EyesTV News

Bloomberg Television claims to be the first cable news network to report the quake, six minutes after the record tremor.

All the TV news providers we have spoken to have reported above average ratings for the subsequent days. On Friday, Sky News had one of its 10 largest audience days ever, with only the Iraq war having a higher daily reach. The BBC had an audience of almost six million to its 10pm news programme on BBC 1 on Sunday; ITV had almost five million viewers to a special report on Friday night while Channel 4 News had 1.5 million viewers on Saturday.

The BBC told Journalism.co.uk it had 5.7 million viewers to Friday’s 6pm news on BBC 1 and 5.3 million viewers to the 10pm bulletin when average ratings are 4.3 million and 4.8 million respectively. ITV News had 4.6 million viewers of its 6.30pm news programme on Friday, a 700,000 increase on its average audience of 3.9 million and an audience of 2.9 million for Friday’s News at Ten, up from an average of 2.5 million viewers. Channel 4 News said that its special report on Friday night had 1.3 million viewers, rising to 1.5 million on Saturday.

Social Media

And of course social media is rife with mentions of ‘quake’, ‘tsunami’ and ‘nuclear’.

In the hour that followed the quake on Friday, Tweet-o-Meter reported 1,200 tweets a minute coming out of Japan. And at the time of writing (Wednesday lunchtime), tweets from Tokyo are again peaking the Tweet-o-Meter scale at 1,200 a minute. In a release, CNN has reported that its breaking news account on Twitter acquired followers at a rate of 10 times greater than average and now totals more than four million followers.

Facebook users were also discussing and sharing first hand knowledge of the quake. BBC News created this map based on mentions of key words in status updates.

And, of course, people have been flocking to see user generated and videos from the news channels on YouTube. This dramatic footage from Russia Today has clocked up more than 10 million hits. Meanwhile, Channel 4 has had 200,000 views on this video of Krishnan Guru-Murthy with before and after tsunami shots and ITN Productions is reporting record views of the ITN News Channel on YouTube.

Late Night Marketing: How one newspaper lost 5,000 incoming links

Leave a reply

Late Night Marketing discusses how Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.no lost more than 5,000 natural “inlinks” (links to its website from external sites and blogs) to its website by disabling a feature from blog search engine Twingly on its website:

The first thing here is that Dagbladet.no now loses a lot of blog traffic, but this is not the most important thing, because the traffic from blogs is not enormous compared to the traffic a newspaper can gain from good rankings on search engines.

What do you think that Google will think of your site if you suddenly have approximately 5,000 fewer incoming links per month?

Full post at this link…

Globe and Mail: Misunderstanding web metrics can cause lazy journalism

Leave a reply

Interesting column from Roy MacGregor for Canada’s Globe and Mail on the damage that chasing ‘hits’ online can do to journalism and why circulation and web traffic should not be confused with circulation:

Why be a storyteller when a ranter will have far more traffic? Why be investigative when instigative is a far quicker route to success on the web?

(…) It is a terrible vision of what journalism could evolve into as it enters a world it so desperately wishes to own, but has little idea of what the available measures in this digital world actually mean.

Full column at this link…

MediaPost: Heavy newspaper readers also turning online in US, says survey

Leave a reply

Some interesting US figures from a recent report by The Media Audit, which looks at lifestyle factors and socioeconomic traits in relation to an individual’s media consumption habits.

  • Individuals who spend more than an hour a day reading newspapers also spend 3.7 hours per day online;
  • Seven daily US newspapers have a net unduplicated reach of 80 per cent or more (based on combining the past month’s web traffic with print readership figure).

Quoted by MediaPost, Bob Jordan, president of The Media Audit adds:

“Daily newspapers were the first to embrace a multi-platform distribution strategy amidst a period when consumers were spending more and more time with the internet. And as a result, newspapers followed the way of the consumer. By doing so, they have broadened their reach to include younger consumers. And these consumers are buying new cars and driving sales for retailers who represent a significant portion of the newspaper industry’s revenue… ”

Full story at this link…

A triumph for journalism? MPs’ expenses debate at the Frontline Club 7.30pm GMT

1 Reply

If you can’t make it in person, follow the MPs’ expenses debate at London’s Frontline Club at 7.30pm GMT here (Monday June 8):


Have the stories been a triumph of journalism or the chequebook? Guardian blogger and journalism professor Roy Greenslade chairs the discussion. From the Frontline Blog:

“With each new tranche of revelations about MPs’ expenses the Daily Telegraph has continued to put on sales and gained kudos for its good old fashioned journalistic scoop. With a story that has shaken Westminster to its foundations the Daily Telegraph has been able to set the news agenda, releasing its revelations ahead of the 10pm news bulletins. The daily diet of scoops is said to have boosted newspaper sales by tens of thousands and web traffic has also increased and no doubt will, in financial terms at least, justify the cost of obtaining the information. But what does the expenses scandal tell us about journalism today?

“On the panel we have Andrew Pierce, assistant editor at The Daily Telegraph, Stephen Tall, editor at large with the Liberal Democrat Voice, the journalist Heather Brooke, author of ‘Your Right to Know’ and Frontline favourte Roger Alton, the editor of The Independent.”

Video: Information Valet conference and launch of CircLabs

Leave a reply

Yesterday’s InfoValet conference (‘From Gatekeeper to Information Valet: Work Plans for Sustaining Journalism’) at DC’s George Washington University had a great line-up of speakers debating the future of journalism in the online age, news aggregation, crowdsourcing and what’s next for the news media industry.

One particular announcement of note: the launch of Circlabs – a technology company building a new service to finance online news.

Writing for Nieman Journalism Lab, Martin Langeveld, one of the project’s founders, describes the need for a new approach:

“More Americans now say they get most of their national and international news from the Web rather than from printed newspapers. Yet news publishers, and particularly publishers of the kind of essential journalism that’s necessary to sustain a democracy, enjoy a relatively small share of total Web traffic.

“Although no clear strategies have emerged for news publishers to thrive in an online-only environment, CircLabs believes that the right technology can play a key role in improving the market share of news content and increasing the Web revenue of news publishers.”

The first stage will be a product called Circulate. Details are scant at the moment, but it’s expected to be available in beta from the end of the summer and fully launched by the end of this year.

“Circulate addresses two critical publisher needs: (1) the need to attract, both locally and nationally, a strong and loyal online readership, and (2) the need to monetize that audience, both directly through the sale of premium content and indirectly through high-value, targeted and interactive advertising.

“Circulate will meet these needs of publishers and allow journalists to thrive in their roles as gatherers and curators of news and information. At the same time, Circulate will provide consumers with a new, post-search way to discover the news and connections they need. Circulate will serve all publishers of online news, ranging from newspapers to local news blogs. Circulate requires little or no technical integration on the part of publishers.”

There are plenty of videos of the day’s discussions on the event’s UStream site – though the player below should provide most of the links:

Has ditching print edition damaged Post-Intelligencer’s web traffic?

1 Reply

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.

Wolves promotion boosts Express & Star web traffic

Leave a reply

Attracting international, ex-pat attention and fans reliving the moment online, sport has shown its ability to drive web traffic to news sites once again with a surge in the Express & Star’s web visitors following the promotion of local football club Wolverhampton Wanderers to the UK’s Premiership.

The site achieved a record 600,000 page views yesterday, with around 330,000 views on the Wolves picture galleries.

“The website chronicles a great day for Wolves fans and we are amazed by the huge interest in it,” said internet editor, Tim Walters, in a statement on the site.

“The traffic on the website was enormous yesterday and today the levels of interest are being maintained.

“The mood of Wolverhampton is dictated by the success or failure of Wolves.

“There is a real feel-good feeling in the city at the moment and people really can’t get enough.”

In addition to coverage in text and picture galleries, an interactive, multimedia timeline was created using Dipity to document the team’s promotion.

Fans boost website hits to 600,000 : Express & Star.