newsonaut
Turning inner space into outer space
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
No politics, please, we're working
Are people really more interested in mindless entertainment and sports — and less in hard core politics — than ever before? A couple of recent studies suggest this is true, but the reason is that we’re simply being polite.
People are getting a lot more news via the Internet on their computers, but they’re mostly doing it during the day when they’re at work. So the topics they gravitate toward tend to be those that are safe for discussion with co-workers — entertainment and sports. Discussion involving politics can lead to confrontations, so even bringing up the subject in the first place can be seen as inappropriate in a work setting.
Of course, this could lead to a vicious cycle where people get used to avoiding politics and wind up not ever discussing the subject. But as we all know, politics — as unpalatable as it may get at times — is something we have know at least a little about if we are to participate as citizens, and not just consumers.
Read more about how modern news consumption is changing at the BBC College of Journalism:
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Saturday, April 21, 2012
Copy editing makes you smart
A copy editor for Time magazine was on the TV game show Jeopardy! on Wednesday — and won. Time says this is proof that copy editors are the smartest people in any newsroom. And I won’t dispute it. After editing a gazillion stories about every topic under the sun, you can’t help but expand your knowledge.
More proof of this will come on Monday’s episode of Jeopardy! when a former copy editor for the Kamloops Daily News makes an appearance. The outcome is top secret, but my hunch is that Mike Garrett did well.
Update: Mike got the question right in Final Jeopardy and came out ahead of the Time copy editor, but both fell well short of the winner, a woman from Indiana.
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Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Newspapers are attracting older readers even on their websites
Newsosaur Alan D. Mutter speaks the painful truth about news sites:
Instead of using the web, mobile and social media to connect with new readers and customers, the typical newspaper dedicates the majority of its digital efforts to faithfully porting its print product to pixels.
Older people who are used to newspapers apparently appreciate this kind of effort, but that’s not good enough. We have to find ways of drawing in young people who are used to getting their news from sites like Reddit.
If not, news sites will suffer the same fate as newspapers. Our aging readers will eventually die off — and so will we.
Mutter has a solution that we should seriously consider:
Because most profit-pinched newspapers lack the time, money and in-house talent to develop such products, it makes sense for the industry to pool its resources to create a Digital Widget Works to build products to compete with the upstarts.
We should be looking at the type of innovation being used at ITV News in Britain. They’ve created a news site that only exist on the Internet.
Be sure to read and heed more of what Mutter has to say.
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Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Are comments worth it? Yes, but they need work
Why do news sites spend so much time and effort on comments when they don’t make money and hardly anyone reads them? Those are the questions being asked by Joel Johnson at New York-based Animal:
Comments don’t make any money. This, to me, is the most damning of all: comments are likely a cost-of-doing-business for most content sites, not a revenue generator. This has been somewhat known for years for any high-volume site that is forced to require human content moderation — humans cost money, whether they are hand-moderating content, shepherding conversation, or building automated tools to allow user-moderated content.
But don’t comments help generate traffic at least?
But here’s the new thing: I’ve had two separate discussions with friends who run mid-sized internet properties–we’re talking high hundreds of thousands to millions of unique users a month–and they’ve both recently completed heavy analysis on their traffic and come to the somewhat shocking conclusion that the people who actually read comments are a small fraction of one percent of their entire readership.
I’m still of the mind that comments have their place, especially on a news site where people are expected to have opinions on what’s happening in their community. But we do need to keep working at them and coming up with a system that more people will be comfortable reading and taking part in.
Update: Mathew Ingram has a rebuttal to Joel Johnson at Giga Om.
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Saturday, April 7, 2012
Pinterest needs a way to contain its success
Just how big is Pinterest? It’s either bigger than you could ever have imagined. Or it’s not quite as big as some people seem to think.
The chart above from a recent Experian study shows total visits skyrocketing. Pinterest is now considered by many to be number three among social media behind only Facebook and Twitter.
On the other hand, a search at Google Trends shows interest dropping off around February.
One of the problems with Pinterest may be that you wind up collecting a lot of stuff and your collections can become unwieldy. Even with multiple boards, that can be a lot of pictures for the mind to process.
With Facebook and Twitter, old stuff is hidden after awhile — you can always be in the present. With this in mind, Pinterest developers might want to look at an option for making pins more temporary. For example, if a pin doesn’t receive a repin or a like in, say, three months, it could be automatically removed from the board.
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Monday, April 2, 2012
Are publishers jumping on the paywall bandwagon?
A common argument against putting up paywalls at news websites is that they only work if everyone does it. Naysayers contend that all it takes is for the competition to provide a free alternative and you’re sunk.
Looking at it market-by-market, that makes sense, but an industry-wide view provides a different perspective. As an increasing number of news sites ask readers to pay, it becomes the established norm. People will come to expect that if they visit a news site frequently, it will begin costing them.
This is why paid-circulation newspapers survive and often thrive in markets where there is a free-circulation newspaper. Readers know there is a free alternative, but they are used to the idea of paying for something with superior content and more frequent publication.
This raises the possibility that a news site with a reputation for high quality could indeed profit with a metered paywall. And there’s nothing like profit to motivate a publisher.
It remains to be seen, though, whether paywalls do indeed become the norm. Two good quality sites that appear content to remain free are the Washington Post and Toronto’s Globe and Mail. If those two starting asking readers to pay, the writing truly will be on the wall.
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Friday, March 30, 2012
The Economist gives Facebook fans what they want, and it pays off
The Economist has a million Facebook fans — twice as many as their nearest competitors. How do they do it? By giving Facebook the special attention it deserves.
Their social media team posts material based on an analysis of what is trending and popular — not just whatever is at hand. They also use items, such as infographics, that are easily digested.
Nick Blunden, global publisher of digital editions for The Economist:
“We’ve found that infographics or charts that we produce on a daily basis have huge value in Facebook,” he says. “It’s visual content you can consume relatively quickly and Facebook is a visual medium. We focus on content types we think people will want to engage with specifically while they’re on Facebook, as opposed to what they might want to engage with in our magazine or apps. I think that has helped fuel people’s associations with The Economist.”
Just like Walmart — give the people what they want.
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Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Talkino offers an innovative way to leave comments
It looks like a new commenting system has found a way to do an end run around publishers, and put the boot to offensive comments along the way.
Talkino allows you to click on a bookmarklet that pops up a window where you can leave a comment on any web page — regardless of whether it has its own commenting system. You can set it up so that if you like someone’s comment, they become a “guide.” This means that the combination of your likes and your guides’ likes make it so you never have to see comments you find irritating or disagreeable. Before you balk at the idea of self-censorship, keep in mind that this is just an option. If you prefer, you can see every comment.
A system like this could be quite attractive to commenters. First, you can comment wherever you like — even on sites that don’t allow comments in the traditional way. Second, you can filter out the static from other commenters.
On the other hand, it could be a bane for publishers. First, they would have no control over comments being left at their site. Second, comments left in a separate popup would lead to fewer onsite clicks and possibly hurt the metrics for advertising revenue.
Of course, the biggest obstacle to Talkino is the fact that it is not widely known or used. It can feel awfully lonely leaving a comment at a site knowing that no one will ever read it. Also, I would advise the Talkino people to hire themselves a copy editor — their site is rife with embarrassing English that hurts their credibility.
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Tuesday, March 27, 2012
The tide is rising for Facebook, so you might as well ride it
Up until recently, I seldom if ever used Facebook, and had no interest in it. The few times I tried Facebook, it seemed way to confusing to bother with. So what happened recently to change my attitude? Numbers.
First, the stats for Facebook usage vs. other social media: The time people spend on Facebook dwarfs Twitter and the rest. Second, the stats for Facebook referrals to websites vs. other social media: Again, it’s the man against the boys.
Now comes news from The Guardian that Facebook is on its way to surpassing almighty Google for bringing in traffic. They have the advantage of being been invited to take part in a new type of embedded content app within Facebook. But still, the lines on the graph (shown above) are staggering. Referrals from Google chug along at a more-or-less even pace, while referrals from Facebook soar ever upward.
Tanya Cordrey, director of digital development at Guardian News & Media, spoke about this phenomenon at the Guardian Changing Media Summit in London:
But last month, we felt a seismic shift in our referral traffic. For the first time in our history, Facebook drove more traffic to guardian.co.uk than Google for a number of days, accounting for more than 30 per cent of our referrer traffic. This is a dramatic result from a standing start five months ago.
Social traffic has since dipped below search — but I believe it is only a matter of time before it becomes the main driver of traffic to many core Guardian products.
Even without a special app, publishers will find it well worth their while to spend more time on Facebook. My own strategy is to get over Facebook-phobia and learn to embrace the culture. People who use Facebook have a certain way of relating to one another that differs from Twitter and other social media. I would be hard-pressed to put it into words, but after awhile you just get it.
After that, you need to treat your news organization’s Facebook page they way anyone else does. Post items that you genuinely believe your readers will find interesting. Pay attention to the kinds of things that get “likes” and post more along that line — just the way you would if you were an individual posting stuff you knew your circle of friends would enjoy.
Don’t make your Facebook page impersonal by bombarding readers with an automatic feed. Would you do that to your friends? And don’t just copy and paste words from your news stories. Rewrite it so that your personality comes through. Finally, don’t be afraid to be quirky. If someone sends in a photo by email, then share it. People will appreciate that you’re using Facebook the way it was intended.
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Saturday, March 24, 2012
At last, a news site that looks like it belongs on the Internet
You can’t get much more up to date than this. ITV’s news stream practically takes information out of reporters’ heads as soon as the synapses in their brains fire, and plunks it tidbit-size onto an ever-evolving website.
Think Twitter, but with posts that are relevant and coherent.
I have to say I’m impressed. For too long, news organizations have tried to make their websites mimic the types of presentations they’re used to in the old media — whether it be a newspaper or a TV broadcast.
ITV has harnessed the power of the Internet and created something that could only work on the Internet. I’m not quite ready to endorse the ITV experiment as the future of online news, but it’s bound to shake up concepts of what the news should look like.
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