Posts tagged strategy
THIS LINK IS FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, IT IS NOT TO BE POSTED OR SHARED.
Email from Vanity Fair PR to media reporters. The link is to a PDF version of a story about the Washington Post that will appear in the magazine’s upcoming issue.
Via Advertising Age:
Rather than do a big dump of all the new stories as soon as the issue drops and obviate the need for anyone to buy it, the content is doled out in dribs and drabs over the course of the month. For those of you hoping there is some sort of process or perhaps even an algorithm behind this schedule, you will be disappointed.
“Every story is different. There’s no formula,” said a Vanity Fair spokeswoman. “We try different things all of the time.”
This bit of sausage-making is interesting given the challenges before magazine publishers. Many have been underwhelmed by how much ad revenue they can pull in from posting their (often very expensive) print journalism on their website.
“We want people to buy the magazine,” said the spokeswoman.
I was thisclose to Rickrolling a link on this one.
One Way, Or Another
Two opposing newsroom strategies are flaring up today.
First, comes good news from Salon. Editor in Chief Kerry Lauerman wrote yesterday that as the online magazine committed more resources to original reporting and reduced its aggregation efforts, the site’s page views and unique visitors skyrocketed.
His takeaway is something that makes news junkies smile: quality trumps quantity.
Via Nieman Lab:
In December and January, Salon published 33 percent fewer posts than it had in those same months the previous years — but it saw 40 percent greater traffic. Slashing the amount of content it published by a third, the site still logged record-high unique visitor numbers — 7.23 million at the end of January — and without any “big viral hits” that would have skewed the numbers, Lauerman said.
Meanwhile, Jim Romenesko reports that AOL’s Patch is pivoting in the opposite direction:
A Patch insider tells Romenesko readers that the AOL-owned hyperlocal news sites plan to cut staff and freelance budgets and start producing “easy, quick-hitting, cookie-cutter copy.” Examples: Best Ofs, and features like “What’s happening to this vacant storefront?”…
…Patch has implemented a new “One Team One Goal” strategy, with a budget that effectively eliminates anywhere from 50 to 100 percent of freelance dollars, depending on the Patch region and how the supervising editor and regional ad director choose to allocate dollars…
The editorial emphasis is now on “easy, quick-hitting, cookie-cutter copy,” including mandatory “Best Of” features (i.e., best coffeeshop, best burgers, etc.) that compel businesses and readers to visit and participate in the Patch directories.
When Hard Times Hit, Young Journos Hit the Road
Wired profiles young journalists who’ve taken matters into their own hands in the face of uncertain job opportunities.
For example, the Hussin brothers raised some money on Kickstarter in order to bike across the country and document people they believe are rethinking American values.
Via Wired:
With most of the country experiencing hard times for the last few years, many young adults, and young journalists in particular, are feeling uncertain about their future. Heading out on the road can be a way to take back control of one’s destiny and grow as a person and hone one’s storytelling chops.
When in doubt, do.
Amazon and Long-form Journalism
Anecdotal evidence is trickling in that Amazon is turning into a legitimate outlet for long-form journalism.
For example, Marc Herman recently wrote about Libya for The Atlantic and then turned his additional reporting into a Kindle Single selling for $1.99. Current result: the title is in Kindle’s top 500 and Herman is on pace to recoup the costs of his Libya trip.
Over at GigaOm, Matthew Ingram writes:
As newspapers and even magazines have declined in both reach and financial health, there has been a lot of concern expressed about the future of journalism — particularly longer-form or what some call “investigative journalism.” This is arguably where the most value lies, especially when breaking news can easily be aggregated by outlets like The Huffington Post or distributed widely for nothing. But how does this kind of journalism pay for itself? Herman’s example is one potential answer to that question: it pays for itself when readers subsidize the writer directly for content that they appreciate.
A News App for Political Junkies
The New York Times is out with a new app for political junkies who need their news fix right now.
What’s particular notable about it is that the Times isn’t limited articles to their own coverage. Indeed, they’re bringing coverage from their biggest competitors.
Via Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab:
For example, the current top story is this one on Democrats seeing the GOP primary as a two-man race. That’s shown as the lead story in a cluster that also includes this Washington Post story, this Business Insider story, and this Washington Examiner story. (Some interesting choices there! I also see links to National Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Talking Points Memo, CNN, and a YouTube video.)
Maybe most interesting of all, one of the current top items in the app isn’t a New York Times story at all. It’s actually a one-sentence summary of a L.A. Times story on Sarah Palin (“Sarah Palin said she would not weigh in early on the G.O.P. race, but she did offer praise for Newt Gingrich and the Trump debate”), on top of a link to the LAT story making that exact point.
The glorified link is given the same weight in the app’s UI as a regular Times story. That feels noteworthy to me — I can’t think of anything else as linkbloggy that the Times has ever done.
The app is free but you need to be a digital subscriber to get the complete content (read: actual New York Times content).
That caveat aside, it’s nice to see that the Times putting readers first.
After all, political news is most valuable when seen in the context of different coverage standing side by side.
When reporting major events, gravity’s natural pull brings us to where everyone else already is. It’s a herd instinct. If this is where everyone else is something important must be going on. At least this is what we tell ourselves.
Unfortunately, it’s a totally understandable if totally frustrating recurring example of how we’re not as independent and creative as we might actually like to be.
It also doesn’t help in any way to distinguish us from everyone else who’s covering the exact same thing we are in whatever chosen medium we might be doing it in.
Enter Gregg Bleakney.
Earlier this summer he covered the Tour de France. Not only did he leave the typical media scrum. He ditched his DSLR in favor of shooting with an iPhone.
Via a Q&A with Wired:
As an emerging photographer, I feel like I should always push hard to separate my work from everyone else’s, and I started to look for another way to cover the event. I was really blown away by the energy and spectator culture outside of the restricted-entry press areas at the start and finish lines of the race; the occasional moments when athletes leave their security perimeter to interact with fans, the security perimeter itself, and with the spectators interacting with each other. So I decided to spend several stages working outside of credentialed areas without a press pass and jokingly dubbed this my “Totally Not Behind the Scenes at the Tour de France” project.
Images: selected photos from Bleakney’s Tour de France coverage.
The Half Life of Shared Links
Via Bitly:
The mean half life of a link on twitter is 2.8 hours, on facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours. So you can expect, on average, an extra 24 minutes of attention if you post on facebook than if you post on twitter…
…Not all social sites follow this pattern. The surprise in the graph above is links that originate from youtube: these links have a half life of 7.4 hours! As clickers, we remain interested in links on youtube for a much longer period of time. You can see this dramatic difference between youtube and the other platforms for sharing links in the image above…
…Many links last a lot less than 2 hours; other more sticky links last longer than 11 hours over all the referrers. This leads us to believe that the lifespan of your link is connected more to what content it points to than on where you post it: on the social web it’s all about what you share, not where you share it!
H/T: Sanjiv Desai.
The Man Who Got Us to 'Like' Everything
The Wall Street Journal’s Geoffrey A. Fowler profiles Soleio Cuervo, Facebook’s product designer:
“We have a saying at Facebook: Photoshop lies,” said Mr. Cuervo. Instead of relying on mockups filled with pretty fake text, Facebook designers create Web-browser-ready versions of their designs that can be filled with real user content, which tends to look very different from what designers might want ideally. “On Photoshop, it is very easy for me to fabricate an imaginary world where users type in very poignant statements, but that is not how people will populate the system,” he said.
Geoffrey A. Fowler, The Wall Street Journal. The Man Who Got Us to ‘Like’ Everything.
H/T: Zach Seward.
Facebook today released the results of a study it conducted on what types of posts by the Facebook Pages of journalists performed the best. Among the highlights: Incorporating personal analysis in posts increased referral clicks by 20%, and including a thumbnail image when posting a link boosted Likes by 65% and comments by 50%. While these findings are for Pages of journalists, the best practices they illuminate can be useful for the admins of any type of Page.
Facebook’s Study of Journalist Page Engagement Reveals Page Post Best Practices
This isn’t telling most what they don’t already know about packaging content for the web. Here’s what it does do: Make the point clear that a non-tailored RSS feed into Facebook isn’t going to get job done—just like personalized tweets are proving to win for brands and journalists alike on Twitter.
”It’s mostly tha voice.” © Guru. Matter of fact? Let that bass line walk: (some strong language)
YouTube clip to Gangstarr’s “Mostly Tha Voice”
“A lot of rappers have flavor and some got skills but if your voice aint dope then you need to chill.”
What they have to say about engagement vs click thrus is very interesting.
(via dominickbrady)
FJP: Liking the Gangstarr quote.
It’s not that far-fetched to imagine 20 to 25 percent of magazines’ readership existing in a digital platform three to four years from now.
Scott Dadich, Condé Nast’s vice president of digital magazine development, explaining the company’s tablet strategy.
Justin Ellis, Nieman Lab. Condé Nast’s Scott Dadich on reinventing mags for the iPad and why partnering with Apple matters.
If you’re using social media to deliver content to where your audiences are it makes sense to know when they’re actually there.
Over on Mediabistro’s All Twitter Blog they do some of the legwork by looking at what time of day people most engage with links and content posted to Twitter and Facebook (caveat: US only).
The above is a detail of a much larger infographic that looks at population by time zone, and at what time of day people are most likely to repost your content or click through on your links. The time here is EST and shows percentage of retweets and click through rate.
Caveat, via Matthew Hayes:
If you are going to employ “social timing” be sure to evaluate your success with audiences in each timezone separately. Disproportionately large populations (like in the Eastern Time Zone) can distort results so that you miss trends in key regional markets.
Which is another way of saying: know where your target audience is.
Mediabistro: The Science of Social Timing | Biggie Version.
The New York Times famous line “All the news that’s fit to print,” made sense when newspapers were the primary source of daily information. Now it seems more like a potential epitaph, as newspaper readership plummets in the face of more focused web-based alternatives.
I sure wish we could get rid of that word “content” to refer to writing, photography, drawing, and design online. The very word breathes indifference — why would one bother about the quality of work when it’s referred to as “content”? I’m sorry to respond to your good question with a cranky diatribe, but this word has crept from New Media over to Radio Broadcasting where I live in my little cave and now my Show has become Content and is sent around to stations in a nice digital package that squashes the sound. Public radio, which holds itself up as a believer in quality, is cutting corners on all sides and I see this perfidious word “content” as part of the downward slide. I loathe the word. It’s like referring to Omaha [Beach] as a development.
Garrison Keillor, host of NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion, answering a question about how he creates content for his show.
British Journal of Photography, Photography as “Content”.
Media Enters the Validation Era
Agreed.
Via steverubel. Why I Adopted a Scorched Earth Policy, Dismantled Two Blogs and Jumped to Tumblr in a Single Weekend:
I fundamentally believe that we are entering the next great era of the web - The Validation Era. In this age of too much content and not enough time, the public will increasingly need to hear things validated across four interconnected media clovers that are converging across four different screens - phones, tablets, PCs and TVs. To be successful, businesses and individuals will need to continually ensure their engagement spans the media cloverleaf.
These four media spheres include:
- Traditional media - powerful mainstream brands like CNN, the BBC and more
- Tradigital media - emergents like TNW, Politico and others that have social DNA
- Owned media - corporate/brand content (web and apps) that emulate media
- Social media - digital embassies in the big hubs - Twitter, YouTube, Facebook
That’s why I decided to jump to Tumblr and why I didn’t stay with Posterous or move to Wordpress or SquareSpace, all of which are solid platforms.
Tumblr is a truly unique hybrid. It sits squarely in the center of the Media Cloverleaf. It’s highly social, with an incredibly engaged community and connective tissue to the aforementioned hubs. It offers most of the benefits of the large blog platforms (eg Owned media). And, last but not least, it is being used by dozens of traditional and tradigital media brands like TNW and Sports Blog Nation.
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