Jul 7, 2009
July 7th, 2009 by malcolmcoles
National newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across their 120 official Twitter accounts - with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers in the top 10. That’s according to a massive count of newspaper’s twitter accounts I’ve done (there’s a table of all 120 at that link).
The Guardian’s the clear winner, as its place on the Twitter Suggested User List means that its @GuardianTech account has 831,935 followers - 78% of the total …
@GuardianNews is 2nd with 25,992 followers, @TimesFashion is 3rd with 24,762 and @FinancialTimes 4th with 19,923.
Screenshot of the data
Other findings
- Glorified RSS Out of 120 accounts, just 16 do something other than running as a glorified RSS feed. The other 114 do no retweeting, no replying to other tweets etc (you can see which are which on the full table).
- No following. They don’t do much following. Leaving GuardianTech out of it, there are 236,963 followers of these accounts, but they follow just 59,797. Are newspapers bringing their no-linking-out approach to Twitter? Or is it just because they’re pumping RSS feeds straight to Twitter, and therefore see no reason to engage with the community?
- Rapid drop-off There are only 6 Twitter accounts with more than 10,000 followers. I suspect many of these accounts are invisible to most people as the newspapers aren’t engaging much - no RTing of other people’s tweets means those other people don’t have an obvious way to realise the newspaper accounts exist.
- Sun and Mirror are laggards The Sun and Mirror have a lot of work to do - they have few accounts with any followers. And they don’t promote their Twitter accounts on their sites. The Mail only seems to have one account but it is the 20th largest in terms of followers.
The full spreadsheet of data is here (and I’ll keep it up to date with any accounts the papers forgot to mention on their own sites)… It’s based on official Twitter accounts - not those of individual journalists. I’ve rounded up some other Twitter statistics if you’re interested.
Jul 1, 2009
July 1st, 2009 by malcolmcoles
Update, 2 days later: Paul is kind enough to let me guest post here (ie I wrote this, not him). It was going well until this post … You can read my climbdown here…
The latest subscriber figures (see table below, and first published in my blog’s newspapers category) show that, apart from a couple of exceptions, it’s time for newspapers to turn off their RSS feeds - and hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to an alternative, such as their Twitter accounts.
(You can read some of the defences of RSS here and here)
The table below shows that only 3 of the 9 national newspapers have an RSS feed with more than 10,000 subscribers in Google Reader.
And most newspaper RSS feeds have readerships in the 00s, if that.
Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has just 11 subscribers to her RSS feed (maybe there’s hope for the UK population yet …).
Despite having virtually no users, the Mail churns out 160 RSS feeds and the Mirror 280. All so a couple of thousand people can look at them in total.
The other papers are just as bad. And while the Guardian has a couple of RSS readers with decent numbers (partly because Google recommends it in its news bundle), it has more feeds than there are people in the UK … [Read more]
Jun 27, 2009
June 27th, 2009 by chrismitchell
Scientology has long been a tricky subject for journalists to cover; the corporate-structured religious movement has a reputation for litigation, against government agencies, news organisations and individuals.
Given this it is all the more interesting to consider the recent series of articles about Scientology in Florida’s St Petersburg Times, which focus on the behaviour of its leader David Miscavige and offer a counterpoint to the Church’s own line that “since the founding of the first Church of Scientology in 1954, Scientology has become the fastest-growing religion in the world.”
The Times presented the series as three large articles (totalling nearly 15,000 words, with the first article alone stacking up 6,618) published across print and web over three consecutive days, starting on Sunday 21st June. In addition the paper ran ancillary features which fleshed out elements of the main story, provided historical context, and also laid out some of the raw material which helped to underpin the series. [Read more]
Jun 26, 2009
June 26th, 2009 by malcolmcoles
Express.co.uk is about to undergo a redesign (and there’s a good review of the new look, still currently in beta, at econsultancy).
To me, the new site isn’t that impressive (screenshot below, or you can compare the old front page or new front page) - it looks like a poor mashup of the BBC and Yahoo in the existing colour scheme.
Even worse, it’s not very accessible as there is literally no content on the new home page with javascript turned off.
The agency behind it is Netro42 who say here about the old version that “Netro42 working in partnership with Northern and Shell quickly established that the key to success was in wholly utilising the digital space.”
Personally, I like to partially use the analogue space when working on websites, but I may be old fashioned.
New Express homepage
I wonder if the new design means they’ll update their site on a sunday? Or get some better suggested search terms?
Jun 25, 2009
June 25th, 2009 by malcolmcoles
In March, I appealed to the Audit Bureau of Circulations to sort out its terrible ABCe website. It’s had a redesign. Here’s a list of its latest problems (originally published here).
If at any point the ABC wants to pay me a consultancy fee, for all this free advice, just leave me a comment to tell me how to receive my money …
All the URLs have changed but there are no redirects
New ABCe homepage in Google
They’ve had a redesign, but they haven’t redirected the old URLs to new ones. So, for instance, if you click the second link shown in Google for a search on ABCe, you get page not found.
Lesson When relaunching a website, always 301 redirect your old pages to new ones (even if they’re all just to your new home page). That way, external links still work and you keep the SEO benefit of any links.
They haven’t sorted www vs non www
The more observant will have noticed that the title of the first result in that screenshot says ‘To access IIS Help’. The ABC hasn’t realised that abce.org.uk is not the same URL as www.abce.org.uk. And if you go to the ABC URLs without www, you get page not found or server errors.
Compare these pages:
and these ones:
Lesson When you set up your website, redirect yourdomain.co.uk/whatever to www.yourdomain.co.uk/whatever. And log in to your google webmaster account to set your preferred domain (www or non-www).
They’re running two absolutely identical websites
ABCs new homepage. No, it's ABCe's. No, it's aaaaggghhh
You can access the entire website at www.abc.org.uk - or you can see an identical website at www.abce.org.uk. [Read more]
May 18, 2009
May 18th, 2009 by malcolmcoles
Google has dropped the Telegraph to 5th place when you search for MPs expenses for some reason, as revealed here.
Last week Google had pages from the BBC 1st and the Telegraph 2nd - even though the Telegraph is the primary source of all this material.
Today the search results are even worse:
- In first place, we have the BBC, with one page from yesterday and from October 2004 - is this what seachers want?
- Then comes the Guardian, with its MPs’-expenses landing page followed by a story from Saturday. That might be fair enough for 2nd place.
- Then theyworkforyou.com - tangentially interesting I suppose, but the page is dated 2004.
- Then the Daily Record from Saturday. I’ve nothing against Scottish newspapers. But really - ahead of the Telegraph?
- And finally, the Telegraph with one page from Sunday and its MPs’-expenses landing page.
The Telegraph is benefiting from the 3 news stories above the normal results. And Google is probably having trouble identifying the original source because no mainstream news organisations link back to the Telegraph. But for a topical news story, this set of web search results is really bad.
Search results for MPs expenses at Google
May 11, 2009
May 11th, 2009 by malcolmcoles
Telegraph.co.uk gets an amazing 8% of its visitors from social sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Stumbleupon, Julian Sambles, Head of Audience Development, has revealed.
The figure explains how the Telegraph is now the most popular UK newspaper site.
75,000 visitors a day
The Telegraph had about 28 million unique visitors in March, which means social sites are sending it almost 75,000 unique visitors a day.
Search engines are responsible for about a third of the Telegraph’s traffic Julian also revealed - or about 300,000 unique visitors a day.
This means the Telegraph gets 1 social visitor for every 4 search ones - an astonishingly high ratio.
You can read more of what Julian said about the Telegraph’s social media strategy here. The statistics were originally given for an article on social sites on FUMSI.
Apr 29, 2009
April 29th, 2009 by malcolmcoles
Some news sites get a last updated time stamp in Google - and some don’t. It’s a bit of information next to the URL that says XX minutes ago and shows when the most recent story was published.
Not all news sites get it - although I can’t see any rhyme or reason (originally posted here).
Sites that do have it
The sites that do have it are: Times, Telegraph, BBC News, Express, ITN, Guardian. (Click the picture for a bigger version).
News sites with a time stamp
The Express could probably live without it, as I recently showed that they don’t update their site after 8am on a Sunday. [Read more]
Apr 20, 2009
April 20th, 2009 by malcolmcoles
Most newspaper websites are doing a bad design job in making their stories readable. Too many are using:
- small fonts,
- long off-putting paragraphs,
- no subheadings,
- no in-content boxes or pictures, and
- no in-content links.
To explain more, I’ve written a companion post on online readability (design, not writing - and this post was first published here). And here’s an example each of their news stories so you can see the issue: Daily Mail, Express, FT, Guardian, Independent, Mirror, Sun, Telegraph, Times.
Main readability design mistakes
This table summarises the main ways they are going wrong.
Tiny fonts
They are all using font sizes that are too small for comfortable reading on copy-heavy pages. Only the Guardian, Independent, Mirror and Telegraph offer obvious controls for resizing text.
But most of the sites use 12 or 13px fonts for body copy. I think this is too small to be the default - 16px is a much more readable size. Only the Guardian comes anywhere near this. [Read more]
Apr 14, 2009
April 14th, 2009 by Dan Thornton
Dan Thornton, Community Marketing Manager at Bauer Media, reposting from his blog, TheWayoftheWeb.
Although hardly newspaper/print apologists, both John Duncan and Martin Langeveld have posted interesting articles trying to compare the print/online split in newspaper readership in number terms. Duncan comes in with online having 17% of page impressions on Inksniffer using the Guardian as a case study, while Langeveld posts that only 3% of newspaper reading happens online.
While I totally agree that it’s easy to overestimate the online figures in comparison to print products, and both articles are good reality checks, I have to say that I think comparing print and online readerships directly in this way is equivalent to comparing the number of people who drive cars with the number of people with vowels in their name.
And touting the eventual figures is very dangerous. [Read more]
Newspapers on Twitter - how the Guardian, FT and Times are winning
