Online Journalism Blog

The first study (PDF) of magazines and their various approaches to websites, undertaken by Columbia Journalism Review, found publishers are still trying to work out how best to utilise the online medium.

There is no general standard or guidelines for magazine websites and little discussion between industry leaders as to how they should most effectively be approached.

Following the responses to the multiple choice questionnaire and the following open-ended questions -

• What do you consider to be the mission of your website, does this differ from the mission of your print magazine?
• What do you consider to be the best feature of aspect of your website?
• What feature of your website do you think most needs improvement or is not living up to its potential?

- the researchers called for a collective, informed and contemporary approach to magazine websites with professional body support.

The findings were separated into the following 6 categories: [Read more]

During January and early February we have been subjected to a festival of political Satirical Statistics, as blogs reviewed 2009, Tweetminster reviewed political twitter, and commentators reviewed all of these numbers.

Most of it has been fluff and fury, but amongst the noise these are the statistics which I think are worth noting with care.

Labourlist’s lunchtime email newsletter goes to 3500 people:

3,500 people now subscribe to the LunchtimeList daily email update, which gives a quick but comprehensive overview of all the day’s news and views in the Labour Party

That’s after a year of solid plugging, and simply highlights how tough it can be to build email lists from scratch. In my opinion, a focus on email was one of the priorities that Derek Draper got right from day one on Labour List as it is still the most reliable way of building a community. Kudos to Alex Smith for publishing the email numbers; as far as I know no one else has done so and tend to just say ” we have thousands of subscribers”. Usually “thousands” can be taken to mean “two thousand and a bit”.

On an obliquely related note, I received my “free trial” to the Editorial Intelligence “Daily Digest” email today, and – bearing in mind that excellent free media summaries are available from several thinktanks (such as Reform and Ekklesia) and elsewhere – I don’t see that these are sustainable as a paid-for product, unless they facilitate real added value somewhere else in an integrated service (in EI’s case, this is the EI Club).

Comment summary may go (perhaps has gone already) the same way as much reporting and photography – it will slide down the value chain and will become an engagement (rather than value adding) tool.

Most of the traffic to Liberal Conspiracy comes from Comment is Free, Twitter and Facebook:

Most of our referrals now come from Twitter, Facebook and the Guardian website (primarily from CIF writers and commenters).

I’m still reflecting on this. Is this an illustration that Liberal Conspiracy is reaching into the wider media, or is it an indication that writers for Comment is Free can direct traffic to blogs when they try?

The online political niche has not grown *very* significantly in the UK.

In their recent report Tweetminster reported around a hundred thousand people following Members of Parliament on Twitter. That is not significantly different to the 50 to 100 thousand people following political blogs quoted to me in 2007 by people associated with the 18 Doughty Street project.

Anecdotal, but interesting. How will real political engagement be built?

Wrapping Up

I’d welcome further comments and insights.

Nicholas Moerman has put together an impressive collection of graphs showing a general decline over the past year in visits to mainstream websites across a raft of categories, from content and commerce to portals and porn. The only sites that buck the trend? I’ll let you guess.

He doesn’t know why this is (or even if he’s seeing things), which is rather refreshing, but offers some ideas, and it’s certainly food for thought. Here it is:

Some research from The Media Audit makes a pretty strong point about how quickly media consumers’ behaviour is changing:

“The Internet now represents 32.5% of the typical “media day” for all U.S. adults when compared to daily exposure to newspaper, radio, TV and outdoor advertising.

“Even those who are considered heavy newspaper readers spend about as much time online today as the typical U.S. adult. According to the report, heavy newspaper readers, those who spend more than an hour per day reading, currently spend 3.7 hours per day online. In 2006 the Internet represented only 18.4% of a heavy newspaper reader’s “media day,” but today it represents 28.4%.”

But there’s good news for some US newspapers who have made the most of their online presence to achieve an impressive reach “of 80% or more when the past 30-day website visitor figure is combined with the past month print readership figure.”

It will be interesting to see how paywall experiments might result in quite different reach stats for other newspapers in the coming months.

More at MediaPost.

Online Publishing Insider reports on the rise of people’s use of content online:

“In the last four years, the share of time devoted to viewing Content online has experienced the greatest growth, increasing from 34% to 47% of time spent, outpacing all other activities. There are a number of factors contributing to Content’s rapid rise. [Read more]