Two weeks ago I conducted a mini-survey of readers. For those who responded, thank you very much – for those who tried to but couldn’t because it was closed, apologies (Surveymonkey’s free version only allows 100 responses and it reached that point within two days). Here are the results:
Employment
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By far the biggest category, 47% of readers are online journalists. 29% described themselves as print journalists, and 6% broadcast, but as respondents could fill in more than one category, I’m guessing the majority of online journalists write for print or broadcast as well.
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26% work in management (19% editorial, 5% technical, 2% commercial/advertising – there may be some in more than one category)
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19% are journalism educators; 7% educators in other areas (again, potential for overlap)
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12% are journalism students; 11% other students (some may be dual-honours students ticking both)
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7% technical. If anyone can post in the comments what that means for you (web designer? Developer?), that would be great.
Even at the top level, these figures add up to 111%, so clearly there are some educators, students and management who work as journalists, and vice-versa. My own feeling that readership would be pretty evenly distributed between journalists, management educators and students goes out the window.
Country
Surveymonkey doesn’t summarise these results, so OJB virtual intern Wendy Withers very helpfully (and quickly!) compiled the following:
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31% UK
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28% USA
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7% Portugal
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6% Canada
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4% Spain
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Other readers in Brazil, Switzerland, Belgium, Chile, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Peru, Qatar, and South Korea.
This seems to support the importance of viral distribution and relationships with other bloggers in blogging. Amazingly, despite my predictions, no Australian or Ukrainian respondents.
RSS Readers
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51% use Google Reader
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10% Bloglines
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27% another RSS reader
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and 18% don’t use one
My 50% non-users prediction was clearly out of touch. And a surprisingly low turnout for Bloglines. I should have asked whether people read blog entries in the RSS reader only, or click through to the blog. Do you?
How did you come across OJB?
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48% came from another blog post
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9% search
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6% blogroll
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5% for either Facebook or an article link
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18% can’t remember
Again, this clearly highlights the importance of other blogs in generating traffic. In hindsight it would have been worth asking whether people came from comments I’ve posted. The role of Facebook is worth noting too.
Online Journalism Blog 
Hey, Paul, I didn’t answer your survey (sorry), but I noted in a recent post that my blog stats show a big shift from Bloglines to Google in the past year — Bloglines was top one year ago, with 35 percent of my blog subscribers using it. Next closest: Rojo, 19 percent.
One year later now, Google Feedfetcher accounts for 44 percent of my subscribers, and Bloglines is a distant No. 2, with 20 percent. (See post.)
My feed resulta are pretty similar to Mindy’s with a big increase in people using feeds generally since Google reader arrived on the scene. You can get all this information about your feeds by handling them through Feedburner.com.
I’m one of your mystery ‘technical’, I’m an independent internet consultant and blogger, but not involved with journalism per se, although I do write a lot about news websites and have done work for BBC News. I’m also one of the dwindling band of loyal Bloglines users, and 99.5% of the time read from within Bloglines rather than visit a site – provided they have a full feed of course.
And I was on holidays when the survey happened otherwise Australia would have shown up in the country stats.
Hi, the poll was closed when I arrived.
I’m from Argentina, LatinAmerica.
I’m not a journalist but belong to the R&D New Media department of La Nacion of Argentina, one of the most important national news outlet in my country.
I can fit in the New Media educator for journalists category.
I use Netvibes as RSS reader.
For new media newsletters I prefer a gmail account, my own new media search engine.
Still thinking I should try the Google Reader.
I’m one of your Qatar readers I’m the Head of New Media here at Al Jazeera. I generally click through to the long pieces if they catch my interest…
I’d be interested if you had other respondents from Qatar (i.e. Al Jazeera).
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Thanks – it’s always very helpful to know who you are – not least because it helps when I’m looking for an expert opinion on something.
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