Monthly Archives: May 2008

How do you measure a blog’s success?

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Brazil correspondent Gabriela Zago looks at the variety of metrics for evaluating the popularity of blogs. A Portuguese language version of this is available here.

There are many ways to measure a website’s success. Some use a more quantitative approach, and others are more qualitatively based. You can say a weblog is popular for many reasons, such as:

  • traffic (page views, visits, visitors),
  • discussions (comments, trackbacks, linkbacks),
  • position in search engines (page rank),
  • readership (feed subscriptions, blogroll presence) and
  • reputation (a more subjective approach, based on what people think of a website, and the qualifications of the person that writes for it).

If you obtain all that data and construct rankings based on these different types of information, chances are that not all blogs ranked will appear in the exact same position in each one of the ranks. Continue reading →

French, Norwegian and US newspapers added to News Interactivity Index

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Just to let you know that the News Interactivity Index now includes newspapers from Norway (thanks Kristine Lowe), France, the Netherlands and the US. You can use it to compare any two newspapers or country averages. The following countries are now covered:

  • France
  • Hungary
  • Macedonia
  • Netherlands
  • Norway
  • Poland
  • Portugal
  • Spain
  • Switzerland
  • UK
  • US

Polskapresse’s flawed strategy for dealing with falling circulation

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Six months ago Polish publishing company Polskapresse took an innovative step in response to declining sales. The company, at the time publishing six regional dailies in different parts of Poland, decided to combine them under one brand: “Polska”. Marek Miller makes an early evaluation of this project.

The reason

The Polish regional press market is divided in two. Half belongs to Media Regionalne (part of David Montgomery’s Mecom) which publishes nine regional dailies; the other half belongs to Polskapresse (part of German Verlagsgruppe Passau). The press market was divided in the way that no regional newspaper published by both publishers would compete directly on the same regional market. Continue reading →

Speaking: Investigative Journalism goes Global

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On June 13th I will be in London at the Investigative Journalism Goes Global conference, hosted by Westminster University. The day will include the official launch of the second edition of the book Investigative Journalism, for which I’ve written a chapter on ‘Investigative Journalism and Blogs‘. I’ll be on a panel discussing “GLOBAL OPERATIONS Sourcing Globally, Reporting Globally”

Here’s the incredibly intimidating company in which I will be sitting.

  • Chair: Deborah Vogel, Course Leader, Postgraduate Journalism
  • Stephen Grey, Investigative journalist and author of Ghost Plane (tbc)
  • Gavin McFadyen, Director, Centre of Investigative Journalism
  • Paul Lashmar, Freelance investigative journalist
  • me
  • Deborah Davies, Channel 4 Dispatches

If you’ll be there let me know, would be great to say hello.

Five questions from another journalism student

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A third year BA Honours Journalism student studying at Middlesex University and based at the Journalism Centre Harlow College has emailed me the following questions. As always, I make the responses public.

1. What effect do you think the increase in Internet news sites will have on newspapers?

It’s already had an effect – increased competition, increased immediacy and reduced costs. But it’s not just news sites – the internet enables people and organisations to communicate with each other without needing news media to do it for them. That’s a real challenge. Continue reading →

Something for the weekend #7: sharing documents on Scribd

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This weekend’s plaything is Scribd, a document sharing website. If you have a PDF, Word doc, spreadsheet, powerpoint, image or open office doc – for example, annual reports, raw material, etc. – this is a good place to put it to make it both interactive and conversational.

A quick look at the tag cloud reveals some useful sources too, including the environmental protection agency, NASA, food and drug agency and so on (it is currently, as you’d expect, very US dominated). Continue reading →

Council elections mashup – help improve it

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I’ve very quickly created a Yahoo! Pipes mashup for today’s council and London mayor elections in the UK. All it does at the moment is

  • take the RSS feed for Tweetscan searches for ‘election’, ‘voted’, ‘voting’, ‘vote’, ‘Ken Livingstone‘ and ‘Boris Johnson‘,
  • gets rid of duplicate results,
  • and spits out a feed.
  • UPDATE: Now it also takes feeds from Google News and Technorati searches for local election and the two london candidates
  • It also filters out anything with ‘Zimbabwe’ in it, as reports on those elections were coming through.

I’d like to invite you to clone the mashup and make improvements. Or you can just suggest them here.

Some things I’d like to do are: add images; geo information and mapping; other feeds; filtering based on user input (e.g. location).

Meanwhile, here’s how the two mayoral candidates are faring on Twitter mentions according to a search on Twist:

Boris vs Ken