Tag Archives: report

Report: looking back at 2016 — looking forward to 2017…

2017 prediction charts

A couple weeks ago I published my responses to Nic Newman’s annual review exercise. Now the resulting report is out (PDF here).

As usual it’s a great roundup of the last 12 months, and some crystal-ball-gazing that will be as interesting historically as it will be for anything it gets right. It includes some particularly good sections on some news organisations’ plans around advertising, membership, and audio.

The funniest bit of the report comes with the statistic that 70% of editors, CEOs and digital leaders surveyed “said worries over the distribution of fake/inaccurate news in social networks will strengthen their position”.

Hm.

trust-in-mass-media-by-age

Chart taken from the Digital News Project 2017

NiemanLab already have a decent write up of the report here.

5 hyperlocal things {UPDATED}

Here and Now report

A new community for hyperlocal bloggers has been launched: Hyperlocal Alliance is “intended for grass-roots hyperlocal site owners, [and] is invite only (at the moment)”.

The Journalism Foundation has published a resource aimed at hyperlocal publishers – How To Build a Local Site (PDF) – including a chapter taken from the Online Journalism Blog (a rather curious choice, but there you go) and a link to Help Me Investigate in the Further Reading section.

NESTA has published Here And Now, its report (PDF) into the UK hyperlocal scene (shown above).

It’s also offering up to £50,000 in funding for hyperlocal projects.

And Birmingham City University (where I run the MA in Online Journalism) are recruiting a Research Assistant for a research project on hyperlocal publishing.

See comments for a 6th…

Internet use in the UK – implications from Ofcom's research for publishers

Apart from photo sharing and social networking, most internet users have little interest in UGC

UPDATE: The Office for National Statistics has also released some data on internet access which paints a more positive picture. Their data puts the numbers who haven’t been online at 18%. And 45% had accessed the web on the move .

I’ve just been scanning through the internet section of Ofcom’s latest report on The Communications Market 2010. As always, it’s an essential read and this year the body have done a beautiful job in publishing it online with unique URLs for each passage of the document, and downloadable CSV and PDF files for each piece of data.

Here are what I think are the key points for those specifically interested in online journalism and publishing: Continue reading

Post more = rank higher. We knew it already, but here’s the evidence.

The second part of Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report is out, with more obvious headlines: the more you post, the better your blog does. Here’s the detail from TechCrunch:

“Blogging is a volume game. The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog). The majority of the Top 100 blogs tracked by Technorati post five or more times per day, and a full 43 percent post more than 10 times per day. Meanwhile, 64 percent of the 5,000 blogs ranked lower than 600 post two to four times a day, which is still a serious commitment.”

For ‘Technorati’, you can also read ‘Google’, as it also ranks pages based on how many incoming links they have (among other things).

This really only confirms what own experience – and those of millions of others – suggests. But I would add a caveat.

While regular posting definitely increases blog traffic, a well considered, high quality post can be just as effective. Posts like the 21st Century Newsroom series generate a constant stream of visits to this blog, for instance. Another point is that frequent posting can result in good posts being buried beneath other ones when people check their RSS readers.

The best strategy, it seems, is a balance of frequency with quality.