Is your newspaper doing what you think it’s doing?  Lets say you operate in New Jersey and run NJ.com.  That site pans itself as “everything NJ”.  Does this hold up looking at the data?

ALEXA:
I did the breakdown for you below.  Click the field you want to change for your publication.  We’re using my home state of NJ so we’re using the following:

Top > News > Newspapers > Regional > United States > New Jersey

We find out that there are 44 newspaper websites in this category and they are listed by popularity below.  I show the first 5 as an example.  Clicking the title goes to the Alexa data, clicking the url goes to the site.

Sites in this Category

1. New Jersey Online
   www.nj.com/
2. The Record Online
   www.northjersey.com/
3. Courier-Post Online
   www.courierpostonline.com/
4. Daily Record
   www.dailyrecord.com/
5. Press of Atlantic City
   www.pressofatlanticcity.com/

So we see that indeed nj.com is the most popular newspaper site in NJ.  Let’s click on the title and see some data.

3,376
Traffic Rank Alexa Traffic Rank
A measure of a website’s popularity

3.0 min/day
Avg. Time on Site Time on Site
A measure of user attention.

8,841
Sites Linking In Sites Linking In
A measure of a website’s reputation

23-Oct-1994
Online Since

Now lets see what keywords are being used on the site.  Wordle is a visualization tool that allows you to input an RSS feed or paste in text.  Here i’ll just copy and paste the entire front page of the entire site.  This gives us:

Words that appear with greater frequency are larger than ones which appear less.  So “Jersey” appears on the site with greater frequency than “local”.  Ignore the color, the color means nothing.  Seems like NJ.com is doing a good job of covering their beat (NJ), but what could they be doing better?  Well, I don’t know because I’m not the publisher, but what if the site is pushing their “Rutgers” news.  Now do you think they’re doing a good job?  Can you find the word “Rutgers”, it’s in there.

I’ve presented you with two quick & free tools that newspaper executives can use to figure out if their site is reflecting their goals.  I encourage readers to do this with their sites AND their competitor’s sites.  Knowledge is power and visualization tools can really highlight problems or trends.  Use the free tools out there to your advantage and contact me for more help.