• Awful article timing
• Awful article title
• Awful article URL

Awful Article Timing:

I write a fishing blog and if I don’t write about fish stocking or an upcoming fishing contest several days before the event (on the blog and on Facebook), I may as well not even write about it. People want to read relevantly timed articles and SHARE those articles.  Who wants to read and share OLD content?  Look at the top articles on Reddit right now. Are they newer articles?  Yes they are.  Look at what’s trending on Twitter right now. Are they newer articles and news stories? Yes they are. Is today a holiday? People will be searching for the holiday so go ahead and write about fishing a Royal caddis fly on the day of the royal wedding. Very punny.

Great Article Timing:

1. The news is covering a hurricane that hit nearby?  Write an article about how low pressure systems affect fish behavior and how fishermen can capitalize on it. (note. if the hurricane hit the lake you write about, then don’t write this article, you will look like a jerk. Instead write about how people can help clean up or volunteer.  Still relevant.)
2. The state is stocking a million fish in a lake you cover?  Write an article about the event days before so they are prepared to get out there and fish.

Awful Article Title:

1. Fishing Before and After Bad Weather (bad. doesn’t reference the actual news event everyone is buzzing about)
2.How Low Pressure Systems Affect Fish Behavior and How Fishermen Can Capitalize on it (bad. too wordy.)

Great Article Title:

1. Fishing Before and After a Hurricane (good. references the hurricane.)
2. Fish Behavior and Fishing Low Pressure Systems (good. indirectly references the hurricane.)

Awful Article URL vs Great Article URL:

Generally speaking, you can turn a great title into a great URL by just making all the words lowercase and chaining the words together with dashes. Keep it short and loaded with keywords.

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So there you have it. A super-simple primer on writing timely web articles that will get shared and get you traffic.

Write this down on a post-it note and stick it to your computer screen:

1. What’s the biggest news story today? Is today a holiday? Can you put a spin on it for your area of focus?  Write that article.

2. What’s the most shared article today on facebook / twitter / reddit?   Can you put a spin on it for your area of focus?  Write that article.

3. Write a kick ass article title AND url.

4. Make it easy to share and share it.

5. Stay on top of your website analytics to see what’s working and what’s not.

6. Repeat every day.

Here’s TechCrunch founder and co-editor Michael Arrington, “On Monday evening I received a phone call from someone I trust who told me that one of our interns had asked for compensation in exchange for a blog post. Specifically, this intern had allegedly asked for a Macbook Air in exchange for a post about a startup.”

1.  I’m stunned that TechCrunch, one of the most influential and widely read blogs in the world would allow someone so young to create content for the site.

2.  I’m glad they fired him and deleted his content.

3.  One of the comments tips you off  to the fired intern’s  identity but he’s a minor so I’ll let you figure it out on your own.

4.  Another commentor links to an insightful article by Mark Cuban who breaks down the legality of “unpaid” internships. (tl;dr they’re illegal if your work benefits the company in any way).

5.  I’m now much more skeptical of some blog content. If there is more than one author on a blog site, I want to be directed to the bio of the author when I click on the author’s name, not to a list of all their other blog posts.  Seeking Alpha is one example of a good author link (for full disclosure I am a contributor to that site).

When I interview Don Carli about sustainability in news media a while back we had the following exchange, which is relevant.

RI- Will people still care where they get their news from?

DC- I don’t think people care so much about where their news comes from, but journalism… yes I believe they still care. Anyone can make news and anyone can report it, but journalism is different and that difference matters. For example, Twitter is fast becoming one the most important source of breaking news, but it isn’t journalism. I think a robust Fourth Estate capable of independent investigative journalism is essential. The first tenet of sustainability is having a political system that secures effective participation of its citizens in decision making. That is the role served by journalists and the media channels that deliver and store their content. …full article

Anyone can make news. ps i could use a new car ; )

The comments section dust up started when certain Engadget regulars became offended over this spoof article (Do you Hate Apple News?) which pretty much mocks readers for whining about reading too much Apple news.

Engadget is doing some cleaning during their down time right now banning trolls and spammers. But will it be enough?  What’s to prevent those people from coming back again? Remember when Kurt Greenbaum took it upon himself to police a vulgar post at the St. Louis Post Dispatch?  The internet can get ugly real quick.

Is it all the readers’ fault?  Maybe Engadet didn’t have to provoke their readers.  And how the heck can a baker’s dozen or so readers shut down the entire Engadget comments section.  Yikes!  I’m trying to think of what PRINT newspapers do and if there is one takeaway from how they handle input from the public it is that they attempt to tune it out and work above it.   Having said that, I really like metafilter’s solution ($5 lifetime membership), which, through the “broken window theory” builds a sense of community and increases self policing.

Personally I let akismet catch everything it thinks is spam / junk and I read through the posted comments to ensure they are legit. Then again Engadget gets 1.5million visitors per month and metaprinter is lucky to get 1.5thousand :(

Published: November 14, 2009 09:46 ET Read The entire story on their site.

Winners:

4Gig iPod – Jeff Emsweller. Jeff spent 22 year in the journalism field, starting as a photographer for the Rushville (IN) Republican newspaper. At Rushville he served as sports editor, assistant editor and then was named editor of the Batesville (IN) Herald Tribune. Jeff also served as editor of the Greensburg (IN) Daily News and then as Publisher of Greensburg, Rushville and Batesville.

1Gig iPod - H. J. Mann. H. J. is the Vice President of Financial services sales Firethorn LLC, a Qualcomm company. H. J. has 15 years of experience in technology and business development. He has held leadership roles in leading organizations such as Acxiom, Epsilon, and DoubleClick. H. J. lives in Dallas with his wife and daughter.  Thank you Robert!  www.firethornmobile.com

$20 Amazon.com Gift Certificate – Maikel Neris.  Maikel is a 27 years old Brazilian web designer and WordPress developer. Thanks for the prize!  www.maikelneris.com.br

Results:

Over the course of the 4 days we ran our giveaway there were 39 on site entries (and a total of 108 entries via twitter, linkedin, and email.  But those don’t count.  Sorry).  RSS subscriber numbers remained unchanged over the week (in a normal week it goes up by a handful) however site visits were up ~5%. Pageviews up ~10%. Pages per visit up ~5%. and Bounce rate fell ~11%.

The week wasn’t a massive success in terms of driving traffic – however that wasn’t my overall goal. The main thing that I wanted to do over the week was to add to the sense of community on the site – to have some fun – to get a few lurkers participating and to thank readers for being a part of Metaprinter. In this regard the week was a big success with many first time comments and a lot of thank you emails from readers who seemed to enjoy it.

Thanks again!  Any Ideas for the Next Giveaway?

Let me help you with that, Rupert. I’m going to save you all those potential legal fees plus needing to even speak further about the evil of the Big G with two simple lines. Get your tech person to change your robots.txt file to say this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Done. Do that, you’re outta Google. All your pages will be removed, and you needn’t worry about Google listing the Wall St. Journal at all.

For more on this:

User-agent: *
The asterisk (*) or wildcard represents a special value and means any robot.

Disallow:
The Disallow: line without a / (forward slash) tells the robots that they can index the entire site.

I’m pretty sure the newspaper publishers are not going after Yahoo’s bigger-than-Google News platform because most of them are in the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium.

The Newspaper Consortium is comprised of 30 companies that represent nearly 800 local papers—a number that’s equivalent to 32 percent of all U.S. daily circulation and 41% of all U.S. Sunday circulation.

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.

If I really want to see a particular article I can back into it by copying and pasting the article title into Google news and then clicking through the search result.  This works for WSJ paid content too which makes me wonder if these large publisher have an agreement with Google, but at the same time are angry about it.

What has been your experience on their site?  I remember being able to read national headlines without logging in.  So while others are going to paywalls, The Washington Post is moving to a membership wall? Maybe just for the time being. I’m hoping this is an experiment that will transform into something better.  I will never create an account and then log in to any newspaper’s website just to read one article and I suspect that others will not either.

UPDATED ON APRIL 9-2009

Why are they doing this?  When newspaper websites do what the washingtonpost site is doing, they are looking for ways to behaviorally target their readers and charge higher CPM’s to their advertisers.

What I would do:

If you are dead set on maintaining one catch-all newspaper-on-a-computer website then instead of  a required login, how about selling a sponsored ad on the “sign in” page then automatically redirecting to the article?  Hulu.com has a relatively non intrusive model where you can view a ~1min. 30sec. ad before watching a show OR you can elect to watch short commercials throughout the show.

Better yet:

Break your massive newspaper-on-a-computer website into stand alone niche sites where the user demographic is already known.  This idea is not new, it has been suggested many times and is being successfully used by blog networks like Gawker Media:

Doing this accomplishes many things that newspaper sites currently stink at.

1. builds a stonger community of interested members
2. people are more willing to register and subscribe to targeted content
3. advertisers are more willing to pay higher cpm’s for targeted content
4. more efficiently allocate resources

RELATED:

Alan Rusbridger on the Future of Journalism

Jacek Utko: Can design save the newspaper? TED2009

Posts Tagged “Future”

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Jon Stewart ends the interview by challenging Jim Cramer to remove words “financial expert and In Cramer We Trust” from his show. He also suggest that Cramer gets “back to fundamentals of reporting” so that he (Jon Stewart) can get back to making “fart noises and funny faces for a living! Cramer agrees, and they shake hands on it. Will it be so?

I think what we are seeing from this particular feud are two things:
1- The beginning of a class war between the rich and powerful VS. everyone else.
2- A wider realization that the internet paradigm is real and affecting how people learn things, exchange ideas, and broadcast those ideas.  If traditional media does not step up and show the “everyone else” category from point 1 that they are relevant and trustworthy, expect their value (to readers and advertisers) to continue to plummet.