How many times have you heard the phrase “content is king”? Perhaps hundreds or thousands of times in the last 10 to 15 years. This has been uttered all those times as a justification for the dominance of publishers of all types—audio, video, text, and images—in the digital age. If it were true, the content kings would not always be whining about profits, downsizing, or restructuring. They’d be riding a wave of successes that emanate from their kingly dominance.
Tag Archives: Content
Metaprinter Giveaway Winners Announced / What I Learned
A number of people have asked me to write some reflections on running The Metaprinter Giveaway this past week.
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.
Jeff has won numerous state and national awards from writing, photography and layout and in 1989, he was honored to have a fire photo submitted and considered for a Pulitzer Prize. Although he did not win, he still treasures the documentation received regarding that nomination.
Jeff is presently the marketing manager for an auto body repair shop with two locations in Southeastern Indiana. “My passion remains for the newspaper industry”.
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?
Topix Creators Brag about Creating a Large, Useless News Site
Topix is a news aggregator which categorizes news stories by topic and geography. Topix LLC is a privately held company. Gannett, The McClatchy Company and Tribune Company own a 75% stake in the company.
Today Topix announced that Topix becomes #1 news site of Gannett, Tribune & McClatchy Internet Portfolio -from Topix blog. I have a few problems with this:
1. This sounds like a made up category, ie. Metaprinter is the #1 news site of the Metaprinter Inc. portfolio!
2. Topix is ranked #32 in the news category on Alexa.
3. Compete doesn’t show Topix beating USAToday as stated in the above article.
4. I don’t know anyone who uses or likes Topix. In fact, reading through the comments at the above post, it seems most people suspect the site is full of flame wars, trolls and hate speak.
5. For their size, Topix does not have a vibrant hyperlocal online community.
6. Where are the local advertisers?
I’ve contacted them for an interview. We’ll see if they can clear some things up.
UPDATE:
An anonymous tipster has revealed to me that some news sites use Topix for their article comments section. See for example this Gannett owned news site: citizen-times.com
Note the ‘comment on Topix forums’ option directly below the social bookmarking tools in addition to the Pluck Sitelife comments option at the end of the article.
“If you choose the Topix comment option, and enough discussion is generated on topix, it presumably bubbles up the story on Topix and the inbound links to the news site generate page views and more discussion”.
A little more digging on my part revealed that Tribune is using Topix.net to link to “Related News From the Web” as here below the Google Ads box in the body on their Baltimore Sun site. The purpose here again is to increase pageviews and links. It seems that Topix is nothing more than a solution for member newspapers to game the system and/or get more Google Juice.
Newspaper Publishers – Disallow:/
Google’s Love For Newspapers & How Little They Appreciate It
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.
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. Continue reading
Nick Bilton Keynote O’Reilly Tools of Change 2009
Columbia Graduate School of Journalism – Blogging for Journalists Best Practices
Show Name: Blogging for Journalists: Best Practices from SreeTips.com
Date / Length: 2/7/2008 3:30 PM – 1 hr
Tips and advice for print and TV journalists who are now blogging. Topics: Basics of blogging; how to get started; building traffic; building your blog’s brand; making money; taking it to the next level. SPEAKERS: Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia Journalism School professor and dean of student affairs & WNBC-TV tech reporter AND David Kohn, Baltimore Sun’s health and science reporter [blogging at http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/maryland/doctor/blog/ ]
Prof. Sree Sreenivasan | sree@sree.net
Dean of Student Affairs, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism
Technology reporter, WNBC-TV and WNBC.com
http://www.sree.net | http://www.sreetips.com
Slate.com’s Jack Shafer asks for Ideas – more MonkeyFishing?
In this article: Building an iTunes for Newspapers Answering David Carr’s excellent challenge. Slate.com writer and PressBox editor Jack Shafer asks for ideas regarding news dissemination.
“I’m not a fan of the PDF-like editions powered by NewspaperDirect.com, are you? I’ve got a couple of editorial ideas for what a paid online newspaper could do for me that a Web or print version can’t. Send yours to slate.pressbox@gmail.com, and we’ll write the sequel together. (E-mail may be quoted by name in “The Fray,” Slate’s readers’ forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)”
Here is my email to slate.pressbox.@gmail.com: Continue reading
Congratulations to the 2009 duPont-Columbia Awards Winners!
Congratulations to the 2009 duPont-Columbia Awards Winners!
New York, NY, January 12, 2009—Thirteen winners of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards have been announced by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
WFAA-TV, Dallas, Byron Harris & Brett Shipp
Money for Nothing, A Passing Offense, The Buried and the Dead
ABC News, Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger
Nightline, The Other War: Afghanistan
All Things Considered, NPR, Melissa Block & Robert Siegel
Coverage of the Chengdu Earthquake
California Newsreel, San Francisco, & Vital Pictures, Boston
Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? on PBS
Chicago Public Radio, PRI, NPR, Alex Blumberg & Adam Davidson
This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money
CNN & Christiane Amanpour
God’s Warriors
Current TV & Christof Putzel
From Russia with Hate
HBO, Thomas Lennon & Ruby Yang
Cinemax Reel Life: The Blood of Yingzhou District
NPR & Laura Sullivan
All Things Considered: Sexual Abuse of Native American Women
Oregon Public Broadcasting
The Silent Invasion
Safari Media, ITVS, Chris Sheridan & Patty Kim
Independent Lens, Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story on PBS
WJLA-TV, Washington, DC, & Roberta Baskin
Drilling for Dollars: Children’s Dentistry Investigation
WTVT-TV, Tampa, & Doug Smith
Small Town Justice
Quality journalism and investigative reporting without newspapers? Yes, it can happen. More info about the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia awards
Targeted Newspapers Outperforming Overall Newspaper Industry
This brief article focuses on Daily Circulation for performance analysis. The Circulation Figures come from annual ABC reports from 2004 to 2008.
Industry targeted business and finance newspapers – IBD, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times are outperforming the industry. All three grew print circulation in the last 3 years and all three are focused on delivering specific financial information to their readers. (note, IBD and FT are off this chart both having USA circulation figures of about 150,000 daily) Continue reading