Search results matching tag 'washington post'

Game changer: Facebook Connect

255762 — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:52:00 GMT

More evidence if you needed it of how powerful Facebook Connect can be from HuffingtonPost.com, which has used it to help recently surpass WashingtonPost.com.

I was looking at it recently as part of our social media strategy and how we might use it and while HuffingtonPost.com is in a league of its own in terms of the vast traffic it generates what it does has important pointers, I think, for others.

While some have queried the of what the Huffington Post has achieved CEO Eric Hippeau in an interview on PaidContent yesterday makes a good case for why it is more than noteworthy.

"It wasn't so much the Washington Post—by the way, it's also the LA Times, it’s also the online edition of the Wall Street Journal. Of the big national newspapers, there’s only two our size that are still bigger than we are: USA Today, which is a very different audience, and the New York Times, which will always be a big brand and very well read and well respected. We’re not in a race with the newspapers. We’re not in a race with anything in particular. Our goal is to establish the brand that defines news and opinion on digital platforms."

And how it did that is interesting, from a political and commentary blog to a pretty much all singing all dancing news site (let's side step the issue of content scraping/oversharing for today), with sport, culture, books and business all being added not to mention its regional editions across the US (Chicago, New York and Denver).

All this is helping it according to comScore hit 6.8m uniques in September. That's up a whopping 50% year on year.

How, in part at least, it has achieve that is through its much talked about Social News with Facebook Connect, which it only implemented in August (Huffington Post and Facebook Go “Social News,” With Connect on Steroids) and allows readers to create a personalised social networking-like news page on the Huffington Post as well as comment and share content easily with Facebook friends.

PaidContent details what Social News with Facebook Connect has meant in terms of those nitty gritty numbers and the numbers are impressive (they're big; always nice): Facebook referral traffic is up 48%; comments jumped to 2.2m from 1.7m in July (15% of HuffPo comments now come from Facebook); and Facebook referrals accounted for 3.5m up 190% percent from June and 500% from January.

Other titbits in the piece are on the international front. HuffPo still has no plans for international expansion outside of serving UK and other European users (the UK accounting for the biggest audiences outside of the US with 305,000 uniques) more appropriate ads, which it is doing via a deal with AdGent007.

"It's not an international strategy, Almost every week some pretty big organization would like to partner with us,” Hippeau said.

Facebook Connect has been described as a game changer by some and the future of journalism by others (take all and digest with a pinch of salt - but not too much).

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You've been blogged: money for nothing and content for free

255762 — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:09:00 GMT

The Washington Post has a good natured piece that is well worth a read on the liberties blogs take when swiping other people's content as they distil hours and sometimes days of work into as little 30 minutes.

In his piece 'The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)', Ian Shapira writes about his recent Washington Post piece about a life coach explaining Generation Y to Gens Xers and boomers ('Guru Explains Gens X, Y, Boomer To One Another'), which was taken by Gawker.

He explains that despite his long interview with the coach, his 3,000 words of notes and 1,500 word finished piece he was flattered to have Gawker blog and link to his piece.

But then having spoke to his boss he slowly realised that he'd been had. Or more precisely, he'd been blogged.

"Gawker's story featured several quotations from the coach and a client, and neatly distilled Loehr's biography -- information entirely plucked from my piece. I was flattered. But when I told my editor, he wrote back: They stole your story. Where's your outrage, man?

"The more I toggled between my editor's e-mail and the eight-paragraph Gawker item, the angrier I got, and the more disenchanted I became with the journalism business. I enjoy reading Gawker and the growing number of news sites like it -- the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and others -- but lately they're making me even more nervous about my precarious career as a newspaper reporter who enjoys, at least for the time being, a salary, a 401(k) (pension plan) and health insurance.

It is easy to understand why his editor might have taken that view. Gawker took extensive quotes and as with everything in blogosphere it took it for free.

Shapira goes on to say that he spoke to the Gawker blogger (who spent 30 minutes blogging the WaPo piece) and finally how he spoke to Gawker boss Nick Denton, who, smart guy that he is, knew just how the reporter felt and that he too felt the pain of people taking his content, saying he would "love to shut down or charge" the Twitter aggregators and spam blogs that reprint Gawker's stories.

Oh yeah, but as for that WaPo piece in particular? "That was certainly more of an excerpt than we'd normally indulge in," Denton said.

I thought about calling this blog post "How I spent hours writing this feature and all I got were a few lazy blog posts" because that seems to highlight the core idea in this debate about the worth of content. The Washington Post invested resources, time and money in that piece. Gawker did little, but scored traffic and income on the back of it.

It's a big debate, some want to stop blogs taking so much for free. Its outcome will impact on the future of newspapers and play a role in any plans they have to charge for content.

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How can newspapers make money on the web?

255762 — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:35:00 GMT

Ex-Washington post digital chief, Caroline Little, has been talking in Amsterdam having a stab at answering the question about how newspapers can make money online. It is a tough question with no easy answers, but her advice is quite right when she says the winners are going to be those people trying new stuff.

Speaking at the World Digital Publishing Conference in Amsterdam, Little, who advises The Guardian in the US, started by saying that despite impressive gains in audience and advertisers, newspaper websites do not produce revenue comparable to that of print newspapers despite their enviable reach.

Sad truth all those quite excellent websites, with video, and community do not pull in the cash. It makes an unhappy coupling as in this climate print circulations are shrinking and investment rising in digital – but without the rewards.

Little, who spoke at the AOP 2007 conference, cited the New York Times and The Washington Post, which are at the top of the heap in terms of their percentage of online revenue as part of overall revenue but it is still not enough and there is no ready-made solution.

That said Little has tips that are worth remembering and apply not only to newspapers, but to any online publishing business and chief among those is that while news websites share the same journalistic values as the newspapers the web is a different medium with different rules and that means trying new things. Here she adds a great piece of advice – not everything will work so do not be afraid to fail because as she puts it "fear of failure can be debilitating".

Little's four areas digital growth:

Multimedia storytelling

For a newspaper, storytelling options have long been limited to text, photography and graphics. The rise of the Web has added a number of new tools to this equation: video, audio, photo galleries, panoramic photos, blogs, etc. Now, we can approach a story with a different mindset, one that says, "what's the best way to tell this story?"

Database journalism

One often hears about the web's endless news hole. The endless news hole, of course, is largely a myth. You can only publish as much good journalism as you can produce, and that takes skilled reporters and editors. And most papers have fewer reporters and editors than it did a few years ago. But what that endless storage space is perfect for is databases that can useful to your readers. Washingtonpost.com has been very active in this area. For example, congressional voting database going back to 1991 and a searchable list of U.S. war dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Reader engagement.

Here are a few things you need to know about your readers: some of them act like jerks, many of them won¹t like the journalism you produce, and the angrier ones tend to be more active. But the upside is huge. When given a chance to participate in the conversation, readers come back. A lot.

Distribution (as key as content)

In this new world of media fragmentation, media companies cannot control the format in which readers consume our journalism. That's scary, but also a huge opportunity. We now have the chance to get our journalism in front of readers while they're driving via audio podcast or radio, while they¹re watching their televisions via set-top boxes or video podcasts, or while they¹re standing on a street corner looking for a restaurant via cell phone or iPod. And we can push journalism to them via RSS, email newsletters and widgets.