Four things that won't surprise you

1. Journalist and pundit Jonathan Alter is leaving Newsweek, possibly for a gig at Bloomberg.

2. Visits to the New York Times homepage are down between 5 percent and 15 percent since the paywall went up.

3. Tribune Co. and MediaNews Group are the leading bidders for the Orange County Register.

4. A freelancer has sued on behalf of unpaid contributors to AOL-Huffington Post.

(All links found via Romenesko)

Down for the hit count at The Daily

Rupert Murdoch's The Daily, a tablet-only news digest in need of subscribers, has a hard-hitting story up about a stripper therapist. A version of the story is available online, along with video - it doesn't include actual nudity, or any actual therapeutic advice. Here's the words-only summary:

Sessions begin with White fully clothed. As the hour proceeds, she asks if the patient (who are, unsurprisingly, mostly male) minds if she removes her shirt.

Then her skirt. Then her bra and underwear. The patient rarely minds.

One-hour sessions cost $150, and at first are conducted over webcam. Once a level of trust has been established, patients can book in-person sessions, though the price increases fivefold.

The same writer, using the same participatory style, recently did some hits-hunting work for the New York Post, where he profiled a masturbation meditation class.

(found via Gawker)

Slapping down hits-based journalism

A study released today of online ad revenues found the stories that generated the most money for news sites aren't necessarily the stories that attract an explosion of clicks. The death spiral of Lindsay Lohan is less valuable to a news site than ongoing coverage of illegal immigration.

To capture the ad revenue, news sites need a system that matches ad content to news content. As Nieman Journalism Lab points out, this adds pressure on the news side to cover those issues that are more likely to attract advertisers:

It’s worth noting that the high-paying topics are united less by their hard-news nature than by their proximity to companies interested in hawking their wares. Immigration lawyers want their ads next to immigration stories; mortgage brokers and “Refinance now!” types want to be next to mortgage-rate stories; job sites want their ads on those Gulf-recovery-jobs stories. That makes sense, but it doesn’t do much for the sea of worthy news stories that won’t have an easy e-commerce hook. There aren’t many good contextual ads for Lohan court stories, but there also aren’t many for corruption investigations.

There are ways to protect editorial independence under a context-based ad system, and the numbers people are using to measure success shows content has value. However, some will read the study as more evidence for niche coverage, and the greedier news sites will undoubtedly begin to demagogue certain topics (immigration, for example) as a way to pull in money. Hopefully, though, a study like this shows that success in the news business means thinking more about content and coverage than fishing for clicks on a link.

Don't sip from the lamestream, media

For responsible journalists, figuring out how and what extent to cover publicity-stuntman Pastor Terry Jones is a complicated task.

Less difficult is pointing out the shamelessness of some media in their attempt to ride the publicity wave Jones and his Quran-burning aspirations have created. For instance, staffers at ABC News wanted to fly Jones to New York City and film the journey. The dumb idea wasn't killed by journalists at the station, but by company executives, Yahoo's Michael Calderone reports.

Calderone also reports that over at MSNBC, the "Morning Joe" crew decided to simultaneously milk the Jones publicity machine and make themselves look above it all at the same time. The show had Jones appear as a guest, but didn't let him speak, instead choosing to have soon-to-be-former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham sermonize to the pastor about New Testament values.

This kind of nonsense becomes irresistible when you live or die by ratings. Which is why a New York Times article about how newspapers are now admitting that they pay a lot of attention to page hits should be worrying.

Proponents of a digital revolution in the news business will generally applaud the paper dinosaurs for finally listening to what readers want, rather than substituting their stodgy editorial judgments for a potentially vibrant democratic discussion.

Newspapers can do a lot of things better if they have a deeper conservation with readers (and with non-readers). But measuring page views and responding to that isn't the way to do it. Indeed, page clicks is the single most dominant measure of success online and it invites the most abuse.

Here's how the Wall Street Journal uses hits to reorder its news site:

At The Journal, editors use traffic data to inform decisions on how articles should be presented on WSJ.com. “We look at the data, and if things are getting a lot of hits, they’ll get better play and longer play on the home page,” said Mr. Murray. Conversely, articles getting low audiences will be moved down more quickly if there is no compelling news reason to keep them prominent.

Predictably, the Journal's editors immediately cite an exception to the rule, saying they've investigated or reported on some issue they knew wouldn't be very popular. But exceptions are merely rationalizations for what is actually happening. And when Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, says his paper uses page views only to determine how articles are presented online, not to direct coverage, he is being similarly disingenuous. Does anyone really think a newspaper is going to invest as much time and resources into topics that it knows won't ever get strong play on the web site? And isn't how a paper presents itself, whether in print or online, one of the key ways it communicates its editorial judgment to readers? (The answer is yes.)

Popularity is, as everyone who has ever heard of Justin Bieber knows, not synonymous with quality. What news organizations can do to protect quality is to develop more effective and nuanced ways to measure success and guide presentation. This doesn't mean they shut readers out. Newspapers should not refuse to adapt to useful feedback from the public. But to protect editorial judgment, they absolutely develop metrics that bake in editorial judgments and organizational mission. Ratings/hit-counts are passive; they will inevitably cause newspapers to substitute audience judgment for their own editorial judgment. Newspapers need a more sophisticated and active approach; they should be hiring people who know how to create the metrics that will make them better, not just more profitable.

Otherwise, they might as well book a flight with Pastor Terry Jones right now.

The "them" generation

We are all marketers now. To succeed in today's media, one must successfully engage The Audience - which often means repeated and desperate attempts to meet the mysterious and mercurial expectations of a largely unknown "them."

In this cause, former Chicago Tribune editor Jack Fuller argues that journalists need to better understand the human psychology to devise ways to carry forth good journalism in an age when the Audience makes all the decisions.

From his post at Nieman Journalism Lab:

The sciences of the mind offer a lot of help if we are willing to learn from them. They explain, for example, why the immediate crowds out the important. Why bad news attracts attention more than good news does. They can show us how emotion interacts with the human brain’s inherent mental shortcuts to lead us systematically to erroneous conclusions. They can point us to the ways in which search algorithms interact with emotions and these mental shortcuts to mislead people about the relative importance of various pieces of information. They can even help us understand the way our ability and impulse to read other people’s minds draws us to a story and light up other secrets of how and why narrative works.

It should be clear by now that the challenge for journalists from here forward is not only the steadfast adherence to the values of accuracy and independence and the social responsibility to provide a civic education but also the development of new ways of thinking and talking about how to advance the social mission of journalism in a radically and rapidly evolving environment. The answer is not to figure out how to transport 20th century news presentation into 21st century delivery mechanisms but rather to create a new rhetoric of news that can get through to the changed and changing news audience

Phrases like the "sciences of the mind" sound anachronistic to me, but let's set that aside. Frankly, I'm not sure how practical any of this is, even though I sympathize with the goal. Grasping the basic tenets of human behavior is hard enough; do we really believe we have the ability to use that limited knowledge to create a "new rhetoric of news"?

It's not that change is bad - or that new ways of communicating the news impossible to construct. What I'm critical of is this bizarre faith that measurements and data are the keys to better communication. We should embrace the author/ego vs. crowd/id dynamic and let new forms of news develop organically - indeed, that's going to happen whether we plan for it or not. We should stop being slaves to the metric and stop condescending to the "them."

Blogger candidacy

Political blogger Mickey Kaus wants to be a candidate for U.S. Senate. LAO

PBS to play ratings game

Under pressure from corporate sponsors, PBS has made a deal to have Nielsen Company rate its programs. From the New York Times:

The public broadcaster will announce on Monday that, for the first time, it has subscribed to full-time television ratings from the Nielsen Company. The subscription provides PBS sponsors with detailed information about the audiences for “Antiques Roadshow,” “Frontline,” “Sesame Street” and dozens of other programs.

-snip-

The deal with Nielsen does not entirely level the playing field between PBS and commercial networks. PBS isn’t signing up for overnight ratings; it won’t be comparing “Masterpiece Theatre” with “The Mentalist” anytime soon. Instead, it is ordering weekly ratings, because some of the programs it provides to member stations are shown at different times.

Although PBS isn't going as far as commercial television, the demand for ratings data does show how important audience numbers have become for all forms of media - whether it be page counts on newspaper websites, Arbitron numbers for public radio, or a Nielsen's weekly count for PBS.

Hits-based journalism*

Tony Pierce, Los Angeles Times blog editor, sent a memo to the troops yesterday. LA Observed got a copy - here's a portion of what was said:

Saturday, I am happy to report (though not surprised), Top of the Ticket had its biggest day ever. Yes, it was bigger than any of those debates, it was bigger than when Sarah Palin explained to the world the difference between pit bulls and hockey moms. Saturday Top of the Ticket, thanks to a tip from a sharp-eyed Times staffer, got more readers than when the United States elected its first Black president.

Indeed, a story that eventually was linked from the Drudge Report in 48 pt bold about Barack Obama bowing to the Emperor of Japan blew away the hits of those other historic days in American history. And this was a post published at 3:38am.

Is there any sweeter success in journalism than a link on Drudge?

*Update: Top of the Ticket writer Andrew Malcolm seems to be going for his second Drudge link in a week.

The 'loyal reader' metric

As news organizations discover better ways to measure online traffic, the focus of publishing could shift away from serving a mass audience to maintaining a loyal one. As a result, this could simultaneously liberate newsrooms from the pressure to generate hits at all costs and provide a more valuable metric with which to sell advertising.

Knight Digital Media talked with Slate editor David Plotz about what this could mean for content. Here's an excerpt (emphasis theirs):

“Until now we’ve been selling to the mass audience. Now once you have this ability to target you can really target your core audience… This creates strong incentive to create durable journalism,” Plotz said. “That one curious reader is worth 50 times the value of the drive-by reader. The person who makes a commitment to your brand, if you’re a quality brand….. if you can get those readers, a smaller set of readers, who come to you three or five or 10 times a week, you don’t have to go after that huge other set of readers.”

So forget celebrity and outrage stories. For Slate, this focus means a commitment to long form journalism such as a recent series on the American dental crisis, which Plotz estimates was read by 400,000 people. Slate has started a “Fresca Fellowship” that requires each reporter and editor to spend a month each year on a long form journalism project. Advertisers have begun to sponsor specific projects and they are paying for themselves, he said.

“Advertisers want to be around some ambitious project more than they want to be around some snarky political column,” Plotz said.

The approach won't work for every publication - and some publications won't want to do it since they equate influence with hits. But the "loyal readers" approach is familiar to journalism magazines and small- and medium-size newspapers, so it shouldn't require them to become niche publications to be successful.

Barely news

It may shock you to learn that local television stations don't always have the highest standards when it comes to their news broadcasts. KNBC seems eager to wallow in this reality, as illustrated by the screen shot of the station's top stories captured by Kevin Roderick at LA Observed.

Roderick writes:

Notice in the screen grab that the very top story in the left-hand column is that PETA ads feature stars who also are...naked. Not visible is another story slightly down page about celebrities in bikinis, with a photo of Britney Spears. I know local TV stations are on life support these days, but geez.

Indeed, everything on the page starts to look like a double entendre.

Roderick adds:

Perhaps this all fits with KNBC's hire yesterday of Alycia Lane, a newscaster-slash-tabloid fave who first came to national attention for her bikini photos — a hire that one newsroom source calls a real "head scratcher" in these times of cutbacks.

You might also have noticed in the upper left of the page NBC's new mood rating tool, which is designed to make you feel part of it all.

I am laughing at NBC.

Journalists caught in the metric

Given the ability of editors to measure traffic individual stories generate on a newspaper's website, could reporters find their beats - or even their jobs - eliminatd if their Web states don't measure up? That question was put to Dan Froomkin, only recently made a former columnist for the Washington Post, during a panel discussion.

From the New York Observer:

Mr. Froomkin's answer was that newspaper editors are typically "not senstive enough to Web sites," and cited Drudge and the Huffington Post as sites that have taken important cues from readers.

Mr. Froomkin said his editors told him that they "didn't think the column was working anymore" and "traffic was down." "Compared to what?" Mr. Froomkin said. "There were some very banal reasons for traffic going down." He explained that the Washington Post site lost readers after the site changed formats, and that he was still getting his "sea legs" after the Obama administration took over from the Bush regime in the White House.

"There was of course the money issue," Mr. Froomkin said. "I was an easy line item to scratch out."

Froomkin's answer isn't all that illuminating; perhaps his own firing is still too fresh. The larger issue of hit counts deserves more debate, however.

Curiosities

Among the leads on the Washington Post's website tonight is a feature about the world's longest eyebrow:

Brian had normal eyebrows as a boy. They started to fill out in high school and exploded when he was in his 20s. Today, it looks as if two hamsters perch on his face.

Hit-count lust

LA Observed has an internal memo from the LA Weekly that suggests the alternative paper has a burgeoning addiction to hit counts.

I've written about the dangers of hits-based journalism before.

Selling out

Perhaps it was inevitable.

Hobbled by bad circulation, newspapers and magazines have searched for a miracle to restore hope and revenue to their paper-based delivery systems. The journey sometimes led them down dead-end paths of celebrity gossip - a recession proof industry - and irrelevant but entertaining first-person accounts of reporters' lives.

Now, thanks to Barack Obama, the resistable has become irresistable. A rare combination of political leader, cultural touchstone and a celebrity, Obama is newsworthy and he sells papers. No tough ethical debates, no boring Fourth Estate rants, just big photos and long, languishing thumbsuckers:

The morning after the election, Barack Obama's supporters were not the only ones celebrating. Newspaper and magazine publishers from Los Angeles to New York had reason to be happy as well. After years of losing readers to the Internet, steep declines in advertising revenue, publication closures and round after round of layoffs, the print industry witnessed something it hasn't seen in a long time: sold-out newsstands.

-snip-

"You can't save and treasure a PDF file off of your computer. That's the transcendence of print that everyone in print has talked about, a certain tangible quality that can't be translated online for certain big momentous events."

The analysis glosses over an important fact. A media that depends on a powerful political figure for revenue has an even greater burden to show it can and will hold that powerful political figure accountable - memorabilia collectors be damned. After all, what's the point of selling out if you've sold out.

More readers, less money

Ten of the 30 most visited media Web sites are owned by newspapers, according to Nielson Online. Drudge Report, which is the first stop for many readers, including reporters, tops the list.

The top newspaper company is Gannett, owner of USA Today, followed by the New York Times. Others on the list include Media General Company (Richmond Times-Dispatch, Tampa Tribune, etc.), The Minneapolis Star Tribune and Hearst (San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, etc.).

Newspaper sites attracted a total of 64.3 million unique visitors. And yet they still haven't found the magic formula for making substantial profits on those hits.

MediaNews Group, the fourth largest newspaper chain in the country, dropped off the top 30 list. There's no explanation why. Perhaps it's due to the runaway success of other sites, or maybe readers are getting tired of the pop-up ads that slow page loading or the ads that cover the top third of the site but just won't close no matter how hard I click my mouse. Buggy blogs in the SoCal area probably didn't help either.

Notes to Denver: Web site redesign should be a priority; busy, flashy, incessant ads detract from the content and drive away new readers; and local papers should have more flexibility to tailor their sites to a local audience.

From the 'who cares?' file

The Internet is a hungry beast. And sometimes you'll feed it whatever you've got. Jonathan Martin at Politico crumples up a page from his notebook and tosses it into the maw:

A liberal radio host calls John McCain a "warmonger"!

Yawn.