17/7/2010 “What the audience wants” isn’t alwa…

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Who owns the The Wikipedia

news? Could of news
sharing a hot translation
“What the audience wants” isn’t always junk journalism
story be illegal? How a C hinese website
assembled a volunteer
Should news organizations give the audience what it wants? The right to link is up for army to translate English
debate in a critical court stories — despite Beijing
Swap out “news organization” for “company” and “audience” for “customers” and
case, pitting news orgs interference
the question seems absurd. But journalists have traditionally considered it a core against Google and
principle that the audience’s taste should not be the sole guiding force behind Twitter
news judgment. Coverage based on clicks is a race to the bottom, a path to
slideshows of Michelle Obama’s arms and celebrity perp walks, right?

Ite m:
m Last week, when The New York Times wrote about the new Yahoo blog The W hat makes a nonprofit news org legit? Six clues
Upshot, the reporter focused on the angle that it will use search data to guide Calmness, curation, cat porn: Dave Eggers on print
editorial decisions: An involuntary Facebook for reporters and their work
The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Back to the pre-print
world?
Yahoo software continuously tracks common words, phrases and The NYT’s depressing list of most looked-up words
topics that are popular among users across its vast online network. W hy Apple banned a Pulitzer winner from the iPhone
To help create content for the blog, called The Upshot, a team of
people will analyze those patterns and pass along their findings to
SE ARC H
Yahoo’s news staff of two editors and six bloggers…The news staff
will then use that search data to create articles that — if the process
works as intended — will allow them to focus more precisely on
readers. From Twitter
Does the audience always want junk? Maybe not.
http://j.mp/afL14u 47 mins ago
Yahoo staffers were dismayed, saying the search tool is just one piece of their
editorial process. Michael Calderone: “NYT obsesses over use of a search tool; Need to catch up on the week's news-innovation
ignores boring, traditional stuff (breaking news, analysis, edit meetings,etc).” news? Here you go http://j.mp/do6R3x 17 hrs ago
Andrew Golis: “Seriously, NYT misses a forest of brilliant old school original
Production as an independent value: what the Old
reporting & analysis for an acorn of search insights.”
Spice ads can teach us (no, seriously!) about the
m Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander writes that the Post is
Ite m: news http://j.mp/9aL1MA 17 hrs ago
steeped in a divide, with web journalists pushing to use user data. Print
Because it is Friday: check out the trailer for "The
reporters, meanwhile, fear that “if traffic ends up guiding coverage, they wonder,
Other Social Network," the Hollywood treatment
will The Post choose not to pursue some important stories because they’re ‘dull’?”
of...MySpace http://j.mp/btLRoj 18 hrs ago
Then Alexander noted that the Post’s top trafficked staff-written story of the past
year was about…Crocs. “The Crocs story illustrates a sobering reality about The RT @hblodget: Huge win for Gawker Media and Nick
Post’s site. Often (not always), readers are coming for the offbeat or the unusual. Denton as court kills Gizmodo iPhone search warrant
They’re drawn by endearing animal videos or photo galleries of celebrities.” Or http://read.bi/bGBhyC 19 hrs ago
rubber shoes.
More updates...
But what if sometimes “what the
audience wants” is more serious
than what the news organization
is giving them?

Ite m:
m A Pew study released
Wednesday noted that, while
public interest in the Gulf oil spill
has dropped a bit — from 57
percent surveyed saying they are
following the story closely to 43
percent — coverage of the oil
spill has fallen off a cliff,
dropping from 44 percent of all
news coverage to 15 percent.
And the drop in public interest
followed the drop in coverage, Check out these related posts
not the other way around.
Meanwhile, news consumers A “reader affection” formula: Gawker creates a
metric for branded traffic
were getting a heavy dose of
Is transparency the new objectivity? 2 visions of
Lebron James and Lindsay Lohan
journos on social media
coverage. (Note: The data is
Lots of data to mull on charging for online content
from June 10 to July 10, so before news that BP has tentatively stopped the
spew.) Links of the Week on Twitter
NYT sees bigger pageview numbers post-
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17/7/2010 “What the audience wants” isn’t alwa…
NYT sees bigger pageview numbers post-
Ite m:
m Meanwhile, Mother Jones
inauguration; credit slideshows
released its second-quarter
This W eek in Review: Newsweek on the block,
traffic stats this week. For unique
Twitter as a journalistic system, and more paywall
visitors, they’re up 125 percent rumblings
year-over-year. Their revenue
“The 24/7 News Cycle”: David Carr, Arianna
has increased 61 percent. The Huffington, and Mark Russell debate the future at
timing roughly coincides with the ASNE
site’s decision to double down on Is print still king? Has online made a move? Updating
oil spill coverage, though it cites a controversial post
other coverage for the uptick as well. The magazine’s Kate Sheppard follows the Three iPad design choices that will influence how we
spill almost exclusively, filing a lively Twitter feed with links to her own work and read news online
others. That could help account for a chunk of the 676 percent jump in traffic This W eek in Review: Surveying the online news
from social media year-over-year. (Pew also found recently that the oil spill had scene, web-first mags, and Facebook patents its
slowly entered the social media world, picked up speed and hit a point last feed
month where it was accounting for nearly a quarter of all links on Twitter.)

Could giving readers more of what they want mean both good journalism and a
stronger bottom line? The two won’t line up every time, but it’s useful to
remember that “what the audience wants” doesn’t always match the stereotype.

Laura McGann | July 16 | noo n

Tags: Andre w Ale x ande r, Andre w Golis, Kate She ppard, m e trics, Michae l C alde ro ne ,
Mothe r Jone s, Ne w York Tim e s, oil spill, om budsm an, page vie ws, pe w, SEO , Twitte r,
unique visitors

3 comments:

1. 66 at 5:53 pm , July 16, 2010

Oil spill coverage will cost billions of dollars over the next several years and
newspapers are cutting back. Lack of coverage will hurt clean up efforts and
we need to clean up on this. It needs to be profitable or it just won’t happen.

2. Suzanne Lainson at 10:34 pm , July 16, 2010

Dull shouldn’t ever be a part of news coverage. If it is “newsworthy” and is
presented correctly it won’t be dull because it is relevant. In other words, if
there is a story that SHOULD be covered, make sure that I, as a reader,
know why it should be covered and how it may impact me.

Trackbacks:

1. Everything Shoes - Your source of shoes news and information at 3:27

pm , July 16, 2010
[...] “What the audience wants” isn't always junk journalismNieman
Journalism Lab at HarvardCrocs. “The Crocs story illustrates a sobering
reality about The Post's site. Often (not always), readers are coming for the
offbeat or the unusual. … [...]

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