I have written about both the fall of traditional news media through social media (see Who Killed the Rocky Mountain News? from John Temple) and the those enlightened media outlets that have embraced social media to their advantage (see for example, NPR is Expanding its Traditional Media Audience Through Social Media and BBC Pushes Social Media for Its News Staff for Both News Collection and Impact Monitoring. The New York Times recently wrote about the efforts of the Washington Post to ride the crest of the social media wave rather than become swept under it in their story, A Newspaper, and a Legacy, Reordered.
Through their efforts the Post has risen to the number two online news outlet only behind the New York Times. They note that the Post has the same problems as other daily newspapers, whose revenues have sunk as the Web and the tough economy has further cut back on advertising revenue. The news staff is 60% of what it used to be. To address this challenge, the Posts has undertaken, “one of the most sweeping and closely watched reorientations of any newsroom in the country. The editors now stress online metrics and freely borrow from the playbooks of more nimble online competitors like Politico and The Huffington Post.”
So what did they do to achieve this new success? They expanded their “Web presence by trying to meld what was great about the old Post with new traffic-baiting tricks of online start-ups — creating new, high-minded blogs…” They also integrated their digital and print operations that had been run separately. This is what all media outlets should do, just as any organization today should integrate is traditional business and its social business.
They filled the newsroom with also brought in large flat-screen monitors that provide real-time projections in real time on what the most popular online stories. The also installed a new internal publishing system that require reporters to identify Google-friendly key words and flag them before their stories are edited. There are now 35 different daily reports that track traffic to different parts of the Web site.
Editors receive a midday performance alert, on whether the site is on track to meet its daily traffic goals. More importantly the top editors embraced studying traffic patterns as a useful way to determine where to focus the paper’s resources. But they have gotten more sophisticated as traffic is all that editors look for when determining whether to kill or expand a blog. They also look at where online visitors and if their computers are registered with a government suffix — .gov, .mil, .senate or .house — editors know they are reaching the desired audience. They have also adopted the language of the new Web using terms like page views, unique visitors and social media referrals in their conversations and strategy.
I think this is a great case example for not only the news media but for any business that wants to survive and succeed in today’s market. Here is another example of the creative use of social media (see our five part series on what PBS affiliate, KETC, did to create a great community through social media. Here is also some advice on how help with this transformation. (Creating a Sustainable Ecosystem for Community News Media - Part One: Providing Relevance and Creating Loyalty).
Greetings! What do you think who is your blog's average reader?
Posted by: TechnologyIsFuture | December 18, 2012 at 06:51 AM