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Kevin: Oliver Luft at the Press Gazette gives more details about the just 'halted' paywall experiment at Johnson Press, a regional (local) newspaper publisher in the UK. Oliver writes, "The scheme saw the publisher trial different access methods across the six papers; reader registration, uploading "teaser" stories which referred readers back to full versions in the print edition, and paid-for access."
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Kevin: UK local (regional) newspaper group Johnson Press has 'quietly' dropped its local paywall experiment. "The apparently dismal level of uptake for the JP trial is bound to cast doubt on whether paywalls are a viable business model for the regional press." I think it's important to keep the lessons focused on the regional press and not extrapolate those to other paywall experiments, most notably at the Murdoch's Times (London).
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Kevin: It's often difficult to come by hard numbers and agreed upon metrics when it comes to the impact of social media on traditional media so it's great that NPR in the US is sharing numbers publicly about how social media engagement strategies are reaping benefits. Ben Robins and Sandra Lozano write: "The results (of research) provided us with a first look at how social media is not only changing the way that news organizations report the news, but how some listeners are learning to engage in new and different ways."
Daily Archives: April 1, 2010
The Tyranny of the Explicit
Johnnie Moore has a great podcast episode talking with Viv McWaters and Roland Harwood on how an undue focus on metrics can get in the way of real thought and understanding. I see this frequently myself, too, when people want to focus on ‘return on investment’ or ‘success metrics’ for social media at the cost of understanding the intangible results, which are actually more important than the measurable ones. There are some great nuggets, so well worth listening to. I particularly liked Johnnie’s discussion of how learning has become codified in unrealistic ways and how that relates to best practice documents that don’t get practised.
My leaving gift from the Guardian
It was my last day at the Guardian, and as a leaving gift, Peter Martin, the tags editor, made me a tag cloud linking to all of the stories that I wrote in my three and a half years there. Steve Busfield, media and technology editor, gave me a piece of paper with just the code for the tag cloud and this simple bit of BASIC on it all on classic VT100 green text on a black screen.
10 PRINT “Kevin Anderson has left the building”
20 GOTO 10
“I’m told that you’ll know what it is,” Steve said.
Friend and colleague Simon Jeffery joked that it was a bit of a joke to print it out. Fortunately, Peter sent me the code so I didn’t have to type it all out.
It was a moving farewell not only to me but also to colleagues Bobbie Johnson (in absentia in San Francisco) Mercedes Bunz, Laura Scothern and Stephen Brooke from the Media Guardian and the technology desk. Thank you to everyone at the Guardian who I worked with over the last few years, with a special thanks to Steve and everyone else on the Media and Technology desk who welcomed me so warmly during my brief sojourn last year and who really made feel a part of the team.
UPDATE: I meant to mention that Peter made this lovely tag cloud which not only displays the tags but links to my articles on those topics using a service called Tagul. He used it to create a 2009 end of the year tag cloud of people in Guardian articles.
The lure of the partial post
Friend and colleague Stephanie Booth writes about the blogazine, which I’ve covered here already, and the frustration she feels when faced with blogs that only post excerpts to their front page (and, I’d add, RSS feeds). I want to pick up on the point about partial posts and want to say in no uncertain terms:
Partial posts or excerpts are bad practice.
They are bad practice for media outlets, but they are especially bad practice for business blogs. As Steph says, partial posts put a barrier between your content and your readers and although it’s a low barrier, just a click high, it’s still a barrier. Trying to artificially inflate page views by forcing people to click through from the front page, or from RSS, is nothing more than an attempt to fake greater popularity. It doesn’t mean that you actually have more readers, just that they have to click twice. Like Steph, I seriously doubt that it makes any difference to SEO, and if you’re willing to sacrifice user experience for a potentially tiny bump in your search engine ranking, what does that say about how you treat your customers?