Relevant, recycled online news
Posted Wednesday, January 3, 2007 at 2:03pm in Blogging, Media, PR General |
Last week I had a brief scan over the Wikipedia entry for my favourite media outlet, The Guardian. Further down the page it has a summary of the newspaper’s ‘online media’ section and mentions that a third of its website’s hits are for articles over a month old. Now think about that for a second. Old (and no doubt outdated) news accounts for a third of the Guardian’s traffic.
The Wikipedia entry links to a piece by Emily Bell (written in the Guardian of course) who backs this up by giving an example of a story which was added to the Guardian’s sister site, The Observer, about missing armed dolphins (not frickin’ sharks with frickin’ lazer beams btw) trained by the US military following Hurricane Katrina.
Bell says: “On the Sunday Flipper appeared in the paper the story won 25,000 impressions; on Monday it attracted a further 484,000; and to date it has picked up 915,000. Once you put a story into cyberspace it acquires a life of its own, well beyond the moment of publication. Flipper was Drudged - that is, he appeared on the US site the Drudge Report, which points people towards the quirkiest and most scurrilous stories on the web. From there one blog after another picks the curious item up and passes it on until the cumulative effect is as great as a major breaking news story.”
It also reminded me of a post written by Antony Mayfield after he had spoke to the automotive industry’s PR group MIPAA. He mentioned quotes from another speaker, the group editor for What Car?, Steve Fowler who claims that the publication gets 900,000+ visitors a week to whatcar.com and 127,000 readers a month to the magazine. “But people still think that the magazine is much more valuable to be in.”
Looking at my own stats this post still drives a lot of traffic to my blog. In fact in terms of hits is the most popular post I’ve written. And even though it was written in mid June, the last comment I received was late November. Google Analytics tells me that people are landing on this particular post using the keywords “public relations campaign”, “pr campaign”, “public relations campaign example”, “steps of a PR program” I could go on. Jeeze, I’m even number 6 in Google.com for people searching using the famous PR theorists, Grunig and Hunt as keywords.
My point is this. News in a dead tree publication is there for, at most, a couple of days. Then it’s off to be recycled and turned into new news. Whereas news online is recycled in a whole different way - it’s a recycling of the same news. Plus it’s searched for (I.e. the eyeballs it comes in range with actually want to read it) therefore making it more relevant to the end user.
technorati tags: the+guardian, online+news, search, recycled+news
Related Posts
- It’s those little things... 01.20.
- Xda Orbit 2 review 02.27.
- Dos and don'ts for digi natives 10.21.
- The Twitter Effect 03.05.
- Carphone Warehouse listens 05.25.
- Next post: « $100 laptop is nigh
- Previous post: Edelman grad blog launched »
11 Comments
David Brain
Wednesday, January 3, 2007 at 2:27pm
Impressive post, as is the length of the Wikipedia entry on Dr Evil.
Stephen
Wednesday, January 3, 2007 at 2:32pm
“Why make trillions when we can make…BILLIONS?”
Classic.
Simon Collister
Wednesday, January 3, 2007 at 2:49pm
Sorry for this not being funny but there was a great - and I mean, great! - article in Press Gazette last year about how journalism is being impacted by the Long Tail. Link is: http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/article/090906/journalists_should_understand_long_tails
Heather Yaxley
Wednesday, January 3, 2007 at 5:24pm
Simon beat me to the Long Tail reference (http://longtail.typepad.com/) - interesting to see if the ability to surf “old news” easily will result in more PRs “recycling” previous stories that clearly worked or if this age old practice will disappear when media can start to recall what’s been around…
Stephen
Wednesday, January 3, 2007 at 7:19pm
Simon, Heather: Thanks. The Press Gazette article is indeed good.
Serge
Thursday, January 4, 2007 at 10:46pm
Sorry Stephen. Talk to the hand, ‘cos the face don’t wanna hear it no more”
Strive Notes » January 6th: this week’s top 5
Friday, January 5, 2007 at 2:14pm
[...] 5. Stephen Davies has a look at the long-tail effect of Internet media in his post on relevant, recycled online news. Nobody wraps a fish with yesterday’s blogpost! Bookmark to: [...]
pooas
Thursday, February 15, 2007 at 5:20pm
http://google.com
Kev price
Thursday, June 14, 2007 at 1:39pm
Not only are articles impacted by long tail, but they are also impacted by how Googles algorithm deals with ‘freshness’.
Google have a tendancy to trust older pages against newer pages in their web results pages (obviously this isnt the case in their news pages).
The longer a page has been there the more links it gets and more trust it gains, Google will measure the number of links over time and see what kind of referal and the context of the referal and what the page can be trusted in delivering for certain keywords.
In a recent article in the NY Times Mr Singhal of the search quality team did talk about the problems they come across when dealing with freshness.
I write about it here:
http://kevprice.com/seo/the-most-open-article-on-google-i-have-read/
(the NY times article has become ‘members only’ now)
Online/offline news blur | PRBLOGGER.COM - PR blog
Sunday, May 25, 2008 at 12:08pm
[...] New Media Age reports that the Financial Times online ad sales has increased 30 per cent with profits from the newspaper and the FT.com website moving from £9 million to £11 million. It probably comes as no surprise that, as more and more people get their news online, the advertisers shall follow. And remember, online news is relevant and recycled. [...]
7 ways to improve a blog’s SEO | PRBLOGGER.COM - PR blog
Monday, May 26, 2008 at 9:54am
[...] a site like the BBC, Guardian or New York Times and you’re laughing. Which reminds me of this post I made on online news and how some people in the industry still don’t think an online hit is of any worth. If [...]