Lawyers Blog Too
As is usual for this time of year, everyone’s got a “Best of” list.
Today, the ABA Journal listed its Best 100 Blawgs written for lawyers by lawyers. Specialized perhaps, but an interesting group to mine for ideas and answers to those tricky legal concepts that crop up on stories.
Especially useful to reporters: SCOTUS blog and sister site SCOTUS Wiki by founder Thomas C. Goldstein.
The Revenue Reason for Breaking News Online
OK! magazine broke the story heard ’round the world: Britney’s 16-year-old little sister is pregnant. Thing is, OK! chose to break it online.
Yes, every outlet eventually picked up the nut graf, showed the same Nickelodeon clips and set stills. But OK! magazine was cited each and every time as the organization to get the get.
The publisher trumpeted the scoop with an exclamation point-filled message to advertisers, and boasted of its celeb news primacy, according to Dylan Stableford at Folio.
It was obnoxious, maybe, but in the hypercompetitive world of celebrity news, perfectly justified.
The two things they got wrong? Nowhere in the message did the publisher talk about the online advertising opportunity. And, according to Stableford, OK! forgot to buy Google keywords:
“It also appears that People.com bought ‘OK magazine’ as a Google keyword, displaying a link under search results that reads “JAMIE SPEARS PREGNANT.”
To top it off? Ironically, the publisher’s message was sent by email.
Wired Ed. Chris Anderson Discusses ‘Emerging Market of Free’
In 2004, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson wrote an article suggesting media should focus on the long tail — small niches — instead of the big subjects.
The idea took off in news, most often interpreted as a move toward hyperlocal coverage online. The Washington Post‘s LoudounExtra most often cited, but there are other niche examples as well, including WCCO-TV, the dominant network TV news station in Minneapolis, and KCRW-FM, public radio based in Santa Monica, Calif.
During a Second Life interview last year, Anderson stretched his “Long Tail” theory into a discussion about technology giving people the power to create information for free.
Most notably, Anderson said, “There are two (long tails) in content. One is broad appeal down to narrow appeal. The other is new vs. old. So the LT revenues that you describe as being slow mostly refer to the second, the monetization of archives over time.
“The other big point to make is that we’re not just talking about a monetary economy. Most of the content created in the LT these days — from blogs to web video — is done for free, with no expectation of financial return. There are plenty of business opportunities in *aggregating* that content, but the money doesn’t necessarily accrue to the creators.”
Earlier this month, Anderson talked about “the emerging market of free” at Nokia World.
It’s an interesting yet potentially scary idea if applied to the news business. Already, we know aggregators like Google, Yahoo, Digg, etc., are profiting from media outlet output, which Web users essentially get for free. But without some fundamental changes to the outlets’ distribution strategy, where will the money to pay news workers come from?
You could argue that journalists are aggregators, interpreters and analyzers of information, and the inherent value in what we can be translated into real dollars that users should be willing to pay at least something for. After Radiohead‘s “In Rainbows” experiment, though, I’m not certain how optimistic I should be.
Top 10 Metrics Interpretation Mistakes
Ogilvie Interactive Marketing VP Rohit Bhargava started a two-part post describing the top 10 overused (and improperly interpreted) metrics of 2007, and what metrics people should be focusing on in 2008.
Earlier this year, there seemed to be a big shift among Web analytics researchers, who’ve now decided it’s more insightful to look at user engagement, which Web Analytics Demystified defines as “an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction on the site against a clearly defined set of goals.”
Among Bhargava’s top 10 junk measurements:
- Technorati Authority – As tempting as it is to use that neat little number beside every blog as the ultimate ranking for a blog, doing so can give you a false idea of the prominence of a blog and unjustly tip the scale against blogs that deserve a higher ranking.
…- Comments – Another element that many people are starting to look at on blogs and online videos is number of comments. The problem with this is that it fails to qualitatively look at comments. If you get 5 spam comments, 3 comments calling you an idiot, and another three that are nothing more than linkbait … that’s not 11 comments, that’s 0 useful comments.
…- Time Spent (searching) – Time spent on a site is a metric that marketers love to use, but it is only partially useful. Often, the time spent on your site is not an indication of engagement, but rather a result of a poor or confusing user interface. When a user has to spend 5 minutes trying to figure out your navigation, that’s not good news or something to consider a success.
…- Page Views – No list of useless metrics would be complete without mentioning an old favourite for the online world … page views. This is another metric that most forward thinking marketers are getting rid of (or have already) and are replacing it with something like unique views to avoid capturing multiple views from the same person and double counting them.
Read the full post at Bhargava’s Influential Marketing Blog and tune in tomorrow for Part 2.
Knight Digital Media Center Bootcamp Sessions Live Online
The Knight DMC started a series of multimedia webcasts. Tuesday and Wednesday sessions will be available live online. (Turn your sound down if you click the link — the video autoplays.)
Remaining sessions are as follows (all times Pacific):
Tuesday, Dec 18
12:30 p.m. — “The Economics of News” with James T. Hamilton, Charles S. Syndnor Professor of Public Policy, Economics and Political Science, Duke University (approx. 1hour)7: 15 p.m. — “A Multimedia Approach to Covering Breaking News” with Regina McCombs, senior producer for multimedia, Minneapolis Star Tribune (approx 2 hours)
Wednesday, Dec 19
1:30 p.m. — “Deepening Engagement with Your Audience” with Neil Chase, vice president of author services, Federated Media (approx 1 hour)
