The New Age of Twitter Journalism

So, it is decreasing traffic? Oh, no, it just says it isn't increasing traffic as much as they would like. With over 90,000 Twitter followers and 40,000 Facebook followers it does help web views.

Also, from the end of the article:
"Those who doubt that a newsroom that is struggling with staff and budget problems can handle putting the time and energy into social media should look at Miami and see a case of what’s going well. And those who think that community conversation is too hard to handle should also pause and consider the possibilities that do exist when a newsroom engages with its community."

 

Right. That's exactly the conclusion you'd expect from an article that starts with the premise "Twitter is great and let me show why" instead of asking "Is Twitter great? And if so, why?" There isn't any kind of fact in what you quoted, nor is there any kind of fact in the article, that would move anyone toward the opinions people are taking.

How much does the Herald's effort help Web views? They have 90,000 Twitter followers and 40,000 Facebook followers. OK. How many Web views come from that? Should be pretty easy to measure. Is it enough to keep a business going? Is it enough to buy donuts once a month? How much is it worth? Is it worth the staffing? These things should be fairly quantifiable, as they are in other businesses.

This is actually one of the reasons I knew the newsroom of the future wasn't for me. There are all these things you sort of have to -- and I do agree that a newspaper has to do them -- but they will pay off nada, zilch, zippo in a business sense. It's just people staying on a hamster wheel and never asking why exactly they are on this hamster wheel. None for me, thanks.

 

Jeff Jarvis would love the article. I don't think he's used a dollar figure regarding digital journalism in anything I've read or heard.

 

Ask Kleinmann how many clicks each tweet or post generates and then ask someone in advertising how that translates. The investment is essentially nothing for reporters. I'd imagine return > essentially nothing.

 

There have been many such imaginings over the last decade.

Some data would be great. I would be shocked if a daily newspaper could draw a line from a link being tweeted out to even as much as ten dollars in revenue.

 

Story did not say in plain letters that tweeting isn't increasing traffic. It said "tweet-to-web traffic conversion isn’t what they’d like it to be" ...

 

Mmmmm hmmm. I stand partially corrected, on the "in plain letters" part.

But what do you think that line means?

It means they aren't increasing traffic.

 

Google Analytics has some neat social media traffic tools. Wish stories utilized them. Traffic stats should be available, especially as they are used in ad sale pitches.

 

I was very anti-Twitter until we started using it for high school sports. The number of high school kids that have started connecting with us as an information source has me convinced that there is something to this. As best I can tell, it's the first time teens have seen that the local newspaper can mean something to them. I'm not saying that turns into immediate subscribers, but those who put technology down should check out the empty desks in the building. We don't still do things the way we did them 100 years ago, 50 years ago or even two years ago. If we don't find a way to stop the bleeding, we will all be gone eventually. I'm just saying this is the first thing I've seen that has connected young people to the newspaper. With all the negative going on around us in this business, that got my attention.

 

That's not correct.

 

I agree and shudder to think what the next fad is going to be.

 

I think all smart companies are tracking where their audience is coming from, and how effective things are like Twitter and Facebook at driving viewers to the site. The frustrating thing as anyone who's below a certain managerial rank is that they might not be sharing it with you. It annoyed the heck out of me, for example, that when I was at my last few newspaper gigs I had no idea of how "popular" one of my articles was. I can understand why management might want to keep the knowledge of certain numbers under their hat, but if you're not willing to share them with employees you risk alienating them.

Also, for whatever reason, audiences are interested in what they're reading. For both my blog and another site, I used to just link to the Top X (five to 11) stories that month, and that post itself was normally close to the Top 10.