No, you CAN'T root in the damn press box

[exmediahack]

On web clicks, at my last shop, I had a good shtick going where — every time I would do it, I would get 1,500 likes and about 100 comments. Had 30k followers on FB and built that up over 11 years.

We had the "peg board" in the newsroom showing web clicks. Whenever I fell out of the Top 3, I would simply post my shtick and be #1 by the end of the day. All I did was discover one little thing that resonated with people and I could use it whenever I needed.

Did it monetize anything? Nope.

Did it make it easier for me, as a reporter, to get a phone call returned? Every time.

However, the shtick opened the door for my actual writing and connecting with people. That's where the value came in.

A rival station hired a female anchor who had her own shtick. She hated bullies and was constantly looking to out "mean people" that she would see on Facebook. However, her followers did that. Constantly.

In 2016, I wrote a long piece, just for social, about 6,000 words on some school shooting and how it impacted my kids, how they didn't even think anything of the possibility of dying from a school shooting. It resonated with so many people. About 200,000 reach, 3,500 likes, 500 comments. Praise all around.

That same day, the other anchor's post.

"Prince just died. I AM SAD. "

11,000 likes. 2,500 comments.

At THAT moment, I de-emphasized my social media presence.

(She got fired a year later for falsifying clothing allowance receipts at her station. She never posted about that…)

I'm now running the newsroom that I had been let go from on my old anchor job. I hate it but the company thinks I'm good at it… for now. It's like being an NBA coach. I'll get fired soon enough.

This stressy summer built up job skills and I'll find something when I finally get tossed for good. I love tropical America and don't want go leave.

(Thank you for the wishes back in July when it got really uncertain.). Constantly have to remind people that social media is not a mirror of real life — but for the under 35 crowd, that's all they know.

 

[BurnsWhenIPee]

Completely agree, Alma. The metrics are a tool, ONE tool that should be used to drive coverage decisions. The shirt that nobody reads should not be written, but it got to the point where people were fighting over posting the latest restaurant inspections, which took zero effort and always were well-read. There has to be a middle ground.

 

[BitterYoungMatador2]

Memories of that setup from my Gannett days haunt me to this day. We were shedding staff, cutting travel and freelance budgets to the bone, as they are putting up a huge bank of big flat-screen TVs as a "leaderboard", and a corporate boot-licker was all hardcore about, "We want you guys to fight for page views! Get in each other's faces when you are ahead of them on the leaderboard! This is like the Hunger Games, and if you want to be here, you need to be at the top of those rankings!" And you could easily tell who had aspirations on being the next corporate bullshirt artist, because they would spend lots of their time just sitting in front of those banks of TVs, studying the leaderboard and pretending to take notes, then calling individuals into a conference room for closed-door meetings.

And calling it "clicks" was grounds for punishment.

forking heck on earth.

I swear we all worked for various versions of the same editor.

 

[Sam Mills 51]

Memories of that setup from my Gannett days haunt me to this day. We were shedding staff, cutting travel and freelance budgets to the bone, as they are putting up a huge bank of big flat-screen TVs as a "leaderboard", and a corporate boot-licker was all hardcore about, "We want you guys to fight for page views! Get in each other's faces when you are ahead of them on the leaderboard! This is like the Hunger Games, and if you want to be here, you need to be at the top of those rankings!" And you could easily tell who had aspirations on being the next corporate bullshirt artist, because they would spend lots of their time just sitting in front of those banks of TVs, studying the leaderboard and pretending to take notes, then calling individuals into a conference room for closed-door meetings.

And calling it "clicks" was grounds for punishment.

forking heck on earth.

Just when I thought I couldn't think any less of Gannett, this is posted ... and the bar somehow finds a way to get lower.

 

[Sam Mills 51]

I'll never forget seeing that for the first time while on a tour of a Gannett shop. The homepage production area looked like Mission Control with the stacks of monitors and the data. Fast-forward to today and I'm in a job where I also watch web hit data all day, but I don't manipulate stories like it was explained to me there. Eh, maybe I'm doing it wrong.

If that is wrong, smile ... their idea of "doing it right" isn't.

Hey, I understand moving along with the times, but this isn't journalism, and nothing any idiot from Gannett attempts to say will change my mind. Too many botched opportunities, too many shameless attempts at buzzwords and an ever-increasing amount of fluff grossly lacking in substance.

 

[PaperDoll]

I am so glad I don't work somewhere with pageview quotas, since all I've seen as somebody who watches those boards (on my own laptop at home) has proven my inability to control clicks.

But the monitors and stats have been misused, yes, especially in that hunger games fashion. What they usually say is: Good features, columns and sports always do well, as does consequential hard news coverage. Save the meeting blow-by-blow for Twitter; write substantial hard news.

I wish that was true. But right now, the only thing getting clicks is high school football. No college, no pros. And, alas, no other high school sports. (It's fall, duh! )

But our overall pageviews often seem dependent on the way the stories are played on the website.

That roundup of unstaffed weekend football games that was posted two days late suddenly blows up when it's at the top of the site. But field hockey, volleyball, tennis... Digital always asks why we should put those (allegedly) low-traffic stories up top, completely not acknowledging the emails from Corporate about how people don't scroll and thus won't be finding them if they're way down below -- or not on the homepage at all. (I wish our SEO was good enough to drive more traffic than people coming to the homepage itself. But most days, it's not.)

Heaven forbid a feature is done off a sport that isn't football. Or even, sometimes, football from a smaller school.

Things are a bit more balanced the rest of the year, but story play online still seems to have a large role in what gets clicked.

 

[Sam Mills 51]

Not in all markets. In this market, youth baseball and softball has gotten pretty good clicks against nothing but other news. No high school football to compete with it.

Also, with state contenders typically in volleyball – and a borderline dynasty in boys' basketball – football isn't the only sport driving the bus in this market.

 

[MeanGreenATO]

"couldn't" or wouldn't, she wasn't wrong.

To set the record straight, she actually took potshots at all sports writers before she later clarified it was just Penn State once I went up to her and wanted to see if she felt like backtracking a little bit.

 

[Azrael]

To set the record straight, she actually took potshots at all sports writers before she later clarified it was just Penn State once I went up to her and wanted to see if she felt like backtracking a little bit.

Good.

I think if you limit her comments to the before, during and after of the Penn State scandals, yes, she's right about Penn State writers.

If you widen out and try to tell me that the average sportswriter - who already works as a critic and a crime reporter, a political analyst and profile writer, a business correspondent, statistical expert and travel writer - couldn't do her job, I'd tell her she's nuts.

That said, the Penn State / Sandusky story was a five-alarm failure of every principle and practice in sports and local journalism, a perfect collapse of the moral and ethical imperatives the job requires, even of us, and an object lesson in the sort of willful and terrible blindness boosterism and homerism can lead to.

 

[exmediahack]

In my last market, I was the news anchor but filled in on plenty of sports stories and on the desk. When the shirt hit with the college team, I always got sent… and I was happy to.

Our sports department was all Pom Poms for them. Essentially a PR arm of the program. I never respected that.

 

[playthrough]

On web clicks, at my last shop, I had a good shtick going where — every time I would do it, I would get 1,500 likes and about 100 comments. Had 30k followers on FB and built that up over 11 years.

We had the "peg board" in the newsroom showing web clicks. Whenever I fell out of the Top 3, I would simply post my shtick and be #1 by the end of the day. All I did was discover one little thing that resonated with people and I could use it whenever I needed.

Did it monetize anything? Nope.

Did it make it easier for me, as a reporter, to get a phone call returned? Every time.

However, the shtick opened the door for my actual writing and connecting with people. That's where the value came in.

A rival station hired a female anchor who had her own shtick. She hated bullies and was constantly looking to out "mean people" that she would see on Facebook. However, her followers did that. Constantly.

In 2016, I wrote a long piece, just for social, about 6,000 words on some school shooting and how it impacted my kids, how they didn't even think anything of the possibility of dying from a school shooting. It resonated with so many people. About 200,000 reach, 3,500 likes, 500 comments. Praise all around.

That same day, the other anchor's post.

"Prince just died. I AM SAD. "

11,000 likes. 2,500 comments.

At THAT moment, I de-emphasized my social media presence.

(She got fired a year later for falsifying clothing allowance receipts at her station. She never posted about that…)

I'm now running the newsroom that I had been let go from on my old anchor job. I hate it but the company thinks I'm good at it… for now. It's like being an NBA coach. I'll get fired soon enough.

This stressy summer built up job skills and I'll find something when I finally get tossed for good. I love tropical America and don't want go leave.

(Thank you for the wishes back in July when it got really uncertain.). Constantly have to remind people that social media is not a mirror of real life — but for the under 35 crowd, that's all they know.

Falsifying clothing allowance receipts? That's a helluva way to get canned.

 

[exmediahack]

Falsifying clothing allowance receipts? That's a helluva way to get canned.

She was bouncing checks all over the market. We knew because MY co-anchor's lawyer worked for the firm trying to collect the bad checks.

The station made it sound like she was leaving on her own to "spend more time with family" (code for: female anchor who just got told she now has to report twice a week but has an affluent husband).

I do miss those glorious clothing allowance days. Had $3,000 my last year we had one (2015). Could use it anywhere we wanted.