The day Maureen Dowd wrote f--- news and a revered political commentator didn't get the joke

Amid all the debate about what is true and what is f--- news, I am reminded of a remarkable journalistic moment that showed how hard it is to know when someone is kidding or serious. And how you can be sincere but spread false information.

Dowd (Fred R. Conrad photo, New York Times)

It was early in 2009, the first months of the Obama presidency, and Maureen Dowd, the sly and witty New York Times columnist, put tongue in cheek to describe how she had gained exclusive access to classified testimony of a supposedly secret meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In the scene created by Dowd, Democrats on the committee, led by Dianne Feinstein, are grilling former Vice President Dick Cheney about the torture methods he and President George W. Bush approved to interrogate terrorism suspects.

Dowd dropped hints all through the column that it was a put-on. The first clue should have been that a columnist was playing the uncharacteristic role of an investigative reporter writing about leaked information.

Forget about the big numbers; go for loyalty, trust

Anyone who has studied the metrics of the internet in any detail knows about the Big Lie: those big numbers of total users and page views that everyone relies on are practically meaningless.

• More than half of the visitors to websites stay for less than 15 seconds. 
• Three-fourths of the users of the most important news sites in the U.S. visit only once or twice a month. How can you even consider them users?
• Half of the internet users in 26 countries are getting their news through social media rather than the originating news sites themselves, according to the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2016. 
• 43% of social media users don't know where the stories they read originally appeared.

Jon Slade of the Financial Times

In other words, millions of clicks or millions of users are not an indication of trust in a particular news brand or loyalty to that brand. We need new metrics, better metrics.

Versión en español

So it was heartening to see this reality affirmed by of one of the leading lights of digital media innovation, Jon Slade of the Financial Times, in an interview with Ian Burrell (thanks to NiemanLab for the lead):

“I've seen data recently that says that of all the pages on the internet less than 1% of them are from newspapers – the vast majority of time spent is with social channels and they are always going to be much bigger than you are – so if you’re trying to play a game of scale then you’re going to lose.”

There are only a few international brands that have even a slight chance of competing with the likes of Facebook and Google for the digital advertising dollars that are based on the number of eyeballs delivered to specific ads.

Brian Stelter shows personal brands rival media brands

Versión en español aquí.

For several years I have been using Brian Stelter, the media columnist and TV commentator, as an example to students of how a young journalist can build a personal brand. 

He did not attend a famous university and had no special family connections. Yet he quickly made a name for himself online by creating a blog that thrived on timely, high-quality journalism.

I always include a slide showing the number of his Twitter followers (lately, 200,000) and pose the question: "How much longer will Brian Stelter need the New York Times?"

As it turned out, not very long. Stelter was just hired away from the Times by CNN to host "Reliable Sources" and be their media reporter.

A niche publication thrives within the New York Times

Loren Feldman, small business editor

 

Versión en español aquí.

A digital media entrepreneur has to think first of building a community. Doing that means offering not just information but answers, advice, help, understanding.

You have to know what your community needs. That is why Loren Feldman perks up when he talks about a five-part series on his blog in which a small businessman described how he almost ruined his business by mismanaging his Google Adwords account.

It was a drama and a mystery aimed at a particular audience, namely small business owners and professionals. The blog is called "You're the Boss: The Art of Running a Small Business," and it appears in the small business section of the New York Times's website. Feldman is the Times's small business editor.

How journalist built his brand from college dorm room

Brian Stelter
2012 Media Bistro photo

Brian Stelter is my favorite example of how a young person can create a personal brand and build it into a career. I have talked about him in presentations in Latin America and Europe and his story never fails to make an impression. 

When he was a freshman at Towson University in Maryland in 2004, he launched his CableNewser blog with news and commentary about the coverage of the Iraq War by CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. He soon attracted a loyal audience of influential TV industry executives. No one dreamed the blog was by a college student.

He eventually parlayed his blogging experience into a job covering media at the New York Times, but that is getting ahead of the story.

More proof that journalists need to brand themselves

Version en español aquí.

New York Times editor Jill Abramson says that half the people coming to the newspaper's website in the runup to the election were searching for Nate Silver, the political forecasting whiz who writes the blog FiveThirtyEight.

"He got huge, huge readership," she said at a conference covered by MediaBistro. "They weren't coming for the rest of the Times; they came for him,"

In other words, Nate Silver has developed a personal brand that is bigger than the New York Times when it comes to the niche of political forecasting.

More paywalls won't save journalists' jobs

Gannett's announcement that it will establish paywalls at its 80 community newspapers  is the latest sign that the newspaper industry believes it has found practical technology to charge for its content. 

But these are not really solutions so much as experiments. Every newspaper will have to test reader response to the various subscription offers and adjust over time. Paying for digital editions is new for subscribers as well as publishers.

Don’t dump your email account for Facebook -- yet

Versión en español aquí.

I was suprised and delighted to read today that the New York Times studied its readers’ habits for sharing articles and found that they prefer email over social networks.

The implication for web designers is that they should make email sharing a prominent tool on their websites or they might miss a big potential source of traffic.

For some reason, I still like managing my online life through email. Daily calendar alerts remind me of appointments. I subscribe to maybe two dozen newsletters so I don’t forget to follow developments in digital journalism or the business of media.