Email bulletins help news media beat the duopoly

We talk too much about the New York Times when the crisis of journalism is also about saving local news operations and digital entrepreneurs.

But the latest news about how the Times is using email newsletters can be applied to all news organizations. Digiday reported that the Times has 13 million subscribers to more than 50 email newsletters.

What this means is that the Times has a direct communications channel with its users in a walled garden that Facebook and Google, the giants of digital advertising revenue, cannot touch.

When users get an email and click on a link, they go right to the Times website and the newspaper's own advertisers.

It also means that the people who subscribe to the free newsletters by registering have a more intimate relationship with the publication.

Versión en español

'Every journalist has to be a user-experience designer'

Maria Ramirez of El Español interviews Gideon Lichfield.
(Photo: TIE Comunicación/Congreso Periodismo)

HUESCA, Spain -- A digital business publication like Quartz qz.com would seem to be making all the right moves. In just over two years it built an audience of 10.9 million unique users a month.

(Versión en español)

But the struggle is to continue growing amid heavy competition and to start turning a profit. So Quartz's senior editor, Gideon Lichfield, was looking for answers and ideas just like the other 350 journalists, professors, and students attending the XVI Digital Journalism Congress. He was also on the program to talk about Quartz, including its plans for expansion into Africa.

Win the competition

Lichfield worked for The Economist for 16 and knows both the print and digital worlds. Digital requires journalists to think more about the audience, he told me in an interview. "How people consume the journalism, how it reaches them, when they're reading it and so forth, that is completely different," he said. "In a print magazine, you don't really think about any of that. The formats are set.

"In digital, every journalist also has to be a user-experience designer to some extent. They have to be thinking about how is someone going to come across my article, what's going to make them read it, what's going to make them share it, what's going to make them get to the end. What sort of device are they going to be reading it on. What time of day might they be reading it. What methods could I be using other than text to get my point across more clearly, more efficiently."

Reader loyalty gains strength as a news metric

Michael McCutcheon of Mic.com

As the publisher of a business newspaper in Baltimore, I used to tell advertisers confidently that no other news medium could duplicate our audience of CEOs, business owners, and high-income decision makers.

First Yahoo Finance undermined us. With their user database, they could deliver advertisers the same people who were reading our newspaper, plus many with that profile who were not.

(Versión en español)

Now social networks like Facebook are using their data to do the same thing. They can promise to deliver that same targeted audience a lot cheaper.

This is bad news for news publishers, especially since they have become more dependent on Facebook and other social networks for their Internet traffic. Publishers have a harder time establishing the value of their brand to advertisers.

Pew Research reported in 2014 that 30 percent of U.S. adults get news from Facebook. That percentage has been growing, and other social networks, such as LinkedIn, are trying to become publishers, not just platforms, as Mathew Ingram of Gigaom has reported.

Are newspaper brands back? Report from Spain

Rosalia Lloret: People are searching for credible
sources amid an avalanche of information.

Versión en español aquí.

El País is widening its lead as the No. 1 newspaper website in Spain with 7.6 million unique users in June (for comparison, the number is 74 million for the New York Times).

At the same time the newspaper's corporate parent, Prisa, is struggling financially and faced a one-day strike over 200 layoffs at its radio affiliate and employee anger over cuts at its financial daily.

Despite the bad financial news, Prisa's chief digital officer, Rosalía Lloret believes there are signs that El País is strengthening its brand. She made her comments during the recent summer course of la Universidad Complutense de Madrid in El Escorial.

Two-thirds choose the brand

Lloret noted that more than half of the users of El País and its affiliated websites come directly to the site, either by typing in the web address or from a bookmark. That is, they are coming intentionally, not by chance.

Why 10% of your web traffic is worth more than the other 90%

(La versión en español se encuentra aquí.)

The blessing and the curse of the web is that everything is measurable. For reporters working in newsrooms that measure the traffic of articles on a minute-to-minute basis, it can be discouraging to see fluff trump substance.

In some newsrooms, reporters are competing for raises and bonuses based on the traffic to their stories. Editors encourage the practice, because they too have their compensation tied to traffic numbers.

It´s easy to get lots of page views with a gossipy piece about a celebrity, but is the site serving its community and adhering to its editorial standards by chasing the numbers?

That is the million-dollar question for journalists working in the digital world.

Worthless users and worthless page views

To illustrate the value of loyalty over volume,  I´m going to use some graphics from the website of the Digital Journalism Center, whose articles are published in Spanish and whose audience is Latin American journalists interested in training opportunities.

The chart below depicts the loyalty of the 15,000 unique visitors to the Digital Journalism Center´s website in the past year, using the Google Analytics tool.

Our site is typical of websites in terms of loyalty: two-thirds of the visitors came to the site only once during the year. Ten percent came only twice.

Visitor loyalty to centroperiodismodigital.org

I urge you to look at the loyalty numbers of your own site using Analytics or some other tool. You will see a graphic that follows this same pattern: the majority of your visitors are casual, infrequent. They probably find you through search engines or some other reference.

Virtually all sites follow this "power law distribution" described by Clay Shirky in his book "Here Comes Everybody."