Gunners-Spurs match should entertain
Chelsea’s shock 3-0 home loss to Sunderland last weekend has given new hope for Arsenal and Manchester United in the title race.
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Newspapers are in trouble and paywalls have (so far) been a flop.Whilesome people say this heralds the end of real journalism, maybe newspaper websites just need a rethink. Perhaps they could really learn something from blogs.
Figures leaked to Beehive City this weekend point to a slow start for Rupert Murdochs Times paywall in the UK. Meanwhile, another story at the Guardian talks about how rival newspaper the Daily Mails website is well on its way to turning a profit without a paywall in sight. Its also the most viewed newspaper site in the UK. How does it achieve this? Id say its by being more like a blog than an actual newspaper.
Lets take a look at the MailOnline front page today and see what theyre doing to think web:
Different headlines from the paper version. MailOnline opts for the kinds of stories that might not be the biggest of the day, but that will get people talking and sharing. In this case, a story with shock value.
Celebrities. MailOnline is heavy on celebrities fluff stories because theyre a big draw. While they wouldnt work so well in the paper version, online you can pump out these types of posts quickly and generate lots of traffic with relatively little effort.
Lots of images. Many newspaper websites try to recreate the look of an actual newspaper. MailOnline forgoes that with images strewn all over the place, giving it more of a magazine feel.
Talking points work well online. Man ordered to pay 1,500 after being found guilty of drowning a squirrel is the kind of story you might see on a Gawker Media blog. It may be a serious story about animal cruelty but as we said in point 1, its a talking point story. It may only warrant a small mention in a print newspaper but it gets frontpage treatment here because MailOnline knows that web users have very different priorities.
Different editorial staff. Most newspapers staff work across print and web. Not at the Mail, here its two separate teams. This isimportantbecause web writing is very different to writing for print. Web articles generally work better when short and concise while print articles can spend longer telling a story.
Many successful blogs follow the guidelines above, albeit tweaked as necessary. Technology bloggers know that Twitter and Facebook are their celebrities that drive lots of traffic, which is why youll see lots of mentions of those companies on tech blogs; just as celebrity blogs will mention people like Justin Beiber a lot he drives traffic.
The Daily Mail is a tabloid and doesnt have to worry too much about losing a quality journalism reputation by changing its output for the web. How about those newspapers often seen as high quality news outlets? In those cases, they could probably drive more traffic, get more advertising and avoid the threat of a paywall by simply tweaking their output for the web.
Not every newspaper can overload its site with celebrity gossip and shock stories as the Mail does. However, they could likely boost their traffic by thinking web a little more. For example, they could:
Include more internal links. This common tactic by blogs links within the text of a story back to relevant news from the past, thus driving more pageviews.
Use Retweetable headlines. As weve noted before, Twitter is hugely important for blogs. By carefully crafting headlines that beg to be retweeted youre increasing the chance of a hit story.
Write short, concise stories. Not everyone has time to read a 2500 word interview. It could be summarised in a 500 word blog post style piece, highlighting the key, newsworthy points perhaps with a link to the full thing for people suitably interested.
Know their celebrities. As I noted above, the celebrities of tech blogs are currently Twitter and Facebook; stories about them drive traffic. Newspapers need to know their celebrities.
Boosting traffic without losing site of what makes a newspaper unique is a difficult balancing act, but I cant help thinking some newspapers could prosper by thinking web before they think paywall.
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Social media gurus: We all know one. If you’re lucky, you know only one.
They are the attendees of tech parties, the “Twitter consultants,” the armchair generals of the Internet, and their numbers grow by the day. Yet most of them couldn’t distinguish a line of code from a badly punctuated haiku.
What’s to be done with the social media experts? Accept that their blathering may contain some wisdom? Or require technical exams for all Twitter users with more than 1,000 followers? You decide! And make the NMDs among us take our “technical” quiz.
There is always grave danger when amateurs turn overnight into experts. This sub-professional clown town is where B movies and Soulja Boy come from. It’s also the birthplace of every blowhard who tells you you’re “doing it wrong” without any technical knowledge or original thought to back it up.
Sometimes, it’s not such a bad thing – in fact, there are a great many non-technical social media folks who are doing a great job of creating quality content and helping brands get themselved situated on the Web. But most of the people I can think of who fit this description have been doing their thing for so long that they’ve had to pick up a few technical tidbits along the way to ensure their continued success and to ensure they weren’t sounding like idiots.
However, I hold the strong opinion that if you’re working in technology – even as a PR flak or social media consultant – you should be able to understand some of the terms, concepts and people that make your business possible. Otherwise, you risk your own reputation by taking the chance that you’re scarily wrong or laughably vague, and you risk gumming up the works for your clients by not knowing how to communicate with their audience, many of whom are very technical folk.
Ultimately, taking the time and effort to understand the technology you use is simply a matter of taking pride in your work, just like the barista who knows all the ins and outs of the perfectly pulled free-trade organic espresso or the skilled sommelier who, though he may not make the wine himself, knows everything about who did and where and how.
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