The best time to join a conversation is now

If you asked me when is the best time for me to post on my blog, I’d say about 8 or 9 a.m. That’s when journalists in the Eastern and Central time zones are starting their workdays and most likely to read my posts, comment, share them in social media and so on.

I came to work yesterday intending to blog about Jack Shafer’s post and Iris Chyi’s research on newspapers’ digital strategy. But a class and other matters demanded my attention in the morning and I couldn’t start writing the post until mid-afternoon. By the time I’d finished, it was after 4 p.m. The normal workday (not that journalism has such a thing) was ending on the East Coast. I briefly pondered waiting until the morning to post. But I was already late in joining the conversation (the last half of my post curated some of the social media conversation Jack’s post had already generated).

I knew I should jump into the conversation right away. I was already late, and if it didn’t get much attention, that was too bad. So I posted at about 4:20 p.m.

And people noticed. Forty-three people retweeted me and at least that many more tweeted new links to the post. Still more shared, liked or commented on it on Facebook. By almost 8:30 a.m. this morning, when I might have been publishing if I had waited till morning, 2,300 people had read the post, with Twitter accounting for more than 1,000 hits on my blog yesterday and Facebook 500, even though we were just barely entering the primary workday in the Eastern and Central time zones.

That’s not a ton of traffic, but my blog usually runs a little under 1,000 views a day (I haven’t been blogging as much the past few months).

The overnight attention underscored a lesson I’ve learned and relearned many times: The perfect time to join a digital conversation is right now.

 

Advertisement

Read Full Post »

Dean Baquet and Clay Shirky posts help my blog to traffic records in October

With help from Dean Baquet and Clay Shirky, I set an all-time traffic record on my blog this month.

Posts relating to Twitter use by Baquet and his Times colleagues contributed more than 10,000 of the more than 40,000 views on the blog this month. My curation of Clay Shirky’s “tweet rant” about people who see new digital platforms as “the next Facebook” contributed another 3,000-plus. Together the topics contributed nearly one-third of my traffic for the month.

Leading the way was Baquet’s guest post questioning whether I and others were creating a “new priesthood” with “new rules for entry,” regarding who is a journalist.

It was an overstatement at best and an inaccurate metaphor. But it drew a lot of interest: more than 6,700 views in the month, including nearly 4,900 the first day, when I set a single-day record for views on the blog.

My initial post, saying that Baquet and other editors who attempt to lead their staffs in innovation undercut their efforts when they aren’t even active on Twitter, also got a good ride (though not even half the views of the response), with 2,800 views. Two other posts relating to the matter combined for another 1,000+ views:

• Dean Baquet may just lurk on Twitter, but he’s clickbait on my blog
• A NY Times editor: “Having the top editor active on Twitter is important’

Baquet’s guest post and my curations of tweets by Shirky and Lexi Mainland of the Times totaled more than 10,000 views. Perhaps I need to just post other people’s writing to the blog.

The October traffic exceeded the record I set in February, when I had 36,179 posts. And I passed the record by Oct. 28, so the longer month didn’t play a role in setting the record, just in pushing the total past 40,000, which I topped last night. I should end today a little over 41K.

Though the Baquet guest post was the giant of the month (if anything on a blog this small is a giant), I had two other days over 2,000 views and 16 more days of 1,000 or more.

Other observations about the month’s traffic:

• This was the fourth straight month with more than 3,000 views for my 2013 post about Twitter’s refusal to allow reasonable ways around its stupid limit of 2,000 accounts most people can follow. It can’t be good for a company when thousands of people are looking for solutions to your bad decisions. But Twitter doesn’t care.
• Archives still drive lots of traffic for the blog. A post on attribution, one on accuracy and two posts on the 5 W’s combined for more than 4,000 posts. Another 25 posts from previous months topped 100 views. Social media is important in attracting attention to fresh content on my blog. But archives and search keep people coming back when the content is not fresh but is timely to someone.
• My Oct. 6 post saluting Matt DeRienzo’s leadership for Digital First Media topped 500 views. Other posts that got a few hundred views told about next semester’s class on interactive storytelling tools, different ways of viewing the size of Twitter’s user base and Planet Princeton’s effective engagement.
• With 18 posts in the month (this makes 19 and it’s the first one this week), this wasn’t nearly my busiest month (on this blog, at least). I had 30 posts in January and 37 in October 2012 and set personal traffic records in both of those months. Both months got boosts from guest posts and October 2012 also got help from reposting some old posts from my old Training Tracks blog.
• I also set a record for unique visitors, more than 28,000, breaking the record of 23,508 that I set in September.

I also set personal records for traffic and unique visitors on my much smaller blog, Hated Yankees. Though the Yankees, the usual topic of that blog, haven’t done anything in October, my second-favorite team, the Kansas City Royals, had a pretty good month, and I turned my attention to the Royals last month.

The month started with a guest post from my youngest son, Tom, a diehard Royals fan from when we lived there in his childhood. He shared his thoughts and emotions about the Royals’ incredible come-from-behind playoff victory over the Oakland A’s. That was the third most-read post of the month, with 122 views.

Hated Yankees had never topped 1,000 views in a month before, and it topped 2,600 views in October. My post on keeping my 29-year-old promise to take my oldest son, Mike, to a game in the Royals’ next World Series got more than 700 views and gave me the single-day traffic record on that blog, 510 views. And my post about going to this year’s Game Two got more than 100 views.

Part of this month’s big Hated Yankees’ traffic, though, was a 2010 post debunking the myth that strategy is more difficult in the National League. Somehow that has become the No. 1 Google result for “strategy National League.” Maybe the World Series prompts some searches relating to strategy and the designated-hitter rule. Anyway, a post that never topped 100 views in a month got over 600 views in October. Maybe someone linked to the post (though I didn’t get a pingback). At any rate, that post became the most-read Hated Yankees post, passing a 2009 post about Graig Nettles.

I also had a post on the International News Media Association’s Culture Change blog this month as well as a couple on the Social Media News Challenge blog.

I don’t know what November will bring, but I presume this will be one of the least-read posts of the month. My post about September’s traffic topped out at 79. But I try to practice transparency and I think you should study what’s working and what’s not, so I post this bit of navel-gazing now and then. I’ll probably update the numbers on the weekend, after the month is over.

Read Full Post »

September traffic report: Unique visitors set a record for my blog

I set a record for unique visitors on this blog in September, even though I was well short of my record for page views.

Neither of those facts is a big deal, especially given the trifling totals for the blog on both counts, but I like to analyze my blog metrics to see what I can learn, (and the analysis will no doubt be October’s least-read post). The blog had 23,508 unique visitors in September, just a bit ahead of the previous high of 22,584 in January of this year. September’s total views, 33,222, were a little less than the record of 36,179, set in February, and also lower than January’s total, 35,739.

So why did I set a personal record for uniques without also setting the record for views? A few observations:

Read Full Post »

A blog traffic record in February surprised me

I must correct an error in a Jan. 31 blog post. After analyzing how I’d set a record for traffic on my blog in January, I closed by saying, “I think I can safely predict that I won’t be breaking this record in February.”

I was wrong. Even with three fewer days, I set another traffic record in February, passing the January figure of 35,739 late this afternoon. I’m at 35,851, with a good chance of passing 36K this evening. And no post that I published in February topped 500 views or made it into my top 10 most-viewed posts of the month. More than 90 percent of this record traffic came from my archives. 

Read Full Post »

Interest in Twitter posts helped drive a record traffic month on my blog

I had more views in January than I’ve ever had in a month on my blog. Sometime Wednesday night or early Thursday, I passed my record of 32,725 set in October 2012. Traffic this morning was at 34,815. I’ll certainly top 35,000 for the month, with a reasonable shot at 36K.

Update: With 1,116 views on Jan. 31 (my 16th day over 1,000 views in January), I ended January with 35,739 views, beating my old record by more than 3,000.

For a variety of reasons, my traffic in 2013 had dipped below 2012 levels, running 20,000 to 25,000 views most months. A post about Twitter and competition on Saturday, Jan. 4, started a surge in traffic like I hadn’t seen in over a year. Where weekend traffic usually runs a little over 500 views a day, I had 3,500 views that day and 2,000 that Sunday and then topped 2,000 again on Monday (weekday traffic normally runs a little under 1,000).

With that kind of start, a strong month was almost guaranteed. That post about Twitter and competition had 6,668 views in January. The only post to draw more traffic in a calendar month was my Dear Newsroom Curmudgeon … post in April of 2012, which topped 8,000 posts its first month.

A couple of follow-up posts on livetweeting and on how word of that competition post spread in social media added another 797 views combined.

A second factor in the strong January traffic was the growing popularity of a post from last summer, providing advice on what to do if you hit Twitter’s limit of 2,000 people that anyone can follow. Above that limit, you need to meet a certain ratio of followers to people you can follow.

This traffic is largely search-driven and resulted in 2,208 views in January. Traffic to that post has climbed every month since August, and it got twice as many views in January as it did in July, the month it was published. As I suggested in the post, Twitter should consider whether it needs to adjust that limit or provide a way for legitimate Twitter users to get exceptions. It’s not a good thing for a business when thousands of people are searching Google for help on dealing with a limitation of your product.

Those two Twitter posts (plus the follow-ups on the competition post) combined for nearly 10,000 views for the month, more than one-fourth of the blog’s traffic for the month. I need to remember that when Twitter questions arise, I should blog about them. I had been procrastinating for months about the post on the follower limit.

Read Full Post »

Advice for editors: Blog about your newsroom’s transformation

This continues a series on advice for new top editors in Digital First Media newsrooms.

A new editor is taking on a demanding job that doesn’t leave you much time. You probably will think you’re too busy for a blog. But editors should blog.

I fully understand thinking that you’re too busy to blog. I started a weekly column right away when I became editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette in 2008 (I had done the same thing as editor of the Minot Daily News in 1993 when blogging wasn’t an option). I meant to start the blog soon, but quickly got “too busy” and didn’t start blogging for six months. But when I made the time, my communication with staff, the public and the broader news business improved right away. A blog is worth the time. Editors should make time for it.

An editor with a blog comments on community issues, explains newsroom decisions to the community, publicly praises staff members who excel and sets an important example for the staff. Editors should make time to do all those things.

Blogging reinforces the culture of transparency that is important for you and your community. When the editor blogs, staff members who are “too busy” understand that this is a priority and that they should make time to blog as well. They understand that engaging with the community is important, that it should be part of what makes you busy, not part of what you’re too busy for.

Read Full Post »

Be fast on the news, even if you’re not first

Even when you’re not first with the news, it’s important to be fast.

Wednesday night, ESPN broke the news that NASCAR racer Jeremy Clements had been suspended for using a racial slur in an interview. I’m not a NASCAR fan and this is the first time I have heard of Jeremy Clements. But Matt Myftiu of the Oakland Press has a NASCAR blog and he jumped on the news. Matt explains (edited from two emails, with me adding the links):

Last night there was some breaking NASCAR news and I posted a quick blog about it at my NASCAR: Beyond the Track blog.

Wasn’t even a big name involved, but the key fact here is that I posted my thoughts right away.   It only took me a few minutes to do this, and because it was breaking news many people who were searching for information on this breaking news ended up being directed toward my blog, as almost nobody had posted anything about it.

I’ve had more than 7,000 hits on that post, most of them coming from Web searches about the topic.  

Read Full Post »

Observations from October’s traffic record on my blog

October traffic on my blog passed the record I set in April, totaling 32,725 views, more than 1,500 beyond the old record. I thought I’d share observations about what worked:

• Make content timely and useful. Changes to the Facebook news-feed algorithm are a concern for journalists managing social media for news brands, as visibility and engagement have dropped. I developed a webinar and blog post on practices that were resulting in strong engagement on Digital First Media Facebook pages. The post generated more than 5,800 views, becoming my seventh-most-viewed blog post ever. Social media have always driven traffic for this blog, usually from Twitter and Facebook. This post also got a boost from Slideshare, where slides from the webinar have been viewed more than 22,000 times and were featured by Slideshare.
• Post a lot. I posted 34 times in October. Lots of them didn’t get much traffic. But their accumulated traffic set the record. There’s no question in my experience that frequent posts boost traffic.
• Ethics posts boost traffic. My second-most-read post of the month (and the one with by far the most comments, 77) suggested that journalists stop using the term “alleged victims.” The post was already generating some discussion when it was featured on the WordPress Freshly Pressed blog (it’s on the third page now). New posts about Bob Steele’s Guiding Principles for the Journalist, my suggestions for updating the Guiding Principles and the #PoynterEthics discussion about updating them (plus some archived ethics post) generated another 1,500+ views.

Read Full Post »

What’s the difference between a columnist and a blogger?

I had an email exchange about the difference between a columnist and a blogger with Teresa Schmedding.

Teresa is Assistant Managing Editor-Content Systems for the Daily Herald in the Chicago area and president of the American Copy Editors Society. She sent me the following email (used here with her consent):

I’m having a conversation in my head about blogs v. columns.We’re getting ready to revamp our article page templates, pull our old blogs into our current CMS, which gives me an opportunity to re-train the staff on the purpose of a blog v. a column or an article. And, as I’m thinking about it, I’m thinking there really shouldn’t be much of a difference between a column and a blog. I started mapping out elements of a blog and here’s what I came up with:

Key elements of blogs:

Read Full Post »

My blog traffic slowed down when my writing slowed down, but increased syndication may have given me a record

June’s traffic underscored a blogging lesson I learned a long time ago: You need to produce fresh content to keep people coming back.

Through the first 20 days of the month, I was on pace to approach or pass my all-time record of more than 31,000 views, set in April. I wrote only two more posts the rest of the month and didn’t quite reach 25,000 views. It was my fourth-best month ever, on the strength of the 15 posts I wrote in the first 19 days of the month.

At least that’s the way it looks according to my monthly stats from WordPress. However, something has happened to significantly boost the syndicated views on my blog. I don’t know whether I’ve had a huge boost in RSS syndication or if WordPress has done something to boost syndicated readership (I’ve checked in WordPress forums and haven’t seen an explanation). In a quirk of WordPress stats, figures for individual stories show syndicated views, but total monthly stats include only on-site views.

For instance, my best-read May post, about copy editing, has had 5,623 total views: 5,163 on-site and 460 by syndication. This was a fairly typical pattern for most of the time I’ve had this blog: several times’ more on-site views than syndicated views, with most of the syndicated views coming in the first four days and the first day’s syndicated views being the largest total. Which makes sense, with people reading my posts in their RSS readers soon after I post.

Read Full Post »

May’s blog traffic: Copy editing and Pinterest push a strong month

Some quick observations reviewing May’s traffic on my blog:

• I didn’t pass, or expect to pass, April’s record of 31,197 page views, driven mostly by my Dear Newsroom Curmudgeon post. Still, at 27,361 views, May was the second most-viewed month in the three-plus years I’ve been doing this blog.
• By far the most popular post of the month was my advice to copy editors and to journalists who need to take more responsibility for their own work. Posts with advice for journalists have always been some of my most popular content. I don’t think that’s necessarily because my advice is so valuable. But journalists are hungry for advice in these turbulent times and I offer a lot of it. With 4,620 views in just the past week, that post is already my eighth most-viewed post ever.

Read Full Post »

Curmudgeon conversation drove a monthly traffic record for my blog

Discussion of curmudgeons and people struggling with changing newsroom cultures drove my blog to record traffic in April.

My previous record, from December 2011, was just shy of 25,000 page views, but last month I topped 31,000. In previous months when my traffic has been strong, I’ve tried to note the patterns or lessons I could learn from the success. The big drivers of this record were four posts relating to change in newsrooms:

1. Dear newsroom curmudgeon set traffic records for a single post on my blog: the highest single-day total of page views and the most views in a week or a month. At nearly 8,500 views it is on the verge of becoming the most-read post I’ve ever written, less than a hundred views behind my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection, published three years ago. The C3 blueprint achieved its traffic by staying popular over time, getting 2,500 views in 2010 after more than 4,500 in 2009. And that was a proposal for a new business model for community news (though no one has actually implemented the model, it received a fair amount of attention). While the curmudgeon proposal was not as broadly useful, I believe it succeeded for at least two reasons: First, it connected with people — curmudgeons and reformers who are tired of curmudgeons — on an emotional level. Second, it offered advice; I wasn’t just scolding curmudgeons; I tried to understand some reasons for their resistance to change and I ended up offering advice.

Read Full Post »