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.

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The Royals’ World Series brings lots of memories with my sons

I’ve been blogging a bit lately about baseball on my other blog, Hated Yankees. I usually blog there about my favorite team, the Yankees. But recently I’ve been blogging about my sons’ favorite team, the Kansas City Royals.

I keep the baseball posts there, presuming that people come here because of interest in journalism, rather than baseball. But some followers of the blog are friends who may be interested in these personal stories or baseball fans also enjoying the Royals’ great post-season run. So I’ll just post a brief plug here for the Royals posts. My posts:

The Kansas City Royals’ amazing 9-game, post-season winning streak

Keeping a 29-year-old promise, I’m headed to the World Series

Decades of Royals (Kauffman) Stadium memories

Game Two was worth the wait for my sons and me

My youngest son, Tom, has also contributed two guest posts:

Tom Buttry reflects on his life (and last night) as a Royals fan

Kansas City Royals’ ‘all-lost years’ team

 

 

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Memories of Tom Harkin

I was annoyed the first time I met Tom Harkin. We were supposed to meet outside the Fremont County Courthouse in Sidney, Iowa, and he was late. I don’t remember how late, but late enough that I was annoyed.

He was a freshman congressman, a Democrat swept into a Republican district in the 1974 throw-the-bums-out vote after Richard Nixon’s resignation. I was a summer intern for the Evening Sentinel in Shenandoah, Iowa. Harkin was traveling around the district, as he usually did on congressional breaks, and would be stopping in Sidney, so I was supposed to interview him for a story.

He showed up eventually, apologizing for the delay, and we sat down to talk at a picnic table outside the courthouse, which had already closed. It was a warm summer day when it would have been more comfortable to talk indoors or to give me a quick interview and hop into his air-conditioned car to head for wherever his evening stop was. But we talked until I ran out of questions, easily a half hour, maybe closer to an hour. If he had a next stop on his schedule, I am sure he was even later for that. But I had waited from him, and he was generous with his time.

I don’t remember the issues we discussed. What I remember is his passion and sincerity. He really cared about people and this was a classic liberal who wanted to use the power of government to make people’s lives better. I remember being impressed and wondering whether he would get his ass kicked in the next election in a district that historically belonged to the Republicans.

But I also wondered if he had staying power. He had the right mix of charm and fight, I thought, to have a successful career in politics. And already I could see that he had mastered the art of constituent service. An aide drove around the district holding “office hours” in small towns, listening to complaints and helping people work out their problems with the Agriculture Department, Social Security Administration or whatever corner of the federal government was troubling them. (Harkin’s staff helped my father-in-law get a passport when the State Department balked because of his lack of a birth certificate, a problem that hadn’t kept him from going overseas in the Navy during World War II.)

Well, Harkin did have staying power. He carried that Republican district four more times and then in 1984, he ran for Senate in a state that had two conservative Republican incumbents. He beat one of those Republicans, Roger Jepsen, in 1984 and won four more Senate terms. Harkin announced today that five terms is enough. He’ll retire rather than seeking re-election in 2014 (he’d have won easily again).

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I’ll avoid Gazette discussions of Tom Harkin

My youngest son, Tom, starts work in Washingon today as a legislative correspondent for Iowa Demcratic Sen. Tom Harkin. To avoid any appearance of conflict, I have told my colleagues at The Gazette that I will avoid any involvement in stories involving Harkin or editorial board discussions that involve Harkin. I may not always know immediately when we are discussing an issue on which Harkin has taken a leadership position, but will withdraw from those discussions when I do become aware.

Tom is a political science graduate of Marquette University and previously worked as an analyst for the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves.

As I have reported previously, my oldest son, Mike, was worked for Chuck Hagel, who was a Republican senator from Nebraska but did not run for re-election last year. Mike held several positions for Hagel, ending as his chief of staff. Hagel is now chairman of the Atlantic Council of the United States and a distinguished professor at Georgetown University and the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Hagel is less likely to be in the news for Gazette readers, but I would similarly avoid involvement in news coverage or editorial board discussions of Hagel.

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25 random things, but not a chain letter

This week my boss, Gazette Co. CEO Chuck Peters, “tagged” me in a Facebook application called “25 Random Things.”

As closely as I work with Chuck, I learned some interesting things about him through the 25 facts he posted. I saw that I was supposed to post my own 25 random things, then tag Chuck and 24 other people. I didn’t mind sharing some facts about myself, but the tagging process felt a bit like a chain letter. Plus I was busy when Chuck tagged me, so I knew it would be a few days before I would be able to compile my 25 random facts.

Then yesterday I saw that John Robinson, editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., noted in his Twitter feed that 25 Random Facts was “officially dead” now that a newspaper (the Charlotte Observer) had written about it. The story explained both the upside I had noted, learning interesting facts about people you sort of knew, as well as the downside, that chain letter thing.

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